Hitler halts the attack on Poland

At around 3 p.m. on 25 August 1939 Adolf Hitler gave the Wehrmacht its final order to attack Poland. The blow was to fall at dawn the next day, Saturday 26 August. Four and a half hours later, at around 7.30 p.m., he revoked the same order. In the course of the afternoon two pieces of news had reached him for which he was unprepared: the Anglo-Polish alliance had been signed in London, and Benito Mussolini had informed him that Italy was not ready for war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers already marching to their start lines had to be halted in a single night. Hitler had not given up the war; he had postponed it. The new date was to be 1 September.

Some accounts state that Hitler delayed the invasion “by five days” to gain time to secure the neutrality of Britain and France. In fact the delay was six days, from 26 August to 1 September, and the new date of attack was not fixed straight away. Nor was the purpose of those days genuine neutrality on the part of the Western powers; it was an attempt to detach them from Poland so that the war would remain a local one. It is also inaccurate to say that word of the halt “did not reach Germany’s allies”, who then attacked Poland on the night of 25–26 August. The clash at the Jablunkov Pass referred to was caused by a German unit, not by allied troops.

The date set for 26 August

Since April the German staffs had been preparing for war with Poland under Case White (Fall Weiss), with readiness from 1 September. In mid-August 26 August was adopted as the day of the attack. On 22 August Hitler gathered his commanders at the Berghof and announced the war to them, and when it became clear the following day that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact would be signed in Moscow, he confirmed the date: 26 August, at 4.30 a.m. The pact was supposed to settle the matter. It deprived Poland of any hope of Soviet help and, in the view of the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, it would also take away Britain’s and France’s appetite for war.

The machine was set in motion. From 19 August U-boats were putting out into the Atlantic, followed over the next few days by two “pocket battleships”, Admiral Graf Spee and Deutschland. On the morning of 25 August the training battleship Schleswig-Holstein entered the port of Gdańsk (Danzig), officially on a courtesy visit. Along the border with Poland the concentration of troops was being completed, from Western Pomerania and East Prussia to Silesia and Slovakia. The SS security service under Reinhard Heydrich was preparing border provocations to serve as a pretext for the attack, while special units of military intelligence, the Abwehr, were to seize bridges, tunnels and railway junctions on the Polish side of the border in the last hours before the assault.

The afternoon of 25 August

Hitler spent the day at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, waiting for signals from London and Rome. Around midday he dictated a letter to Mussolini, delivered to Rome in the early afternoon, in which he explained the pact with the USSR and made it clear that war with Poland was imminent. At around 1.30 p.m. he received the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, and put to him a “last” offer: once the “Polish problem” had been solved, he was prepared to guarantee the British Empire and conclude a wide-ranging agreement with Britain. At the same time he insisted that he would solve the Polish problem one way or another. Henderson was to fly to London with the proposal the next day. Hitler evidently hoped it would land on the desk of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, just as the war was beginning, and give him an argument for staying out of it.

Without waiting for a reply, Hitler issued the order at around 3 p.m. Most sources give the time as 3.02 p.m., as noted by the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder. The army commands passed it on, and within a few hours divisions were moving from their assembly areas towards the border.

Then everything began to go wrong. In the late afternoon the news agencies reported that Lord Halifax and Ambassador Edward Raczyński had signed a mutual assistance agreement in London. Far from backing away from its March guarantee, Britain had turned it into an alliance – two days after the pact that was supposed to deter it. At around 5.30 p.m. Hitler received the French ambassador, Robert Coulondre, who told him that if Poland were attacked, France would fight at her side. Soon afterwards, at around 6 p.m., the Italian ambassador Bernardo Attolico arrived at the Chancellery with Mussolini’s reply.

Mussolini’s letter

Since 22 May Italy had been bound to Germany by the Pact of Steel, which committed it to take part in any war waged by the Reich, including an offensive one. Mussolini, however, had signed it in the belief that war would not break out for at least three years. That was also how the Italians understood the talks held when the alliance was concluded, and on 30 May it was confirmed in a memorandum by General Ugo Cavallero, which Mussolini sent to Hitler. When, on 11–13 August, the Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano was told at Salzburg and on the Obersalzberg that Germany would strike Poland before the end of August, he returned to Rome convinced that his ally had deceived him, and urged his father-in-law to keep out of the war.

Mussolini wavered until the last moment, but on 25 August he gave Hitler a clear answer. If Germany attacked Poland and the conflict remained localised, he wrote, Italy would give it every political and economic support. If, however, Britain and France entered the war, Italy, given the state of its preparations, would not undertake military operations unless Germany immediately supplied it with the equipment and raw materials needed to repel the attack he expected from the British and French. According to witnesses, Hitler received Attolico icily and dismissed him curtly. The blow was greater than the military value of the Italian army might suggest: Hitler had counted on the threat of war in the Mediterranean to tie down France and Britain and discourage them from intervening.

The order revoked

According to the account of the Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, General Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler then summoned him and ordered: “Stop everything at once, fetch Brauchitsch. I need time for negotiations.” The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, assured him that the troops could still be halted. The order to stop the advance went out at around 7.30 p.m., and throughout the night the staffs relayed it onwards by telephone, by radio and through officers sent by car and aircraft to units that were already on the move. The SS border provocations planned for that night were also called off.

Halting an army on the march a few hours before an offensive was an undertaking without precedent, and it succeeded in the overwhelming majority of cases. But it did not arrive everywhere in time. An Abwehr sabotage unit that was to seize the tunnel under the Jablunkov Pass and the railway station at Mosty did not receive the order in time and attacked on the night of 25–26 August. The Polish defenders beat off the raid, and the German side later explained it away as the unauthorised act of a “madman”. For the Polish command, however, it was a clear signal of how close war was.

After the war, at Nuremberg, Hermann Göring testified that he had asked Hitler that evening whether the cancellation was final. Hitler replied that it was not: he merely had to see whether British intervention could be eliminated.

Six days

Hitler devoted the following days to diplomacy designed to break up the opposing front, or at least to shift the responsibility for the war onto his opponents. On 26 August, at Hitler’s request, Mussolini sent a list of the supplies he needed, so enormous that Germany could not possibly meet it; among other things it named 7 million tonnes of oil, 6 million tonnes of coal and 600 tonnes of molybdenum – more, as Attolico himself is said to have remarked, than the entire world output of the time. Hitler released Italy from its obligation to join the war and asked only that it keep up the appearance until the end that it might do so. On 26 August the French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, appealed to Hitler, as one former front-line soldier to another, for a peaceful settlement. Hitler replied that Danzig and the “Corridor” must return to the Reich.

Henderson flew to London on 26 August with Hitler’s offer and returned on 28 August with the answer: Britain wanted an understanding with Germany, but not at Poland’s expense, and encouraged direct German–Polish negotiations. Meanwhile the Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus, an acquaintance of Göring’s, shuttled by air between Berlin and London as an unofficial intermediary. In Germany, the covert mobilisation went on, entirely unaffected by the pause: the Wehrmacht gained time to bring further divisions east and to fill out its ranks. On 27 August rationing of basic goods, from food to soap and coal, was announced in the Reich.

As early as 26 August the staffs began to treat 1 September as the probable new date. Hitler took the final decision on 31 August: at 12.40 p.m. he ordered the attack for 4.45 a.m. the next day, and around midday he signed Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War.

The Polish side

In Warsaw the German orders were not known, but intelligence reports of troop concentrations along the border left no room for doubt. Since 23–24 August Poland had been carrying out an emergency mobilisation, calling up reservists to units in the most threatened districts by individual call-up cards, without public announcement. The Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, and the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, wanted to proclaim general mobilisation as soon as possible, but the British and French ambassadors argued that this might hand Hitler a pretext and ruin the chances of negotiations. The government gave way to this pressure and kept postponing general mobilisation, which told on the army’s readiness in the first days of the war.

The outcome

Hitler halted his army not because he hesitated over whether to start a war at all, but because he wanted to wage it on his own terms: with Poland isolated, Italy at his side and the Western powers idle. The evening of 25 August showed that Ribbentrop’s calculation had been wrong and that the pact with Moscow had not been enough to make London and Paris back down. Six days of diplomacy changed nothing. At dawn on 1 September 1939 the Wehrmacht crossed the Polish border and the Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Westerplatte. That same day Italy announced that it would not undertake military operations, just as Mussolini had said on 25 August. Britain and France, after two days of hesitation, declared war on Germany on 3 September.

Historians cite the events of 25 August as the best evidence that Hitler still regarded a European war as a risk he would rather avoid, but not as a reason to give up the war with Poland. When it turned out that he could not have one without the other, he chose both.