Hitler offers peace

On Friday 6 October 1939 Adolf Hitler stood before the Reichstag for the first time since 1 September, when in the same hall he had announced the start of the war against Poland. The deputies gathered in the Kroll Opera House, a former opera building opposite the burnt-out Reichstag, which since 1933 had served as the chamber of the Nazi parliament. The speech lasted about an hour and a half. Most of it was an account of the victory over Poland; the last part was a proposal addressed to Britain and France: now that Poland had fallen, the war in the west had lost its purpose and should be ended at a conference of the great powers.

Chronologies describe the event briefly: Hitler spoke in the Reichstag and expressed a wish to convene a conference with Britain and France to restore peace. This is an accurate summary, though two things need adding. Hitler did not speak of three-way talks but of a conference of “the leading nations of this continent”, and he did not propose an armistice, but peace on terms that were read at once in London and Paris as a demand to accept accomplished facts. He excluded the future of the Polish lands from any discussion: it was to be decided by Germany and the Soviet Union alone.

The “peace offensive”

The speech was no improvisation. It had been heralded by the joint German–Soviet declaration published on 28 September together with the Boundary and Friendship Treaty. In it the two governments stated that, after the “definitive settlement” of the questions arising from the collapse of the Polish state, ending the war was in the interest of all peoples, and that if their efforts failed, Britain and France would bear responsibility for the continuation of the conflict. On 3 October Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that any peace proposals would be examined together with the Dominions and France, but also that the declaration combined an announcement of peace with a barely veiled threat. In the same debate David Lloyd George urged the government not to reject detailed terms hastily, especially if they were put forward by neutrals. He was sharply criticised from almost every side of the House.

Behind the scenes, soundings had been going on for several weeks. The Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus, a friend of Hermann Göring who had acted as a go-between for Berlin and London in August, spoke with Hitler and Göring in Berlin on 26 September, and on 28 and 29 September he was in London to see the Permanent Under-Secretary Alexander Cadogan, and then Chamberlain and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. He brought terms presented in the mildest possible form, but their content was clear: a truncated Polish state dependent on the Reich, the incorporation into Germany of the former Prussian lands, the return of the colonies or compensation for them, and a promise that Germany would make no further annexations. The British listened politely but without enthusiasm. On 1 October the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, was received in Berlin. Back in Rome he told the American ambassador that his visit had been for information, that “the real crisis of the war” would come that week, and that he hoped Hitler’s proposals would not be rejected out of hand. At the same time the Foreign Office learned that Benito Mussolini had no intention of acting as mediator in a cause that looked lost from the outset.

The day before the speech, on 5 October, Hitler flew to conquered Warsaw and took the salute at a victory parade in Ujazdowskie Avenue. The capital lay in ruins after three weeks of bombing and shelling, and its defenders had surrendered only a week earlier. According to foreign correspondents who accompanied the visit, Hitler showed them the ruins as a warning to the politicians in London and Paris.

The conqueror of Poland

The first part of the speech was a report on the victorious campaign, delivered in a tone of triumph and contempt. A state of 36 million inhabitants, with an army of nearly fifty infantry and cavalry divisions, had, he said, ceased to count within a week and been “completely annihilated” within four. Hitler claimed that the last units had held out in Warsaw, Modlin and on Hel until 1 October not thanks to their own bravery but thanks to German prudence and restraint. He insisted that he had ordered the air force and artillery to attack only military targets in Warsaw and that he had offered the civilian population an evacuation, which the defence command had refused. He passed over in silence the fact that the Luftwaffe had bombed open towns from the first day of the war and that Warsaw had been shelled indiscriminately.

He asked the deputies to rise and gave the Wehrmacht’s losses as of 30 September: 10,572 killed, 30,322 wounded and 3,404 missing. Later research gives higher figures, usually around 16,000 dead. He spoke of 694,000 Polish prisoners marching into captivity. Yet the campaign was not in fact over. At Kock and Wola Gułowska the last battle of regular Polish troops was drawing to a close, and that same day Brigadier General Franciszek Kleeberg’s Independent Operational Group Polesie surrendered.

Poland and the Poles were described in the terms Hitler had been repeating for months. The Polish state, in his account, was an “artificial” creation of the Treaty of Versailles, born of German and Russian blood, ruled by a narrow clique, a country in which the minorities were oppressed and roads and towns fell into ruin. A large part of the speech was taken up with a tale of “satanic” crimes against Germans in Poland, based on an exaggerated propaganda picture of events such as Bloody Sunday in Bydgoszcz. Of the executions of Polish civilians and prisoners being carried out at that very time by the Wehrmacht and the Security Police task forces, there was not a word.

A new order in the east

What mattered most for the future of occupied Poland was what Hitler said about the “new order” in the east. He praised the agreements with the USSR, calling the non-aggression pact a turning point in German foreign policy and the new friendship treaty a guarantee of lasting peace between the two largest states of Europe. He assured his listeners that Joseph Stalin had found nothing in Soviet principles that ruled out friendly relations with a state of a different system.

He then listed the tasks the Reich had set itself in its zone: drawing the Reich frontier in accordance with “historical, ethnographic and economic facts”, the “pacification” of the whole area, securing it, rebuilding its economy and communications, and, as the most important task, “a new order of ethnographic conditions” – that is, resettlement of populations. He explained that eastern and southern Europe were full of “splinters” of the German nation which had to be moved in order to remove a source of conflict. In the second part of the speech, among the list of aims, came a point phrased almost in passing: “an attempt to reach a solution and settlement of the Jewish problem”. At the end of this list came “the creation of a Polish state”, so constituted and governed that it could never again become either a hotbed of anti-German activity or a centre of intrigue against Germany and Russia.

Hitler put the question of why war should be waged in the west bluntly: “For the restoration of Poland? Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again. This is guaranteed by two of the largest states in the world.” The final settlement of the area and the question of rebuilding a Polish state were to be decided “exclusively by Russia on the one hand and Germany on the other”, and not by war in the west, at the conference table or in newspaper offices.

The outstretched hand

Only now did the speaker come to the offer. He assured in turn the Baltic states, the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland that Germany had no claims on them. He reminded France that after the return of the Saar he had renounced all claims and was not even raising the question of Alsace-Lorraine. To Britain he promised friendship, claiming that his life’s aim had been the reconciliation of the two nations, thwarted by the hostility of “certain British statesmen and journalists”.

The Reich now regarded the Treaty of Versailles as obsolete and saw no reason for its further revision, with one exception: the demand for the return of the former colonies, justified by a right to a share of the world’s raw materials. Hitler insisted that this was not an ultimatum. He went on to speak of reviving world trade, regulating currencies, limiting armaments to a “reasonable” level and international rules of warfare. Just as the Geneva Convention had once forbidden the killing of the wounded and the ill-treatment of prisoners, a new agreement was to regulate air warfare, the use of gas and submarines, and the definition of contraband. All these questions were to be settled by a conference of the leading states of Europe, carefully prepared and meeting not “amid the thunder of guns” or under the pressure of mobilised armies.

Finally, Hitler painted a picture of what would follow if the offer were rejected. The French would begin to destroy Saarbrücken, the Germans would reduce Mulhouse to rubble, France would retaliate by shelling Karlsruhe, and Germany Strasbourg. One day there would again be a frontier between Germany and France, but instead of flourishing towns there would be ruins and “endless cemeteries”. He attacked Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and his “followers”, declaring that if their opinion prevailed, this statement would be his last. Then Germany would fight, and “there will never be another November 1918”. He ended with the words: “May those who consider war to be the better solution reject my outstretched hand.”

First reactions

In Germany the speech was well received. The American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander Kirk, reported that many Germans appreciated the absence of an ultimatum and hoped that talks, once begun, would make a resumption of fighting more difficult. Berlin also made sure that foreign journalists noticed the appeal it contained to neutral states. That same evening the head of the Foreign Office’s press department gathered correspondents from Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and the United States and suggested that a great neutral power might undertake mediation. Asked whether Germany would accept an armistice proposal from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he replied that it certainly would. The American correspondent William L. Shirer noted, however, that it sounded like an old gramophone record played for the fifth or sixth time.

In London Foreign Office officials conferred all afternoon with Chamberlain and Halifax. Their first assessment, passed on to the American ambassador, was that the proposals were too vague to serve as the basis for a conference unless Germany backed them with a concrete act, such as the evacuation of the Polish part of Poland. A conference on Hitler’s terms would put all the cards in his hands. The government announced that the speech would be carefully considered. In Paris the American ambassador, William Bullitt, was told that same day that there was “not the slightest chance” of the French government accepting the speech as a basis for an armistice. The French paid attention to something else: the announcement of German–Soviet cooperation in “solving ethnic problems”, which opened up the prospect of intervention by both powers in Hungary and the Balkans.

The Poles had no illusions. General Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of the government-in-exile in France since 30 September, made a speech that evening in which he declared that no Polish government would ever recognise the partition of the country and that the Poles would fight on alongside their allies for the restoration of their state.

Significance

The proposal of 6 October was largely a propaganda exercise. Hitler would probably have accepted a peace that left him Poland and a free hand in the east, but he did not count on one. As early as 27 September he had told his commanders that he wanted to strike in the west that very autumn, and three days after the Reichstag speech, on 9 October, he signed Directive No. 6, ordering the preparation of an attack through Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – the very neighbours to whom he had just promised respect for their frontiers. He needed a refusal from London and Paris in order to present the continuation of the war to the Germans as something forced upon them from outside. The answers came within a week: on 10 October the French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, replied on the radio, and on 12 October Chamberlain in the House of Commons. Both were refusals.

More important than the offer itself were the words about the “new order” in the east. On 7 October Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, responsible for bringing ethnic Germans in from abroad and for removing the “alien” population from lands earmarked for settlement. In October the Heim ins Reich operation began, starting with the resettlement of the Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia, whose new homes were to be the houses of expelled Poles. The “settlement of the Jewish problem” took the form, as early as the second half of October, of the first deportations of Jews to the San. The promised “Polish state” never came into being. In the lands not incorporated into the Reich the Germans created the General Government, a territory ruled by the occupier without any Polish state authority whatsoever.

After the defeat of France, on 19 July 1940, Hitler once again appealed in the Reichstag to Britain’s “reason”. It was his last public peace appeal in the west, and it too went unanswered. The speech of 6 October closed the September Campaign and opened the period of the Phoney War: six months of quiet on land, during which both sides of the front prepared for a decision in the spring of 1940.