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- [00:00]
Tom Holland
Thank you for listening to the Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com this episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Now, every year brings new challenges. But there's one thing you don't have to worry about in 2025. Spending too much money on a wireless plan. Because now you know all about Mint Mobile. They have plans starting at just $15 a month when you buy a three month plan. And Tom, you can even bring your own phone.
- [00:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's insane. And with all that money I'd save, I could maybe get another Roman coin. It's certainly a lot easier to do than learning Welsh, which is my other New Year's resolution.
- [00:52]
Tom Holland
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- [01:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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- [01:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
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- [01:59]
Tom Holland
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- [02:26]
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- [03:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
I wanted Warsaw to be great. I believed Warsaw would be great. I and my colleagues drew up plans for a great Warsaw of the future. And Warsaw is great. It happened sooner than we expected. Not in 50 years, not in a hundred, but today I see a great Warsaw. And as I speak to you now through the windows, I see enveloped by clouds of smoke, reddened by flames, a wonderful, indestructible, great fighting Warsaw in all its glory. And even though ruins lie where fine orphanages should stand, even though there are barricades where we wanted parks, even though our libraries are engulfed in flames, even though our hospitals are burning, then, not in 50 years, not in a hundred years, but now, today, Warsaw, defending the honour of Poland, has reached the peak of its greatness and its glory. That was the mayor of Warsaw, Stefan Starzinski, who was broadcasting to the people of the Polish capital on 23rd September 1939. It is one of the most famous speeches in Polish history. And even in translation it is, I mean, unbelievably moving and powerful. And all the more so, Dominic, because of course, you can tell what the context for this is by his description. Warsaw is under attack. It's being pounded by German artillery. You've got the Luftwaffe carpet bombing it from the skies, thousands of civilians dead, fires blazing out of control, much of the city in ruins. And that great owed, I guess, to this sense of the invincible spirit of the Polish people. But goodness, I mean, the invincible spirit of the Polish people has to go through a lot in this episode and has to go through a lot in the years that will follow the events of this episode, because we are talking about the Nazi invasion and conquest of Poland.
- [05:22]
Tom Holland
Yes, it's. It's. It's an incredibly bleak story, Tom, and it is an amazing speech. Very moving to even tip. To hear you reading it out, you have a bit of a kind of lump in your throat. The kind of idea of Warsaw reaching the apotheosis of its glory in circumstances of the most terrible horror. Four days after that speech, after Stasinski gave that speech, the city surrendered. He ended up being arrested by the Gestapo and he vanished. He was never seen again. It's not clear whether he was shot in Warsaw or whether he was taken to a concentration camp and murdered. Go to Warsaw. There are loads of monuments to him, the streets named after him and things. And at the end of the 20th century he was voted the Vsovian of the century. So his memory certainly in Poland definitely lives on. But I guess it would be wrong for us to pretend that this episode is going to be anything other than quite a dark story.
- [06:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, I mean, unbelievably bleak.
- [06:15]
Tom Holland
So we ended last time with the war breaking out. The first shots of the war being fired in Danzig after these false flag incidents on the border. So 4:45, Saturday the 1st of September, the German battleship, the Schleswig Holstein, opening fire on the Polish munitions depot on the Wester Platter peninsula in the harbour. And at the same time the German police in Danzig and the SS launched an attack on the Polish post office in the city which they saw had long been seen as a standing affront. Now those two moments, the attack on the Wester Platte depot and the attack on the post office are incredibly well known stories in Poland. If you go to what's now Gdansk, there are monuments, there are museums. I mean it is a place incredibly rich in history, particularly Second World War history. And they've become part of patriotic legends. So let's start with those two stories and tell people what happened. So first of all, the Wester Platter. So this is this, it's basically a munitions depot on it, on this sort of neck of land. There were about 200 Polish soldiers there guarding the depot and they were completely cut off. So they're the first people to come under fire. And they refused to surrender. And over the next few days The Germans made 13 separate attempts to storm the peninsula, including sending dive bombers to, to hit them and the pot. These 200 guys held out for a week and that was a week longer than even their own officers had thought possible. And at the time it was a massive story in Poland. So every day on Polish radio the news bulletins would have the phrase the Wester Platter fights on.
- [07:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
So it's kind of like Thermopylae, isn't it? A doomed heroic class stand.
- [07:58]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And Polish historians use that exact parallel. They call it the Polish Thermopylae. And these guys finally surrendered on the 7th of September. So a week longer than they'd fought for, a week longer than they should have done because they basically, they'd run out of supplies and those men who'd been wounded were dying of gangrene. And this is pretty much the only time in this episode when the Germans behaved nobly and they did behave very nobly. So when the Poles came out, the Germans couldn't believe their Eyes. They thought there'd been 2,000 of them and there were only 200. And the German commander, who was a guy called Friedrich Georg Eberhard, was actually very gallant to the Polish commander who was called Henrik Sukarski. Sukarski gave him his sword and surrender his saber. And Eberhard gave it him back and said, no, you keep it. And then lined up as men. And as the Poles came out, the Germans all saluted them as they were kind of led off into captivities. And Eberhard said to his men, that's how you fight, that's how you defend your honor. Look at those Poles and look at what they've done.
- [08:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Because the gallantry of it, the nobility of it, of that scene, I mean, it blazes all the brighter, doesn't it, for the near universal darkness that effectively is the rest of this invasion.
- [09:09]
Tom Holland
Exactly, exactly. Because it's such a contrast with what happened at the other totemic battle in Danzig, which is the post office. So the post office was being held by 56 people. They were mostly postmen and their families. And they were armed with pistols and grenades.
- [09:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
So they're not soldiers, they're not in uniform?
- [09:25]
Tom Holland
No. And the SS hammered them with howitzers and grenades and whatnot and didn't get any joy. And as dusk was falling, the SS resorted to a very brutal tactic. They brought up a railway carriage filled with petrol and they used fire hoses from the fire engines to pump this petrol into the building. And then they set light to the building with grenades. So the building went up like a, you know, like a candle. And three Poles were burned alive straight away and the rest kind of surrendered and rushed out of the building. The first guy who came out was the post office director and he was holding a white flag and the Germans shot him dead straight away. The next bloke, they pushed him back into the building so that he burned alive. And then they spared the others at first, but for precisely the point that you said that they are postmen and not, not soldiers, they were rounded up and they were told you were illegal combatants, you weren't fighting legally. And so they are immediately court martialed by the Wehrmacht. They were all shot by SS firing squads and buried in a, in a mass grave. So a very, very dark story. Again, there's a big monument to the postman in Gdansk. And it's actually this whole story is a chapter of Gunter Grass's book the Tin Drum, which is set in, in Danzig gdask as it became. So while all that's Going on German forces, as we said last time, 60 divisions, one and a half million men spearheaded by tanks. They are pouring over their borders of Poland. And actually the first person to break the news of this story was a journalist from, of all places, the Daily Telegraph. So British newspaper. And this was a great war correspondent then, very young, 27 years old, called Claire Hollingworth and she had only been working for the Telegraph for a couple of weeks. I mean, basically everybody who works at the Telegraph now is about 27, aren't they? I mean, isn't that the nature of the Daily Telegraph? But then she must have been basically the youngest person they employed by about 50 years. They had sent her, she'd gone off to Silesia, to Katowice to cover the, the story of the, the tension in Poland. And she looked out of her hotel room and she heard all these planes going overhead and literally saw German tanks kind of driving down the street. And she rang the British Embassy in Warsaw and said, I mean, it's on. The Germans are attacking. And the Embassy said, well, we haven't heard anything about this, so, you know, you're making it up. And she literally held the phone out of the window.
- [11:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
And again, it's a reminder, isn't it, of how in, in so many ways how distant this war is because now communications are so instantaneous. The fact that you have to have a journalist on the frontier holding a telephone out. Exactly, to inform the British Embassy of what's happening just seems incomprehensible.
- [12:02]
Tom Holland
It does, yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously, you know, far, far closer to the Great War than it is to us. Right? Yeah. I mean, even though we think of the Second World War probably because of the. The moving pictures, because of color imagery. Yeah, exactly. With. We think of it as more immediate right from the start, it is clear the Poles are facing massive, massive challenges. As we heard last time, the British and the French had persuaded them not to mobilise early to avoid provoking the Germans. So they're not ready. A lot of their reservists haven't got to their barracks. Those who have, have not been issued with guns. They're not in any condition really to face this incredibly well drilled war machine of Hitler's. And even if they had been, this is going to be a very tough ask. So if you look at the map, Germany can attack Poland from three different sides, from the main body of the Reich in the west, from East Prussia which is in the north, and they can also attack. It's often forgotten that Germany is not the only country that Attacks Poland because they have their client state now, Slovakia.
- [13:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, under the Catholic priest.
- [13:07]
Tom Holland
Under the Catholic priest, Monsignor Tiso said they attacked from the south as well. And Slovakia is the only bit where there's any natural barrier, which is the Tatras mountains. But in the west, there is no natural barrier at all. It is just flat farmland. And as it happens, it's been a very, very dry summer. The rivers have dried up. We'll maybe come to this a bit later.
- [13:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
So there's no mud to clog up the.
- [13:29]
Tom Holland
Nothing. The tanks can just. It's perfect. The tanks can just roll over the border. Now, as for the two armies, we said the Germans attacked with one and a half million men. The Poles have about a million men, many of them infantry, and they have about another million reserves. But Poland is so much poorer than Germany that they are much less well trained and less well equipped. So there's a brilliant book called the Eagle Unbowed on Poland in the Second World War by Halik Kochanski, who's an Anglo Polish historian, and she points out Poland's annual defence budget was 50 times smaller than Germany's. And in fact, it was only a tenth of the budget just for the Luftwaffe. So that tells you how. What a disadvantage they're fighting. The Germans have 15 times more armored and mechanized units than the Poles do. If you think about the air war, which is very important, The Luftwaffe have 2000 fighters, the Poles have 300 and something. The Polish airmen, by the way, are considered some of the best in the world.
- [14:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, because they go on to fight in the Battle of Britain, don't they?
- [14:31]
Tom Holland
With tremendous heroism in the Battle of Britain. But there aren't that many of them and they don't have many planes.
- [14:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Again, I mean, I know that I keep going on about this. It seems bizarre that the country with the impregnable defenses, I. E. Czechoslovakia, gives them up and Poland, that has no defenses at all, fights.
- [14:48]
Tom Holland
I suppose it's partly because Czechoslovakia has already been defeated, though, that Poland fights. Right. They've already seen what happens if you don't fight, so they feel they have no choice. Anyway, within hours, it is obvious that the polls, I mean, with hours, not days, hours, it is clear that the polls are in real trouble because this is the first demonstration of the Germans famous blitzkrieg lightning war tactics. So in the Great War, in the First World War, you had these gigantic armies advancing over a huge front that could be tens, hundreds of miles wide. The thing that the Germans do now is they. They concentrate their Armies into these columns that move very quickly, that punch a hole through your line and then keep going, causing complete chaos.
- [15:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
And is this a strategy that's been formulated, or is it one that evolves in the context?
- [15:34]
Tom Holland
Think a bit of both. So armies always have doctrines, so they will have a kind of idea of an ideal of what to do. They have a theory. But then once you put it into practice, you'll always adjust, you'll see what works.
- [15:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Because the idea of speed and violence is very fascist, isn't it?
- [15:49]
Tom Holland
I guess it's very fascist, exactly. And of course, it's a product of technology, of the technological change. The fact that you now have mechanized units in a way that you didn't in the first place, but it's striking is.
- [15:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, the. Because obviously the French do not adopt this. No, de Gaulle is very keen on it, but he doesn't have any leeway with that. But presumably it's adopted by the Nazi high command because it conforms with their sense of how a German army.
- [16:12]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I think.
- [16:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Performing.
- [16:13]
Tom Holland
I think so. I think they're less hidebound by convention, maybe, because, of course, they've rearmed more recently. Yeah, they've rebuilt their army more recently.
- [16:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
And I suppose that's also true of the air force, isn't it? Yes, they've had to build it from scratch. So it's that much more advanced.
- [16:27]
Tom Holland
Exactly right, exactly. And actually, this is their other great innovation that goes hand in hand with the blitzkrieg tactics. So on the first day, The Germans throw 900 bombers and 500 fighters into action. Their air force, which is, as you say, is new, is one of the most modern in the world. They've honed their skills, as it were, in Spain, the Condor Legion, and they've pretty much won the battle for the skies by day two, wiped the Polish air force in the skies, bombed their aerodromes. You know, they. They command. They. Heavens. Now, this thing about bombing, I think, is really important and is a very obvious difference with the First World War. So we've talked a few times in this series about how commentators everywhere in Europe in the 1930s were obsessed with bombing. So the bomber will always get through. Civilians will pay the price if there's ever a future war. And this is the great demonstration of bombing's potential, even more so, actually, than Guernica, which had previously been the most famous kind of object lesson.
- [17:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
So that's in Spain, in northern Spain.
- [17:30]
Tom Holland
So Guernica in Spain, in the Basque country, probably. Historians now think probably about 300 people died at Guernica civilians that was. These were greatly inflated figures at the time. But in Poland, it's on a completely different scale. It's interesting. It's a sign of our blinkedness, I guess, that we don't know about this, that these aren't household names in the way the Guernica is, because it's Eastern Europe. So people, well, they get to have.
- [17:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
A great artist painting, I suppose that's true, of course. So Picasso's image of it is the kind of icon of bombing campaigns, isn't it?
- [18:03]
Tom Holland
It is, absolutely.
- [18:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
So it kind of does stand in for everybody else who suffers from it over the course of the war.
- [18:10]
Tom Holland
It does, yeah. You're absolutely right. But. So no one, probably, or very few people listening to this podcast would have heard of a town called Wielung, which is a rural town in west central Poland. So this was just a sort of small town hit by the Luftwaffe. In the first hours of the attack on 1 September, the Luftwaffe bombed it for nine hours. They dropped 400 bombs, a total of 50,000 kilograms of explosives. They almost completely leveled the town center. The civilian death toll, I mean, there are different estimates there. They go as high as about 1,200 people. So that's a tenth of the entire population. But the thing is, this was a tower with no military targets in it at all.
- [18:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
So it's deliberately targeted to create terror.
- [18:54]
Tom Holland
Terror. And that's the terror from the air that is the real. There's very little like this in the First World War. And you have these stories. German planes that strafe refugee columns that fire deliberately on ambulances that bomb hospital trains. And they will bomb a train. And then the passengers, the train will kind of come off the tracks. The passengers who survived will all, you know, like a sort of. From above, they probably look like, you know, kind of insects sort of flooding across the landscape. And then the planes will come back down for the kill and machine gun them as they. As they flee. Scenes like this appall even the most experienced observers of war. So the head of the military mission in Poland was actually. He was an amazing character, this guy, Adrian Carton de Wiart, who was. He had one eye and he had one arm.
- [19:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
So like Nelson.
- [19:43]
Tom Holland
Like Nelson. And if I tell you his Wikipedia entry begins with the word words in the First World War, it says he was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear. Was blinded in his left eye, Survived two plane crashes, tunneled out a prisoner of war camp and tore off his own fingers. When a doctor declined to amputate them. And he said of the First World War, frankly, I enjoyed the war. So he's the guy who's observing all this.
- [20:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
So he's not a wuss?
- [20:09]
Tom Holland
No, he's not a wuss. And this is, this is the interesting thing. He says, he is appalled. He says, this is not war as I understand it. Carton de Wil said, with the first deliberate bombing of civilians, I saw the very face of war change, bereft of romance, its glory shorn. No longer the soldier setting forth into battle, but the women and children buried underneath it.
- [20:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Could I, could I just ask at this point, I know that you wrote about this and put it in your notes and then removed it because you worried about time, but I think it should, should mention it because it's probably the one thing that most people listening to this episode will know about the early days of the Nazi invasion of Poland, which is a vague, inchoate sense that the romance and glory of war is upheld by Polish lancers charging panzers.
- [20:59]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [20:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
And this is not true. They did not do this. However, there were cavalry engagements. So there's a famous cavalry engagement in the first hours of the Nazi invasion where group of German soldiers have moved into a forest, cleared clearing in a forest that Polish cavalry units see them attack them, clear them out of the, out of the forest. And although they then get attacked by armored vehicles and machine gunned and they lose about a third of, of their men and horses, the rest get away. They have held up the German advance for a few hours and enable Polish forces to drop back. So very kind of heroic. And then the Germans invite international journalists to come and look at the scene of this skirmish, this battle, and there were kind of, you know, horses with their guts ripped out and dead cavalrymen, Polish cavalrymen. And one of these journalists who's writing for an Italian paper, he writes it up as cavalry charging tanks. And I guess it resonates because of the famous story of, of the Poles arriving at the siege of Vienna.
- [22:13]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [22:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
In 1683. Yeah, kind. Yes, all of that. And so for, I mean, I suppose for, for some polls and certainly for foreign, foreign sympathizers, it becomes emblematic of an age of chivalry.
- [22:31]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [22:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's been destroyed.
- [22:33]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [22:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Whereas for the Nazis it serves as an emblem of Polish backwardness. So even Gunter Grass, you mentioned the Tin Drum. I mean, he describes this, the, the Polish cavalry as kind of Don Quixote and by extension the whole Polish state.
- [22:47]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [22:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
So there, that's, it's a kind of interesting ambivalence. Isn't it? Yeah, that, that it is a myth. Polish lancers didn't charge tanks but it obviously spoke to something that both sides in the war wanted to believe for different reasons.
- [23:01]
Tom Holland
Yeah. The Poles the idea of romance and the Germans the idea of backwardness, I suppose. I mean it's definitely true. The Poles had cavalry. The Nazis had cavalry as well. The Germans did.
- [23:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
They had a lot of horses.
- [23:10]
Tom Holland
They did have a, they had a lot of horses. They took horses of course, when they attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.
- [23:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
France. Yeah, yeah.
- [23:16]
Tom Holland
So it's not unreasonable to have cavalry but at this point the cavalry mean a lot to Poles because of their historic traditions and the land owning classes tend to dominate the cavalry as of course they did in, in, in Britain. But I think that by and large they used the cavalry, they knew that they, they weren't stupid. They used the cavalry for reconnaissance and whatnot. And there's this one incident, as you say, this very famous story, but they're not charging tanks at all. And it basically becomes an emblem of a doomed futile struggle which kind of suits, you know, as you say, it has a kind of ambiguity to it, it works in different ways, but it's probably a bit misleading. I mean the polls are trying to fight a modern war. They just don't have the tools right to do this.
- [23:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well also it highlights the, the, the imbalance in mechanization.
- [24:00]
Tom Holland
Yes.
- [24:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Which is what dooms them because.
- [24:01]
Tom Holland
Exactly.
- [24:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Because, because basically the Nazis are stress testing what they can do with tanks, what they can do with modern airplanes. And as we all know, it's devastating.
- [24:12]
Tom Holland
Yeah. So by day two, the Poles are already going backwards and a lot of their officers are already shell shocked by just the speed and the ruthlessness of the German advance. There's a brilliant book on Poland, the Second World War by a guy called Jan Karski and he was a cavalry lieutenant and he basically said it took three hours for the Panzers and the Luftwaffe between them to reduce my division to complete and utter chaos. And he said by the end of the first day we weren't an army anymore. We were just a collection of random people stumbling towards some enemy wholly indefinite goal. Now the one hope they have, and it's not a completely vain hope, they have powerful friends, Britain and France, I mean Britain and France, for all that we have criticized them in the last few episodes, they are serious players, you know, rich, powerful empires, not just kind of industrial democracies. So the polls, it's reasonable for the polls to think, well maybe you know, the weight will be on our side. We outnumbered the Germans, they're fighting on two fronts. The Poles have drawn up a plan called Plan Sachod. Now this envisages, of course, the Germans will make gains in the first few days, but then we will withdraw to these defensible rivers in the center of Poland, the Vistula, the Bug, the San and so on. We will hold the Germans there. Now, meanwhile, in the west, the French and the British will launch their attack on western Germany. Hitler will have to withdraw troops, recall troops to defend the Fatherland. That will allow us to at worst stabilize our lines and at best maybe launch a counter attack. So on paper, it doesn't sound like such a terrible scheme, but the issue is, will the French and the British do their bit? Now, when the news broke that France and Britain had declared war on 3rd September, there were huge crowds in Warsaw outside the embassies, people singing, know God Save the King and the Marseillaise and stuff, very moving scenes. And two days later, on the 5th of September, the commander of the Polish armed forces, who's a guy called Marshall Ridz Smeagli, he says, okay, let's put this band into operation. They start to withdraw to the center of the country, give up western Poland now. And they're waiting and waiting and waiting for the Allies to make their move. And two days later, they get the first sign this is going to happen. The French cross into the Tsar land at three points and you know, is this it? And actually, do you know what? The French just stop a few miles in. It's a complete sham. They don't even get to the fortified Seafried line, the line of kind of German forts. They hang around for a few, a couple of weeks, and then by early October, they go back to France and they are.
- [26:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
They outnumber the German forces in the west by 5 to 1, 6 to 1.
- [26:58]
Tom Holland
I mean, this is the thing Goebbels in his diary wrote, the French withdrawal is more than astonishing. It is completely incomprehensible. At the Neureberg trials, General Jodl told the judges, he told the trial, he said the French could have taken Germany in the first weeks of the war. Said they outnumbered us in the west by 5 to 1. And they didn't do it. And not only did they not launch a ground invasion of Germany, the polls are begging London, please, when are the RAF going to attack the German airfields? When are they going to start hitting Germany? And they send direct messages, when are you going to do this? And the British say, we don't want to provoke German bombing raids of Britain. That's the last thing we want to do. I mean some British ministers notoriously said well we're not going to bomb German munitions factories and things like that because I mean that's private property. You couldn't, you couldn't attack people's private property. That's absolutely disgraceful. So all they do is they send the RF to drop propaganda leaflets over Germany saying, you know, you shouldn't be fighting the war, you've let yourselves down.
- [28:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
And I'm sure we'll come to this when we. In due courses. I'm sure we will. We cover the phony war. But it is still. I mean it's weird, isn't it? Why are they, I mean is it psychological reasons?
- [28:12]
Tom Holland
We could, I think a lot of it is psychological. They think, they assume the war will be long. They don't have the spirit, I think it's fair to say for an aggressive war, martial ardor. They don't have it. I mean is it all psychological? Probably not all psychological but a lot of it I think is.
- [28:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
But it's so odd, isn't it? Because I mean the Polish strategy is the best that could have been hoped for. If the Poles do survive as a military force and they're attacking in the west then you have the pincer movement that Hitler had been so afraid of.
- [28:42]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I know, squander that.
- [28:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
It just seems so odd.
- [28:44]
Tom Holland
It's, it's sort of, I mean maybe some listeners will come up with some complicated reason, some sort of military history reason why this was actually a brilliant plan but it just seemed to me pretty indefensible. Halek Kochansky in her book the Eagle Unbowed she says the first justification the British and the French do have is they say well we don't want to do anything because it'll just provoke the Germans even though they're at war. Then the second thing is they say we don't do anything now because we're not quite ready. We're building up our forces, give it time and then they wait a few more days and then they say well there's actually no point doing anything now because Poland's going to lose anyway. So they sort of, it becomes self fulfilling prophecy and actually it's true by the 8th of September when Allied chiefs discuss this, they say well let's not waste their resources, Poland's clearly going to lose anyway. Like let's just wait and fight a long war in the West.
- [29:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
And that of course will be in due course what the British will say about the French.
- [29:32]
Tom Holland
Yeah, of course, yeah. They're going to lose anyway, so there's no point in helping them. I mean, it becomes completely self fulfilling. So by the second week, Poland is still all alone. And we'll just come to the end of this half by talking about the situation within Poland. What makes it really, really difficult for their army is that the roads, the fields are now completely clogged with people, with untold countless thousands of people fleeing eastwards, fleeing the German advance. Now this is an image that of course, will become incredibly familiar in the years to come. And they are fleeing with very good reason, because they are facing an onslaught that in Europe, I would say, has not really been seen before. Unprecedented even by the standards of the First World War. The First World War was pretty murderous, but this is different because Hitler has set an unprecedented tone. Now remember that he does not think of the Poles as fully human as the Germans are. He specifically said to Goebbels, they are more animals than human beings. They are totally dull and formless.
- [30:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
And that's literal, isn't it? I mean, that's, that's his scientific opinion.
- [30:48]
Tom Holland
Exactly, that's his scientific opinion. It's not a metaphor. He really means that. So we talked last time about this meeting he had at the Eagle's Nest before Ribbentrop went to Moscow where he briefed his generals. And I said, we will talk about what he said in the afternoon next time. So this is what he talked about in the afternoon. In the afternoon he said to his generals, this will be a different war from wars we've fought before. And he said, and I quote, the victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war, it's not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. 80 million people must obtain what's their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness. Our strength lies in our speed and our brutality. And he, that he, he. This is the analogy he chooses. Genghis Khan hunted millions of women and children to their deaths, consciously and with a joyous heart. History sees in him only the great founder of a state. I'm not actually sure that's true. I think Genghis Khan's reputation is more checkered than Hitler believes. And then he goes on to say the aim of the war lies not in reaching particular lines, but in the physical annihilation of the enemy. By and large, people did not say that. I would say in the First World War, of course, people do say brutal things, but not beforehand so starkly and so coldly, he says. So in the East, I have put my death's head formations at the ready with the command to send men, women and children of Polish descent and language to their deaths pitilessly and remorselessly. Poland must be depopulated and settled with Germans.
- [32:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
So the generals who are listening to this, what are they making of it?
- [32:25]
Tom Holland
Well, we know that at least one of them was appalled by it, a guy called General Kurt Liebman. He said he found it repulsive. The bragging and brash tone was downright repulsive. He said this was a bloke who had lost all feeling of responsibility and who, with unsurpassed wantonness, was determined to leap into the dark. This is a guy, a senior general in the Wehrmacht. He's not, you know, this is not a kind of pacifist speaking. And Liebmann said at the time he thought that a lot of other generals were quite shocked too, and thought, this is all a bit strong, but they've sworn an oath to the Fuhrer. And of course, when wars start, people become radicalized very quickly.
- [33:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, but this is before the war's begun. That's what's striking about it.
- [33:07]
Tom Holland
Yes. Yeah, of course. That people may well have had doubts. I think, Tom, I would be surprised if Lehman was literally the only person at that meeting of 50 people or whatever to have any question marks in his mind.
- [33:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
Because the implication of depopulating Poland and settling it with Germans, the prospect of committing genocide, I mean, that isn't really what soldiers sign up to.
- [33:27]
Tom Holland
No.
- [33:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Even if you're serving Hitler, but in.
- [33:29]
Tom Holland
The context of the 1930s, after years of indoctrination, after years of listening to Hitler's speeches, fueled by a sense of resentment and victimhood, I guess you can see how it happens. I mean, we know it happened, right? It does chime with the prejudices already held by a lot of German soldiers. So we know that German officers, when they talked to their men beforehand, they gave them pep talks and they said, come on, guys. We all know the Poles are primitive. We all know they're dirty. They can't be trusted. We, you know, we can't take any prisoners, all of this kind of thing, and we can see the results. In two months of the campaign, hundreds of Polish villages were burned, thousands and thousands of civilians executed. Give you one example, Richard Evans, in his book the Third Reich at War, he describes a guy called Gerhard M. Who is a stormtrooper, who, before the War was a fireman and he came from a place called Flensburg, which is basically Denmark. It's right on the border with Denmark. And this guy Gerhardt describes how in the first days of the invasion they were going through a Polish village and someone fired at them. And so they reacted by burning the entire village to the ground. Burning houses, weeping women, screaming children. A picture of misery is how he described it. Gerhardt described how one woman was trying to get out of her house and they. We stopped her, he said, and they. But she burned to death. Her screaming rang in my ears long afterwards. And a few days later they got to another village and he said burning houses were lining our route. After the flames there sounded the screams of the people who'd hidden in them and were unable anymore to rescue themselves. It was dreadful. It's still ringing in my ears even today. But they shot at us and so they deserve death.
- [35:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
So that is conscience being put in the shade by fascist ideology.
- [35:14]
Tom Holland
I guess so. By fascist ideology, by the pressure of war. And the thing is, this is within the. This is in the first week of the war, Right.
- [35:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, I know that, that soldiers who get shot at commit atrocities, but they don't justify it, I think in the way that he is.
- [35:33]
Tom Holland
Yeah. I think this is different from let's.
- [35:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
Say the French troops in the Peninsula War or something.
- [35:36]
Tom Holland
Right. Or the Germans in Belgium in 1914. Yeah. Or British soldiers in the Boer War or whatever it might be. I mean there are so many. There are countless examples. But this has been ideologically prepared for the supreme commander, the guy at the top has briefed his people beforehand and said, you know, kill them all. This is what I want to do. People did not do that before the First World War. I mean, people say brutal things in wars and they give brutal instructions, of course, but this is of a different order. And all the historians of the Third Reich and the Second World War.
- [36:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it's ideological programming, isn't it?
- [36:08]
Tom Holland
Exactly. Well, here's the thing, right, because it's not just the army that are doing it, it's also the ss. So this is the really ominous thing that in their wake are following the first Einsatzgruppen under Reinhard Heydrich task forces. They are sent in the wake of the army to carry out the SS's ideological vision. These are led by experienced guys who had often been in the Fry corps in their 1920s in paramilit, right wing paramilitaries right from the start. They have been sent to round up, to find, to execute government officials. Intellectuals, officers and so on. They are killing about 200 people a day in the first week of the invasion. And Heydrich is shocked at this and says, this is far too few. This is, we should be killing far more people. On the 19th of September, he had a meeting with General Halder commanding the German army. And Heydrich said, come on, I want to have a clear out, Jews, intelligentsia, priesthood, aristocracy. He says, my men have got lists with 60,000 people's names. On all of those, 60,000 people have to go.
- [37:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
So decapitation.
- [37:14]
Tom Holland
Yeah, decapitation strategy. Now, of course, the category of people as well that jumps out at you from that is, since we know what's going to happen are Poland's Jews. Poland has by far the largest Jewish population In Europe, about 3 1/2 million people, which is a tenth of the population. They live in the cities by and large. So Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and so on. They are very identifiable.
- [37:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
So in Nazi anti Semitic cartoons, yes, Jews will be portrayed as wearing a distinctive style of dress, wear their beards, their hair in a distinctive way.
- [37:45]
Tom Holland
Yes.
- [37:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Even though most German Jews do not look like this, but in Poland, lots of Jews do. I mean, they look just, they, you can tell them apart from the gentile population.
- [37:55]
Tom Holland
Absolutely right.
- [37:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Which means that they're then sitting ducks to, to Germans who have been prepared to look on them with horror.
- [38:02]
Tom Holland
Absolutely right. They're immediately identifiable in a way they might not be in, in Germany, in the Reich itself. So absolutely, they, they live in the cities, they have distinctive clothes, they have distinctive kind of hair, they speak Yiddish as the first language. Most Polish Jews are very poor, so they live in a part of town that's maybe a bit more run down, which of course then plays into the Nazi stereotype again. Now we don't need to massively dwell on this because it's so horrific, but we know that right from the very beginning. And it's not just the ss, it's ordinary German soldiers as well. As they pass through towns, they will go into the Jewish areas, they will, they will round people up, they will shoot randomly into houses, they will mutilate people, they will humiliate the women and children. They will do all these kinds of things. I mean, you know, there are horrific scenes from the outset. There is no, there is no question about kind of where this is ultimately all leading. Ian Kershaw, in his biography of Hitler, he identifies in the first week of September 1939 is the point where they cross that kind of moral line. I mean, he calls it Tom, the Nazi Rubicon the moment they really cross the line.
- [39:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
So moral Rubicon.
- [39:16]
Tom Holland
Yeah, moral Rubicon. Because up to this point Hitler has done terrible, terrible things within Germany. But by and large, not always, of course, but by and large there has been a sort of pathetic, flimsy legal framework like the Nuremberg Laws and, you know, colossal quantities of people have not been murdered at this point, as in hundreds of thousands of people. But from this point they are clearly envisaging killing gigantic numbers of people. So as he says, this is not yet genocide. It is not yet the all out genocide that you see when they go into Russia in 1941. But, and I quote, it had near genocidal traits. It was the training ground for what was to follow.
- [40:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
So it is the, the kind of neo Darwinian, social Darwinian nightmare of how nature functions untrammeled by moral considerations. It is the predation of the strong upon the weak.
- [40:14]
Tom Holland
Yes. And not all German officers are comfortable with it. So there's a guy called Colonel General Johannes Blazkowitz who is a Wehrmacht commander in Poland. And two months into this. So in November 1939, he wrote a report and he said, I'm absolutely appalled by what we've done by the animal and pathological instincts of the ss. He said, we have murdered tens of thousands of Jews and Polish civilians. And he said, if we don't bring the SS under control now, remember, this is just two months into the Second World War, there will be an immeasurable brutalisation and moral debasement. And his superiors were kind of, they thought, this bloke's lost his marbles. They basically buried his report. He persisted. Hitler was told about it And Hitler just said very contemptuously, you can't wage war with Salvation army methods. And Blazkowitz was the only senior commander who wasn't promoted. After the conquest to Poland, he basically denied promotion. He was brought back later on, but his career kind of stalled and actually he ended up taking his own life at the Nuremberg trials and he was going to be acquitted. He was put on trial at Nuremberg and he jumped out of a window, killed himself. And the judges and everybody were very surprised because they said we were going to, not only were we going to acquit him, we were going to say he was how the German army should have behaved.
- [41:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right.
- [41:40]
Tom Holland
But he was clearly so traumatized, traumatized by guilt and wonderful. Anyway, back to the narrative. All the time the Germans are grinding eastwards. On 7 September, the poles move their high command to the far east of the country, to Brest, because They realize that the Warsaw is next in the firing line. Their communications network has fallen apart. Their defensive plan is in a complete and utter mess. And the next day, the 8th of September, the German Panzers reach the outskirts of Warsaw.
- [42:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
Okay, well, let's take a break there. With the German army approaching the Polish capital. And in the second half, we will see what ensues. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. Dominic, what do you find useful about Nord?
- [42:29]
Tom Holland
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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- [43:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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- [45:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Hello, welcome back to the Rest Is History and we're listening to the the Invasion, the Conquest, the Rape of Poland and Dominic. The Germans have reached the outskirts of Warsaw. How does the city respond?
- [45:52]
Tom Holland
Heroically, I think, Tom, in a word we heard from the mayor, Stefan Starzinski, at the very beginning. He musters the population of the city to dig anti tank ditches and to put up barricades and all this stuff. And they actually do hold off the first German attack. The Germans surround. They then surround the city with infantry and with panzers and Hitler says we will starve and bomb and pummel it into submission. The Poles asked the Germans, they sent a message saying can we at least evacuate our civilian population? And the Germans said no, no way. So on the 10th of September, Warsaw became the first capital in Europe to be subjected to relentless bombing raids. We'll come to them in a second. The city held out for another week.
- [46:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
But meanwhile there is a devastating twist coming, isn't there, which was being prepared in our previous episode. So people won't come as a total surprise to our listeners what now happens.
- [46:46]
Tom Holland
But it will come as it does come as a surprise to the polls, because the Poles of course don't know what was decided in Moscow. Stalin has been biding his time for two weeks. He's been distracted because the Red Arm has actually been fighting the Japanese in the Far East, a place called Khalkhin Gol in Mongolia, not really reported in the west at all, but very important in the long run because it actually persuades the Japanese to switch their attention from fighting the Russians to fighting further south in Asia. Anyway, when that's all over on the morning of 17 September, Molotov, his foreign minister calls the Polish ambassador in Moscow and says to him, poland has clearly disintegrated. Poland is dead. Poland is full of our Ukrainian and Belarusian kith and kin and we feel honor bound to protect them. And therefore we're sending in the Red Army. And this is a very familiar argument to the Poles. As Halek Kochanski says in her book, it's the same argument the Russians had used in 1795 to justify the third partition of Poland. So the Polish ambassador thinks, oh, here we go again.
- [47:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Here we go again.
- [47:56]
Tom Holland
Yeah, exactly. The Red army crossed the border immediately, almost 40 divisions in total coming from Belarus and Ukraine. The Poles were staggered. The Poles didn't know how to react. Are they coming to help us? Are they coming to attack us? Even many Soviet soldiers themselves were actually not sure which shades of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
- [48:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
Are we not sure? Are we the baddies?
- [48:18]
Tom Holland
Yeah. What side they're on. The Polish commander said to them, don't resist. You know, it's pointless. Fall back. And actually, at this point, the Polish commanders say to their army, we need to actually get out of Poland to save the army. So they start to retreat south towards the Romanian border. The British and the French are staggered by this.
- [48:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
So they had no inkling that it was coming.
- [48:40]
Tom Holland
They didn't. They didn't know it was coming at all.
- [48:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
The fabled British spy service has.
- [48:44]
Tom Holland
Has. Yeah. Not covered itself in glory. Do you know who really lets himself down here, Tom? Somebody who, you know, I don't hold in high regard.
- [48:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [48:50]
Tom Holland
This will not go down well with our Welsh listeners. It's David Lloyd George. Lloyd George had never been a friend of Poland, going right back to the 1920s. He's basically opposed Poland at every point. And Lloyd George wrote an article in the Sunday Express later, the home of AJP Taylor, saying the Soviet Union is completely within its rights. You know, it's completely reasonable for the Soviet Union to take its historic lands in eastern Poland. I mean, I think this is really, really poor stuff from Lloyd George.
- [49:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, Lloyd George is one of the guys who's being. I mean, he. In due course, he'll be lined up as a potential marshal. PETA went.
- [49:23]
Tom Holland
He mature, Peter. Yeah, I mean, I know some people love Lloyd George, but I think he's a terrible man because most people in Britain were just so appalled by Stalin's behavior. They. Chamberlain, you know, talked in the comments of his horror. His assistant private secretary Jock Culver, wrote in his diary, said it was an act of unparalleled greed and immorality. The Soviet justification. The most revolting document in. In modern history. But of course, what are they going to do? The answer is nothing. If they haven't done anything, it's Germany. They're hardly going to intervene against the Soviet Union. So for the Poles, this is really the death knell. Their leadership flees into Romania later. That scene is very controversial. You know, that capital is still holding out. Why have they fled to Romania? I guess they're damned if they do, damned if they don't, really. So now the dictators are free to carve up Poland between them. 19 September. Two days later, Hitler entered Danzig in triumph.
- [50:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Usual scenes.
- [50:16]
Tom Holland
Yeah. Flowers, Nazi salutes.
- [50:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, yeah.
- [50:20]
Tom Holland
He spent a week at a hotel, the Casino Hotel. We know that Hitler loves a hotel.
- [50:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
Does it have a spa?
- [50:25]
Tom Holland
Probably does have a spa. It's a seaside resort called Sopop, which is just outside Gdansk. And he took, twice took flights to Warsaw to watch the bombing of Warsaw at firsthand. And he loved it. Kershaw describes in his biography how much Hitler enjoyed. He loved war and he loved watching it.
- [50:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, he must have felt. He must have felt like a God on Valhalla, swooping over the scene of devastating battle or something.
- [50:51]
Tom Holland
An analogy that he would have enjoyed. I'm sorry to say what's happening to Warsaw is, at this point, I think it's fair to say, unprecedented in European history. Of course, there have been bombings in Spain, but not of a capital city on a scale like this. The city is being pounded by artillery every day. Endless incendiary bombs from the skies, Stukas swooping overhead, machine gunning people. Almost all of the city's hospitals have been demolished or on fire. There's no electricity, lots of places, there's no water. The streets are full of bodies or dead horses and rubble. And the most common comparison, people say, this is how I thought the end of the world would be. You know, this is the only thing that can possibly spring to mind. To mark Hitler's second flight, on the 25th of September, the Luftwaffe really turned the screw. They sent wave after wave of bombers just indiscriminately hitting apartment blocks, schools, hospitals. In the end, there was so much fire, so much smoke, that they basically had to call off the attack because they couldn't see what they were doing. There were just clouds and clouds of black smoke. Most people at this stage had run out of food. Hundreds and hundreds of people are trapped in the ruins of these buildings. If you want to get a sense of it, I mean, why would you. But if you do, there's a brilliant documentary film, very short film, called Siege by an American photographer, Julian Bryan, who was basically the last Western journalist in Warsaw. When you go to the museums in Gdansk and in Warsaw, they've always got this kind of playing, and it's extraordinarily kind of harrowing. I'll just read one eyewitness account to give you a sense of the novelty of it, because that's the important thing. It's a scene that we're used to now from wartime footage, but at the time, it was the first time it had happened. And this is from a guy called General Stanislaw Sobowski. Now, he actually ended up at Arnhem the Bridge Too Far. Do you know what? He was played by Gene Hackman in the film.
- [52:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Goodness.
- [52:46]
Tom Holland
So imagine Gene Hackman telling you this.
- [52:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
I was not expecting Gene Hackman to make it appear.
- [52:50]
Tom Holland
No, no, it's always great to get him into the show. He said, I had seen death and destruction in many forms, but never had I seen such mass destruction which hit everyone responsible, regardless of innocence or guilt. Gone were the proud buildings of churches, museums and art galleries. Statues of famous men who fought for our freedom lay smashed to pieces at the bases of their plinths, or stood decapitated and shell scarred. The parks created for their beauty and for the happy sounds of laughing, playing children were empty and torn, the lawns dotted with the bare mounds of hurried graves. Almost the only noise was the rumble of bricks as walls, walls weakened by bombs, finally subsided. The smell of burning houses pillared into a windless sky, and the smell of putrefaction lingered in the nostrils. And if you juxtapose that with the reading that we began the episode with, you know, one of them is Warsaw's glory and the other is a much more unsentimental. This is actually the reality of what it's like in the streets. So Warsaw finally surrendered on the afternoon of the 27th. Its soldiers, who defended it 100,000 people, were led to POW camps. The Nazi vengeance inevitably fell on the city's Jewish population. That was a third of the population, about 350,000 people. Their shops and houses looted. People are beaten up or killed in the streets, women humiliated, stripped, raped. All of this kind of thing. I mean, it's a horrendous, horrendous scene. The news of Poland's defeat back in Germany, there was no triumph, actually. There was no victory parade because, of course, the war wasn't over. They're still technically fighting Britain and France. And actually, for people who were in Berlin they said, you know, nothing's really changed. You know, there's a bit of rationing, but otherwise nothing has changed. So William Shirer, the journalist, American journalist, you've quoted a fair bit, he said, for most people, the war was something they just read about in the newspapers. It was unreal. He has an amazing description of being on the subway and it. And loads of women late at night get on at the opera house. He's struck by the incongruity of the fact they're all nattering about the opera they've just seen. And he knows that at the time, German bombs are falling on Warsaw and they don't mention it at all. And he said, I doubt if anything short of an awful bombing or years of semi starvation will bring home the war to the people here. Which is of course, very, very prescient, because that is what will come to Berlin. A week later or nine days later, 20th September, he described how he hadn't met anybody who thought there was anything wrong with what the Germans were doing in Poland.
- [55:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
Do they know what's happening in Poland, though?
- [55:24]
Tom Holland
They know they're fighting a war. They.
- [55:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
But they don't know the full scale of what's being visited on the polls.
- [55:30]
Tom Holland
They don't know the scale of it. But people, I guess eventually word will filter back. I mean, this is a huge question in and of itself, of course, isn't it, Tom? There should be a whole podcast. How much did the ordinary German people know about what was being done in their name?
- [55:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
But I'm just wondering whether Nazi propaganda celebrates what's being done in Poland or whether it keeps quiet about it.
- [55:48]
Tom Holland
I think obviously disguises a huge amount of what they're doing. I mean, they're not saying we're bombing hospitals, we've set schools on fire, we've burned people alive in their villages. I mean, they're definitely not doing that. So, yes, reasonably, you can say they don't know about that. But even so, you know, they're pummeling Warsaw into submission. People are gathering in shops to look at maps and they'll follow the course of their army in their little pins. Watch them with the pins. Exactly. And Shaira says as long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war. So let's just end by talking about what this all meant for Poland. A huge subject, so we can only scratch the surface. Poland at the end of this war, which basically the whole thing is done and dusted in what a Month and a half in total, mopping up in the countryside. It's been completely ravaged on a scale, I think, unimaginable at any previous point in human history, because particularly of the air campaign, probably 66,000 Polish soldiers were dead. Civilian deaths, impossible to say. Maybe 100,000, maybe 200,000, maybe fewer. It's hard to say what happened to Poland. There was a lot of dithering about what the Nazis and the Russians would do. But in the end, western Poland was annexed by the Reich. Stalin, that's about 10 million people. Stalin took the eastern bit, so that's about 13 million people. And that was given to the republics of Belarus and Ukraine, where it remains today. So we will hear next time on Thursday's episode about what happens in Stalin's bit of Poland. The killings of tens of thousands of professional people and officers and so on. The people put in prison camps, and in particular the one and a half million people who are put into cattle trucks and then are deported to Kazakhstan or to Siberia. And these are people, I mean, it's not just anybody who's a professional person, who's in the army, who owns land or anything like that, but even Stalin deported people who, if you spoke Esperanto, if you collected stamps, if you had kind of cosmopolitan tendencies, a sense of sophistication and integration into European culture, you know, you were out, you're off. Yes, that left a kind of rump bit of Poland in sort of the south and the center around Warsaw and Krakow, which had about 11 million people. And there was some talk, we have a kind of rump state. And they said, basically, no, we'll just leave this as a kind of weird appendage, kind of semi legal colony called the General Government. And it was ruled by Hans Frank, the Nazi lawyer. And this, the General Government becomes the location for some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust. So if the big camps, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor and Belzec are all in the. The General Government. And in these areas, Polishness is. They attempt to eradicate Polishness itself. They shut down all the schools, the universities, the libraries, the museums. Polish music is banned, you know, Chopin is banned.
- [58:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
They abolish Polish names, don't they? So the town of Oswytien becomes Auschwitz.
- [58:54]
Tom Holland
Auschwitz, exactly. National monuments are blown up, teachers are murdered, all of this kind of thing. In the first three months of the year, the SS and the German militias of various kinds probably murdered, I don't know, 65, 70,000 people, priests, intellectuals, professional people. But also, it's not just working through their lists, they're also killing people almost at random. So I'll give you a tiny example. It's just one small example that could stand for so many. There's a town called Gdynia in the north called Obwse. And there one day somebody smashed a window at the German police station. And the SS knew it was someone from the school. And they rounded up 50 boys from the school and said, who did it? And these boys, teenage boys, they refused to give up the culprit. And the SS called these boys parents and said, we want you to beat up your own children, to beat them in front of the local church. And the parents said, well, we're not going to beat our own children. So the SS said, great, well we'll do it then. So they beat these boys with their rifle butts and then shot and killed 10 of them. And they left their bodies lying in front of the church the whole of the next day as a lesson to the people of the village. And that story is just one among countless stories of the kind of random brutality that would become the norm in Nazi occupied Poland, which is effectively as.
- [60:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Close to hell on earth.
- [60:18]
Tom Holland
Yeah. As you get in, as you would get in European history, I think it's fair to say. I mean, if there's one place you don't want to be in your all European history is Poland between 1939 and 1945, especially if you're Jewish. Because with the division of Poland of those three and a half million Jews, 2 million of them immediately have fallen into the hands of the Nazis. Now, even before the fall of Warsaw, Hitler is thinking about what to do with this population. And he says, why don't we put everybody into the general government, into this kind of weird colony that we've got centered on Warsaw and Krakow. Even at this point, Heydrich from the SS is saying, we'll corral these people in the general government. But this is just a step towards what Heydrich calls the final aim. And at this point it's not clear what that will be. Maybe putting these people in a reservation somewhere further east. Unclear. But even at this point, just end with this, there are hints of a much darker outcome. That autumn, Goebbels went to visit a ghetto in Woodz where a lot of Polish Jews lived. And he was shocked at what he saw. He said, these aren't human beings, these are animals. He said. So our task is not a humanitarian one. Goebbels said, it's a surgical task. We have to take steps and really radical steps, because otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease. And a month later, he had a chat with Hitler. And Hitler said to him, you know, we're going to have to turn to this Jewish and Polish question very soon, because he said, if we're not careful, in a few generations, it will reappear to kind of haunt. Haunt us. So we have to be clear about this. There is no panacea. We have to take radical measures. And I quote, the Jewish danger must be banished from us. And, Tom, I think everybody listening to this will know where that particular story is heading.
- [62:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Absolutely, Dominic, thanks. I mean, that was a brutal, harrowing, terrifying episode. And that ends our account of the Nazi invasion of Poland. But we are not going to leave this story completely. We have an episode that is a kind of coda to the conquest of Poland, but is also a kind of palate cleanser. It's a story that takes us into the kind of the dark heart of Poland's fate in the Second World War. But I think it also offers perhaps a sense of hope and redemption, because, amazingly, it features at its heart the story of a bear. And we will be back with that on Thursday. The story of Wojtek, a bear that is very well known in Poland, Dominic, and should, I think, be better known here. So you can hear that episode on Thursday, but for now, goodbye.
- [63:22]
Tom Holland
Bye.