Chapter 17: The Launching of World War II
All efforts at diplomacy fail; the Germans ignore the British ultimatum, and war begins
I apologize for the long delays between posts.
It has been quite busy recently at work both with our annual gala and then the launch of a brand new Substack called The Next Move with Garry Kasparov. It has been a lot of fun managing the launch of the publication—if a bit stressful—and it’s been fascinating to work so closely with the former world champion in chess.
I should have more time this coming month to turn my attention back to Shirer’s book. I appreciate the texts and DMs from those of you who have soldiered through these past couple months.
One reader has sent on a Netflix documentary, which I wanted to share with everyone else. Produced in 2024, it’s entitled “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial.” The documentary uses William Shirer’s radio broadcasts from the 1930s and 1940s. The recordings are cleaned up using AI technology, so you don’t get the old-timey radio broadcast feel, but you do get a good sense of his reedy voice and the tenor of his coverage.
The documentary uses the Nuremberg Trials as a framing device to tell the story of Nazi Germany while also explaining the trials themselves, with the question of crimes against humanity and international law. As a result, it shifts back and forth between the Nuremberg Trials and the Nazi period. Shirer, of course, plays a role in both, since he returned to Germany at the end of the war to cover the trials.
The documentary has an actor play Shirer watching and taking notes, walking in and out. Honest, I’ve never been a big fan of documentaries that mix actors with historical footage. I know historical reenactment makes the story more accessible to some and also fills the gap when there is no video footage, but I have always felt that it actually takes you a step away from the past. It makes the past a little too accessible, imposing a vision of what happened rather than allowing you to discover it.
Also the actors are usually so passive, almost dream-like specters wafting through historical set pieces…
But perhaps that’s just me. Let me know what you think.
We now turn our attention to World War II.
In the previous chapter, there were a variety of attempts to avert war in Poland. Hitler was playing out of the exact same playbook as in Austria and Czechoslovakia, but this time there he no longer had plausible deniability. The official Nazi line, which was amplified in their propaganda, was that the Poles were attacking Germans, and Germany had the responsibility to protect Germans outside its borders. Of course, this was a lie. The aggression was on the German side.
Although the playbook was the same, politics in France and in Britain had shifted since Austria and Czechoslovakia. They didn’t necessarily want to fight but they did want to draw the line somewhere. Even Hitler’s ally in Italy wasn’t very committed to fighting a war (to say nothing of the German people themselves). But the German leader wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Hitler called everyone’s bluff, and, as it turned out, not everyone was bluffing…
The strange diplomatic intervention of Birger Dahlerus, the Swedish businessman, ultimately failed. As Shirer notes, “But as happened to almost everyone else, the confusion had been too great for him to see clearly; and as he would admit at Nuremberg, he had at not time realized how much he had been taken in by the Germans.”
The French cabinet was divided but, after the news of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, ultimately decided to honor its obligations to Poland and Britain. The French called up 360,000 reservists a week before the war.
On September 3, the British gave an ultimatum to the Germans: if German attacks on Poland did not cease within 24 hours, then a state of war would exist between Britain and Germany.
The attacks did not cease…
Sep 1, 1939: The Outbreak of War
Case White, which was Hitler’s war plans for Poland drafted in April 1939, went into effect at daybreak on September 1, 1939—a date I always associate with the W. H. Auden poem.
Shirer’s description of the Nazi invasion of Poland sent shivers down my spine.
Overhead German warplanes roared toward their targets: Polish troop columns and ammunition dumps, bridges, railroads and open cities. Within a few minutes they were giving the Poles, soldiers and civilians alike, the first taste of sudden death and destruction from the skies ever experienced on any great scale on the earth and thereby inaugurating a terror which would become dreadfully familiar to hundreds of millions of men, women and children in Europe and Asia during the next six years, and whose shadow, after the nuclear bombs came, would haunt all mankind with the threat of utter extinction.
It’s worth noting Shirer’s tone in his description of the outbreak of hostilities.
Shirer both believed war was absolutely necessary to stop Hitler and, in equal measure, that war was also terrible. For Shirer, as for many of his generation, war was horrific and abominable…and yet also necessary.
When I read writers who experienced World War II, I find the tone is rather different from those who write about it in more recent times. Perhaps that is because it was a total war, and the developed world hasn’t seen such a total war since then, with all the terror, death, and destruction that it brings.
Remembering Neville Chamberlain
At the end of the chapter, there is an extended passage about Neville Chamberlain. Many forget that he was still prime minister when the war started; Churchill didn’t take over until May of 1940, over eight months after the war began.
For better or for worse, Chamberlain isn’t remembered for going to war to stop Hitler in 1939, but rather for not fighting harder to stop him at Munich. So it’s interesting to see Shirer quote Chamberlain’s address to the House of Commons on September 1, 1940.
This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do: that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much…I trust I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been re-established.
Of course, he didn’t live to see the end of the war. He died just over a year later, in November 1940.
What I thought was interesting was Churchill’s speech to the Commons after Chamberlain’s death. He noted that Chamberlain’s hopes were
surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly in utter disdain of popularity or clamor.
For someone that Churchill had opposed politically—and vociferously so—this acknowledgement was magnanimous to say the least. He recognized that the pursuit of peace is not ignoble in and of itself.
Of course, Chamberlain’s intentions mattered little. The war had started.
Topical Posts
Podcast ep. 1: The Man, The Myth: Hitler in American Culture
The Problems with the German Character Explanation of the Nazis
Podcast ep. 2: Why are Dictators (and Techno-monarchs) Appealing?
Podcast ep. 3: Interview with a 20th Century War Correspondent: Jon Randal
If You’ve Fallen Behind on the Reading, This Post is For You
Who was William L. Shirer? — part 2 (The Nightmare Years 1934-1940)
Podcast ep. 4: The Exhilaration & Peril of Covering the Nazis (with Prof. Michael Socolow) (Video, Audio)
Podcast ep. 5: What American Reporters Saw That Others Didn't (with Prof. Deborah Cohen) (Video)
Just wanted to say thanks for putting this group together and for putting out this incredible content.