. . . As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth
-- SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN
(c) 1940 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Treachery, lies and murder -- those were the hallmarks of Adolf Hitler's launching of World War II. The German Wehrmacht had its orders to invade Poland at dawn of Sept. 1, 1939, but the first killings actually occurred the night before near a border town called Gleiwitz. There German SS troops took twelve prisoners from the Oranienburg concentration camp outside Berlin, ordered them to dress in Polish army uniforms, then injected them with poison and shot them. The twelve "Polish casualties" were dumped in a forest near the village of Hochlinde to be exhibited later to the foreign press.
The SS killers took along one more Oranienburg prisoner when they burst in on the Gleiwitz radio station, knocking a Mozart symphony off the air and firing pistols in all directions. The intruders shouted in Polish over the open microphones that they and their comrades were invading Germany. Then they ran off, leaving the corpse of the prisoner as one more "Polish casualty."
At 10 a.m. the next day in Berlin, in the ornate Kroll Opera, where the Reichstag had met ever since a mysterious outbreak of arson gutted its traditional headquarters in 1933, Chancellor Hitler arrived wearing the "sacred coat" of the German infantryman and used the crudely faked fracas in Gleiwitz to justify his invasion of Poland. "For the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory," he told the brown-shirted deputies. "Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs."
It was a grotesque misstatement of the ugly reality. Five months earlier, the secret plan known as Operation White had declared, "The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To this end, a surprise attack is to be aimed at and prepared . . . any time from Sept. 1, 1939, onward." If anything more was needed, it was the neutralization of Poland's other big neighbor, Soviet Russia, and Hitler had achieved that just the previous week by suddenly concluding a treaty of cooperation with his supposed archenemy Joseph Stalin. And so, at the appointed hour of 4:45 a.m. (Poland time), Hitler struck all along the 1,750-mile Polish frontier. The catastrophic war of revenge that he alone wanted was now his to command.
Without the slightest warning, Germany's General Walther von Brauchitsch sent the Fourth Army smashing through the disputed Polish Corridor, isolating the Free City of Danzig; the Eighth and Tenth Armies striking over the Vistula plain toward Warsaw; the Fourteenth Army driving across Silesia toward Cracow -- 1.5 million men in all, led by a fearsome new military force, the 2,700 fast-moving panzers (tanks) of the German armored divisions.