Black Earth(46)

Just as pertinent as Stalin’s calculations about future conflict was his present community of interests with Hitler. In 1939, Hitler reached the same conclusion that Stalin had reached in 1934: Since Poland was no longer a conceivable ally in a European war, it had no reason to exist. Molotov spoke of Poland as the “ugly offspring” and Hitler of Poland as the “unreal creation” of Versailles. Stalin proclaimed a “common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium.” He knew that the breaking of the old balance meant anarchy and pain for Jews. He was aware that dividing Poland in half meant giving two million Jews to Hitler. The Treaty on Borders and Friendship that the Soviets and Germans signed on September 28, 1939, shifted Warsaw, which capitulated that day to German siege, from the Soviet to the German zone. Stalin thus granted Europe’s most important Jewish city to Hitler. The joint invasion of Poland, Stalin said, meant a friendship with Germany sealed “in blood.” Much of the blood shed in wartime Poland would be that of Jewish civilians, including three hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw.

Aside from Soviet and German propagandists, working in harmony, few people could find anything good in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. One exception, thousands of miles away, was American evangelists, known as dispensationalists, who believed in a coming Armageddon in which they would be transported to heaven. They read the improbable accord between Nazis and Stalinists as the realization of a biblical prophecy (Ezekiel 38) of an alliance between Gog and Gomer that would attack the Land of Israel and thus fulfill one of the preconditions for the return of the messiah.

Avraham Stern in Palestine concluded from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that Hitler was more pragmatic than he appeared. If the Führer would deal with a Soviet Union that he had always condemned as a front for Jewish power, then why not with Jews themselves? Perhaps the coming conflict would, despite everything, provide Jews with some sort of opportunity for redemption. Stern, who had drunk deeply from the cup of secular messianism, was not so far away from the Americans who imagined Jesus returning as a savior bearing a sword rather than an olive branch, massacring his enemies rather than loving them. Stern’s poetic inspiration Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote of the messiah arriving on a tank. Stern himself prophesied that the blood of Jews would be the red carpet for the messiah, adorned by the white lilies of the brains blown from their skulls.

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Stern was about to lose a patron in a bloody tragedy that was equal to the darkest poetic fantasy. On August 22, 1939, Hitler told his generals that the “destruction of Poland” was “in the foreground. The goal is to destroy living forces, not to reach any particular line.” Here was the opportunity, if unexpected, to begin a racial war. He continued: “Close your hearts to mercy. Brutal action. Eighty million people must get their due. Their existence must be secured. The stronger has the right.” Germany was indeed much the stronger, in no small measure because of what Hitler had acquired without war from Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938.

The invasion of Poland came from all sides: on September 1 from the north and west by German forces from Germany, from the south by German forces from what had been Czechoslovakia with the assistance of Slovak troops, and then on September 17 from the east by the Red Army. German and Soviet forces met at Brest and organized a joint victory parade, swastika followed by hammer and sickle, “Deutschland über Alles” followed by the Internationale. The Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow after the common “victory over capitalist Albion.” Some of the German tanks admired on the streets of Brest were likely of Czechoslovak production; some of the German soldiers and SS men invading Poland were Austrian. German technical superiority, which Hitler saw as racial superiority, was a fact. When the German air force overflew the parade at Brest, its pilots were pausing from their terror bombing of Polish towns and cities. Bombing civilians was a tactic that Europeans generally saw as legitimate when used in colonial possessions; it was now applied in Europe itself. Far more Jews were killed in the German terror bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 than as a result of all prior German policies taken together in the six years since Hitler had come to power. Likewise, the seven thousand Jewish soldiers killed in action resisting the German invasion far outnumbered the Jews who had been killed in Germany to that point.

The German invasion of Poland was undertaken on the logic that Poland did not, had not, and could not exist as a sovereign state. Soldiers taken prisoner could be shot, since the Polish army could not really have existed as such. Once the campaign was over, what began was not an occupation, since by Nazi logic there was no prior polity whose territory could be occupied. Poland was a geographic designation meaning land to be taken. German international lawyers contended that Poland was not a state, but merely a place without a legitimate sovereign over which the Germans found themselves masters. Polish law was declared null and void—indeed, never to have existed. This state of affairs was based upon the simple will of the Führer; once war was under way this sufficed for important dispensations beyond the borders of prewar Germany. The true Nazi revolution had begun.