Fat Boy and the Champagne Salesman , livre ebook

FAT BOY AND THE CHAMPAGNE SALESMAN
FAT BOY AND THE CHAMPAGNE SALESMAN
G ring, Ribbentrop, and the Nazi Invasion of Poland
Rush Loving Jr.
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Rush Loving Jr.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06194-2 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-06195-9 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-06196-6 (web PDF)
To my two best friends, my sister Anne Loving Fenley and my wife Jane Gregory Loving.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
1 Kaiser Wilhelm s Legacy
2 The Eloquent Artist
3 The Champagne Salesman
4 Fat Boy s Swedish Friend
5 Close Your Hearts to Pity!
6 A Performance of Bombast and Threats
7 A Second Bismarck
8 Et Tu, Brut ?
9 It s Enough to Kill a Bull
10 The Speech That Fell Flat
11 Into the Wee Hours
12 A Shouting Match
13 Where Is the Pole?
14 The Intercepted Telegram
15 Invasion
16 Ultimatum
17 Finis
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
M OST PEOPLE KNOW THAT W ORLD W AR II B EGAN because Hitler demanded the return of the Polish Corridor, a strip of German land that had been given to Poland at the end of World War I. Few are aware of the struggle that went on inside Hitler s Reich Chancellery that led to the invasion of Poland. It was a dramatic battle between Hitler s two top lieutenants, Hermann G ring and Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Fifty years ago, the cause of the war intrigued me, but when I began research for a book on the subject, I found that new information was coming to light almost every month. So I bided my time and collected source material as it emerged into public view.
I started with sources such as Documents of German Foreign Policy, The British War Blue Book, The French Yellow Book , and the diary of Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano. But in the 1960s, a rich stream of additional material began to surface, and the flow continued into the twenty-first century. This material included the memoirs and diary of Albert Speer and the memoirs of generals Wilhelm Keitel and Franz Halder, as well as memoirs on life with Adolf Hitler. Finally, through Baltimore s Enoch Pratt Free Library, I borrowed a copy of the memoir of G ring s secret emissary to the British government, a Swedish businessman named Birger Dahlerus, who plays a major role in this book.
Originally, I pieced together a story of diplomats and their governments maneuvering to get what they wanted while hopefully avoiding a war. It was a fascinating yarn. But the more sources I unearthed, the more I began to focus on an even more compelling-and dramatic-side story. G ring and Ribbentrop, I discovered, pulled Hitler in different directions, as G ring desperately tried to avoid a war with Britain, and Ribbentrop, insisting the British would back down, urged Hitler to push them all the way. It is a sensational yarn-one that includes scenes of Hitler ordering his generals to pull back their troops even as they marched toward the Polish border.
Thus, Fat Boy and the Champagne Salesman .
FAT BOY AND THE CHAMPAGNE SALESMAN
INTRODUCTION
Adolf Hitler s Bequest
W HEN A MERICANS TRAVEL TO THE BATTLEFIELD AT N ORMANDY S Pointe du Hoc, invariably they visit the nearby cemetery where US soldiers are buried. There lie ten thousand men who gave their lives for the cause of freedom.
The graveyard most people do not see is nine miles east, at La Cambe, one of six where the German dead rest. It is even more moving than the American burial ground. There lie more than twenty-one thousand men-many who, at the time of their deaths, were in their midteens, others as old as seventy. Most of them had been conscripted into a war that none had ever wanted, for a regime many did not believe in.
They were there because Reichsmarschall Hermann G ring, known by some of the other generals as Fat Boy, had been losing a secret battle with a onetime champagne salesman named Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had become Germany s foreign minister.
As a result, in August 1939, Adolf Hitler made one of the most tragic decisions in history.
1
KAISER WILHELM S LEGACY
W ORLD W AR II PROBABLY NEVER WOULD HAVE OCCURRED had it not been for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Nazi Party would not have taken over Germany, and the Communists would not have seized control of the Russian Empire. Life in the last three-quarters of the twentieth century would have been radically different. In fact, there never would have been cause to write this book.
Wilhelm had made a mutual-assistance pact with Franz Josef, emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1914. The empire had stretched across southern Europe, from the Italian and Swiss borders on the west to Romania and the Russian Empire in the east. It extended halfway down the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea.
Among those lands to Austria s south lay the principalities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. Serbs, who wanted to create a Balkan nation from those two provinces, Serbia, and other states in the region, had been outraged. In June 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife were visiting Bosnia s principal city, Sarajevo, when a group of Serbs assassinated them. Austria soon went to war against Serbia, and because of Wilhelm s mutual-assistance pact with Franz Josef, Germany was forced to support the Austrians. Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia soon stood up against the two nations, igniting World War I.
The war was brutal. Modern weapons were used against men fighting with nineteenth-century tactics, and the result was a merciless slaughter on both sides. Soldiers were sent charging across battlefields as they had for centuries only to be mowed down by modern machine guns. They fought from trenches deep enough for men to move about without being shot. But they still could be killed by poison gas or modern artillery shells that created mammoth gaps in the line or by airplanes that could fly over and strafe everyone below. Much of that generation of Europe s men died. France and Germany each lost 16 percent of their fighting men. Britain lost 10 percent.
The civilians of Germany suffered as well. The British set up a naval blockade that cut Germany s food supply, and the shortage was made worse because the military took much of the farmers output. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians starved and many died.
Even though they were fighting Germany, Russians starved as well, inciting food riots that brought on the Russian Revolution. The war that Wilhelm helped to set off cost his cousin Nicholas II his throne and later his life. It also planted the seeds for Communism, which has infected the world up to the present day.
Eventually, Germany surrendered and the people soon revolted, forcing Wilhelm to flee to neutral Holland, where he spent the remainder of his life.
When the victors met at France s Palace of Versailles to put together a peace treaty, they punished Germany harshly. On its western border, Germany was required to return the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which it had seized from France after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. In addition, Germany s Rhineland was turned into a demilitarized zone where German troops were forbidden to venture.
In the east, Germany s loss was much dearer. More than a century before, Germany and Russia had divided the ancient state of Poland between themselves, allowing Austria one of Poland s duchies. The Treaty of Versailles re-created Poland, taking back the lands that the three nations held. Poland received large portions of eastern Germany, including part of Prussia, the state where the German Empire had been born. The treaty gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea through a narrow corridor of Prussian land that separated Germany from the remainder of Prussia. The strip included the German port of Danzig, which was made a free city, meaning it belonged to no nation.
But that was not all. The most injurious of the punishments were economic. Before the war, Germany and Britain had been Europe s two most affluent economic powers. That ended. Germany had been the world s third-largest colonial empire, with lands in Africa and the Pacific, some of which were abundant with natural resources. That ended too. The treaty stripped all those colonies away, removing a treasured source of income. In a move that further crippled Germany s economy, France was given the Saar s coalfields for fifteen years, and Germany s agriculture was impaired as well because the grants to Poland had included some of Germany s most fertile farmlands.
Those takings left the economy in tatters. Moreover, the treaty required that Germany pay the victors 132 billion gold marks in reparations to help compensate them for the cost of the war, which had drained their treasuries. Britain, France, and Belgium were in recession, and the French and Belgians were strained even more than the British because much of their lands had been the battlefield and they were having to rebuild.
The reparations were supposed to help compensate Britain and France, but that cost and the loss of colonies and fertile farmland devastated Germany yet more. Inflation soon struck, causing the cost of living to soar by more than sixteen times in only six months. Some