WW2 | Sept. 1 – Hitler Invades Poland

September 1, 2017 – This day in 1939 Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. He had been aggressive before without provoking a response from the rest of Europe.

Hitler began his plan with a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934.

This pact was contravened five and a half years later – Hitler had just been buying time.  The pact was unpopular with his supporters, who resented the Versailles Treaty's giving former German provinces to Poland. Hitler, however, saw the nonaggression pact as a way to prevent a French-Polish military alliance against Germany before the Wehrmacht had rearmed.

In the second half of the 1930s, France and Britain pursued a policy of appeasement toward Germany. Public opinion (especially in Britain) was sympathetic to revising some territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty, and neither Britain nor France in 1938 was militarily prepared to fight the Nazis.  So Britain and France acquiesced to:

• German rearmament (1935-1937). 
• Remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936).
• Annexation of Austria (the Anschluss, March 1938). 
• Invasion of the Sudetenland and breakup of the Czechoslovak state (March 1939) in violation of Anglo-French guarantees of the integrity of rump Czechoslovakia in what is called the Munich agreement.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was the last straw. France and Germany responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler's shocking answer to that was   a nonaggression pact with Premier Josef Stalin in August 1939, partitioning Poland between the two powers, giving Germany the western third and enabling Hitler to attack Poland without fear of its defense by the Soviet Union.

One week after the surprise pact with Stalin, at 5:11 a.m., Hitler issued an order for the Wehrmacht to invade Poland, claiming that the Poles were preparing to invade Germany. In fact, the Wehrmacht was massing on the German side of Poland's western border and the Poles were simply moving their army to defend this border.

Britain and France declared war within two days, but it was too late. The German army launched its Blitzkrieg, its "lightning war."  From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, more than 2,000 German tanks,covered by  more than 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border. Within six days they took Krakow and within ten they were outside Warsaw. By early October, Poland had fallen. World War II was on.

HITLER | Aug. 19–Elected President and Führer

Hitler Feigns Respect for President von Hindenburg,
who dies later that day (August 2, 1934).

Already appointed Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler on this day in 1934 is elected President.

Now holding both offices, he no longer had any constraint. Hitler's dictatorship was in place.

How Hitler Became Chancellor

Germany was a strong democracy in the 1920s, when the country was prospering, even though the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were onerous Hitler had some modest success exporting the loss of German face.

The country's democracy was destroyed step by step as Hitler appealed to a public that was demoralized by the loss of the war, the Treaty, and then the Crash of 1929:

• Hitler blamed German labor unions for hurting the economy and won financial backing from business leaders by promising to break them. 
• After the Crash of 1929, he attacked the Weimar Republic for failing to protect the German people from financial panics and high unemployment and promised the public a better deal. 
• In 1930 Hitler's support jumped to six million votes, 8 percent of the German vote, making the Nazi Party Germany's second-largest. 
• In the 1932 contest for President of Germany, an anti-Nazi coalition supported 84-year-old Paul von Hindenburg against Hitler. Although von Hindenburg was reelected, the Nazi share grew more than four-fold, to 37 percent.
• Now afraid of the growth of the Nazis, in January 1933, von Hindenburg–even though he had made clear he despised his opponent–sought to control Hitler by appointing him Chancellor.

How Hitler Became Dictator

Although now Chancellor, the appointed chief executive of Germany, he was not a dictator. He was subject to the elected President, to whom the Germany Army reported. This Having irritated Hitler and he went about eliminating constraints on his actions: 

• In February 1933, the Reichstag building, where the parliament met, suffered a fire. Hitler used this as an opportunity to call for another election. This time, Nazi police under Hermann Göring intimidated Nazi opponents. Even so, the Nazis and their allies won only a bare majority.
• Later in 1933, Hitler consolidated his power through the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz). He started arresting and executing political opponents, and even purged the Nazis’ own SA paramilitary organization in a successful effort to win support from the German army. 
• August 2, 1934. Hitler visited President von Hindenburg to pay his respects.  A few hours later, von Hindenburg died. 
• After von Hindenburg's death, Hitler purged the Nazi Brown Shirts, his own storm troopers.
• On August 9, 1934, a plebiscite vote was held on August 19. Intimidation, admiration of job growth under Hitler, and fear of Communists, brought Hitler a 90 percent majority. Hitler decided to unite the chancellorship and presidency under the new title of Führer. He now controlled the army. His dictatorship was solidly in place.