[The following is in regards to Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland.]
The third week of September, Shirer drove along roads clogged with German troops and armor from Berlin to Danzig. He was surprised to see troops marching toward home rather than toward the front, a sure sign that a war not yet a month old was going well for the invaders. In a thick stand of woods he smelled mountains of dead Polish cavalry horses. A division of Polish cavalry had charged German tanks and been slaughtered. The Germans with their new tanks were in Poland to fight a modern war, with modern tactics and modern weapons; the Polish were fully prepared to fight a war that had ended in 1918. Dead Polish troops lay in the woods, abandoned where they fell.
In a diary entry made in Berlin on September 9, Shirer wrote of the monstrosity of the German machine attacking Poland: “Nota word int eh press about the heroic resistance of the Poles, no talk amongst the Germans of the righteousness of a country defending itself against a gigantic military force which has attacked it. People here absolutely unmoved by that spectacle.”
It was yet another rap against the German character, which Shirer thought little of even without a military campaign like the one the Germans were waging in Poland. “P.H… told me this noon he’d seen some of the horribly mutilated bodies of G’s [Germans] killed by Poles, but also how G’s were rounding up civilians, men, women, boys, marching them into a building for a summary court martial then out the backyard against a wall, where disposed of by firing squads.”
Source:
Wick, Steve. “Lies as Thick as Grass.” The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 151. Print.
Further Reading:
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider donating to my Patreon!
No comments, yet...