Book Three: The Road to War
- Shirer begins this chapter by describing the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and he compares the terror of the Polish soldiers and civilians to the relative calm of the German public, who went about their day as if nothing important had happened.
- He also compares the apathy of German citizens to the excitement that they'd expressed when Germany went to war in 1914. Even Hitler himself seemed somewhat "dazed" by what he'd done.
- By noon on September 1, Britain and France hadn't yet presented their formal declarations of war.
- But by the early evening of that day, both nations had delivered messages to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop which stated that if Germany didn't halt its aggression and withdraw its forces, they would fulfill their military obligations to Poland.
The Last-Minute Intervention of Mussolini
- The Italian dictator was confronted with a difficult choice: he could immediately declare Italy's neutrality or risk an attack by Britain and France.
- He hedged.
- After asking Hitler to release him from the terms of the Axis alliance, Mussolini tried once more to set up negotiations between Germany, Britain, France, and Poland.
- As Shirer puts it, when those attempts failed, there went the last possibility of averting World War II.
The Polish War Becomes World War II
- Shirer describes the reaction in Berlin when the government announced at noon that Britain and Germany were now at war, and he describes the contents of the newspapers that started to circulate as soon as the news was announced.
- Shirer listened to Chamberlain's declaration of war on BBC radio, even though Hitler had made listening to foreign radio a crime punishable by death.
- Chamberlain was crushed knowing that his efforts to come to an agreement with Germany had been a huge mistake. (His policy of appeasement would haunt him, and the world, forever.)
- Although the British declaration had come through by noon on September 3, the French held out for a while, still hoping to strike a deal with Mussolini to persuade Hitler to keep France out of it.
- Hitler issued a new set of orders to his Army and Navy commanders now that the Western powers had decided to enter the war, and ordered the German economy to become a war economy.
- Hitler sent two letters on the night of September 3—the first to Mussolini thanking him for his support, and the second to Stalin.
- The letter to Stalin contained an explicit, but highly secret, invitation to the Russians to join the attack on Poland.
- Ten hours after Britain declared war, the British ocean liner Athenia, en route from Liverpool to Montreal with 1,400 passengers, was torpedoed by the German Navy. Over 100 passengers died.
- World War II was on.