"Case White"

CCLXXIX

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Lend-Lease Act, 1941

“Operation Grandma Died” marked the beginning of World War II in Europe. The end of the summer of 1939 had been marked by increasing tension along the German-Polish border. Toward the end of August there had been several ugly incidents --- gunfire across the boundary into Poland (excused by the Germans as “the act of an insane person”), a general mobilization of Wehrmacht troops in eastern Germany, purported incidents between Polish peasants and German peasants. 

There had been tension since that fateful year of 1937*, when Germany had first demanded the return of Danzig. The port city, an old Hanseatic town, had been put under League of Nations control after World War I when, to allow Poland access to the Baltic Sea, Pomerania had been transferred from German control to Polish control by the Treaty of Versailles. This left East Prussia geographically isolated from the rest of Germany, and presented Poland with a large (and alienated) population of former Germans. Since 1937, the East Prussian Gauleiter** had been actively agitating for the return of Pomerania to Germany, and a strong Nazi contingent had developed in both Pomerania and Danzig. Poland and Germany had been in negotiations over the region ever since the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 (in which Poland received a small region of Moravia and Slovakia).  

The Polish Corridor, 1939

The rape of Czechoslovakia, 1938

Negotiations seemed to be going well, but when Germany mobilized its forces Poland did as well, only to be upbraided by the French, who (along with the British) had promised to come to Poland’s aid in the event of hostilities with Germany. Poland stood down. Germany did not. 

On the night of August 31, 1939, Polish soldiers on their side of the border were startled by gunfire and shouting (some in Polish and some in German). The next morning Germany accused Poland of invading its territory, seizing the border radio station at Gleiwitz, and killing several German soldiers (whose bodies were put on display along with a number of dead Polish soldiers). Poland denied any knowledge of the incident. 

By the next afternoon, German forces were penetrating Polish territory all along Poland’s western border. Grossmutter Gestorben had worked, and the German invasion, “Case White” was under way.

The German government took every opportunity to allow the foreign press to view the dead at Gleiwitz. Some of the correspondents were suspicious; the Germans seemed too full of glee

The truth came out in 1945, just after the war ended. The dead “soldiers” were all unlucky inmates of Dachau Concentration Camp that had been dressed in German and Polish uniforms and executed, making it seem that they were combat fatalities. The Polish uniforms had been supplied to the Wehrmacht by a clever black marketer named Oskar Schindler. The whole “Gleiwitz Incident” like the “Mukden Incident” between Japan and China in 1937 had been a false flag. 

Had Hitler merely taken the Polish Corridor and Danzig in September 1939, it’s likely that Britain and France would have merely registered strong protests against the act, but Hitler had had enough of Allied appeasement. He wanted a war, and on September third he got it, when he ignored both British and French demands that he withdraw his forces from Poland. 

It was geographically impossible for either the United Kingdom or France to send troops to Poland with any dispatch; so though a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) landed in France and the French occupied their defenses on the Maginot Line, nothing of note occurred on the Western Front for months.

First synthesized in Japan in 1893, in the 1930s  Pervitin (Crystal Methedrine) was marketed by Temmler Pharmaceuticals in Germany as an over-the-counter pick-me-up like No-Doz. During World War II it was distributed freely to every soldier in the German military. It allowed them to stay awake longer, march further and faster, be stronger, and fight harder. All of the men involved in the Blitzkriegs of 1939 and 1940 and the Russian invasion of 1941 were taking Pervitin at least six to eight times a day. Twice a day for brief periods was the recommended commercial dose. The SS also discovered that giving Pervitin to the Einsatzkommando and the lagersoldaten tasked with running the Concentration Camps made them more aggressive, more task-oriented, and less empathetic. They became robotized. The name fit. It perverted men into something else. (The Allies thought Pervitin was too dangerous and invented Dexedrine. The Second Battlle of El Alamein was fought between German tweakers and British speed freaks.) At one point, Temmler was producing over 700,000 pill-packs a month of Pervitin. They had to license it out to a competitor to meet the demand. It did have side effects. Hard neurological signs like tardive dyskensia became evident in long term users. Men became paranoid. They began to hallucinate wildly. Ultimately, Pervitin began eating away at the brain tissue, and the soft tissues like the gums and skin. Men aged at an accelerated rate. They could no longer follow complex directions. As the supply of Pervitin was interrupted in 1945, the German Army from Hitler on down (he had a special IV prep) began suffering horrifying withdrawal symptoms. With the end of the Reich one of the most serious problems facing the Allies was how to control an entire nation of meth addicts. After the war, Temmler thrived just servicing former soldiers.

The Eastern Front was another story. German forces moved like lightning --- in fact, they gave the world a new word, Blitzkrieg, “Lightning War” --- toward a border pre-set by a secret Non-Aggression Pact protocol with the Soviet Union.  The Russians invaded from the east. Lithuania took back its historic capital of Vilnius.***  By September 30, Germany had occupied the Polish capital, Warsaw. Poland ceased to exist. 

Germany set up a province it called the General-Gouvernment. Everyone in the General-Gouvernment was decreed a subhuman according to Nazi racial laws. The Poles were enslaved. The Jews were enslaved and killed.

The partition of Poland in 1939. In 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany occupied all of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia and Estonia (which had all been seized by the U.S.S.R. in 1940), Belarus, the Ukraine, and vast swaths of western Russia

Including various types of labor camps and other subcamps, there were some 10,000 units in the Nazi Concentration Camp system. Deaths by starvation, exhaustion, torture, and execution were the rule at camps like Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau. Some camps, like Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec and Majdanek were simply killing centers. Auschwitz-Birkenau served both purposes. Of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, four million died in the camps. The Roma, liberals, homosexuals, Slavs, and anti-Nazis were also targeted populations

On May 10, 1940, “Case Yellow” began. Hitler’s troops began to overrun The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, and France. Although the French Army was larger than the German Army it was not as well-equipped, and crumbled in just 46 days. By the end of June, France was out of the war and the U.K. stood alone.

After the Battle of France, the truncated French state (marked “Free Zone”), with its capital at Vichy, pursued a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany

350,000 Allied troops were surrounded by the Wehrmacht at Dunkirk in the last week of May 1940. A flotilla made up of every conceivable type of ship from fishing smacks to armored cruisers lifted 300,000 men off the beach to fight another day. But they left all their heavy equipment behind

*1937 was the year that Japan invaded China, and by some is considered the year that the Second World War truly began. This “Sino-Japanese War” became a theater of World War II and ended with Japan’s total surrender in 1945

**”Gauleiter” was the Nazi term for the Governor of a province (Gau). Gau was an archaic term from Teutonic mythology revived by the Nazis. Before and after Naziism, German provinces (states) went by the German word Land.

***Eastern European cities historically changed hands quite often. Vilnius (Lithuanian) was known as Vilna in Russian, Vilne in Yiddish, Wilna in German, and as Wilno in Polish