Scenes from the Invasion of Poland

Angus Thuermer is 92 now, a retired CIA agent living the quiet life in the picturesque horse country of northern Virginia. But 70 years ago, when war was about to break out in Europe, he was working as a junior reporter in the Berlin bureau of The Associated Press. In late August 1939, his bureau chief sent him to Gleiwitz, along the Polish border, since he knew "something was going to happen."

One evening, Thuermer took a taxi outside of town and promptly found himself in the midst of a Wehrmacht regiment marching along the border. Realizing he had better leave before he got into trouble, Thuermer ordered the taxi to take him back to Gleiwitz. A couple of evenings later—Aug. 31, to be exact—he was woken up by sounds outside his hotel. He looked out of his seventh-floor window and saw German troops in a field car followed by countless others marching. Then a band suddenly appeared. That convinced him it was only an exercise. "You don't take a band to go to war," he said, recalling his thinking at the time. So he went back to sleep. The next morning, he looked out the window again and saw trucks bringing back wounded German soldiers from Poland.

Feeling somewhat sheepish that he had slept through the first night of the conflagration that would become World War II, Thuermer rushed to find the press officer of a German Army unit that had moved into his hotel. Introducing himself, he explained that he was eager to accompany German troops into Poland, since it was normal practice for AP reporters to do so. They had been allowed to accompany German troops into Austria and the Sudetenland, he pointed out. "Yes, Herr Thuermer, but this time it is different," the German press officer replied. "You go back to Berlin and to the Propaganda Ministry and they will tell you what is happening."

The German officer was right: this time, it was different. This was really war. Americans like Thuermer who lived in Germany at the time had a unique vantage point on the early period of the conflict. Unlike Britain and France, the United States would remain formally neutral for more than another two years, which meant it could continue to station diplomats and journalists in Berlin. The German invasion of Poland was a drama that they watched from the perspective that the host country afforded them—as they had watched Adolph Hitler's rise to power, his early campaign of terror, and his first steps toward fulfilling his dreams of conquest.

To those Americans who came to see him, Hitler repeatedly listed his grievances against Poland right from the very beginning. Shortly after taking power in 1933, he granted an interview to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the founding editor of the prestigious quarterly Foreign Affairs. The Polish frontier was "impossible and intolerable," he complained to him, and to accept it was absolutely "unthinkable." He portrayed Germany as crippled by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, while "Poland holds a naked knife in her teeth and looks at us menacingly." He claimed that there were 50 soldiers in the armies of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium for every soldier of the German Army, which meant that any new fighting would be the sole responsibility of the Allies. "To say the contrary is to say that a toothless rabbit would start a battle with a tiger," he insisted to Armstrong. The American recalled that, as Hitler spoke, a lock of hair came down menacingly over his eye.

Americans in Berlin were in a unique position to assess the speed at which the German rabbit acquired more and more teeth. Truman Smith, a highly skilled American military attaché who had met Hitler as far back as 1922 during his first tour of duty in Germany, was reassigned to Berlin in the mid-1930s. He was particularly impressed with the rapid development of German air power under its new ruler. Smith helped arrange an invitation from the Luftwaffe's commander in chief, Herman Goering, to Charles Lindbergh, the famed pilot who had made the first transatlantic crossing, to visit German aircraft factories and airfields. Lindbergh reported that Germany was "now able to produce military aircraft faster than any European country … A person would have to be blind not to realize that they have already built up tremendous strength."

Since Lindbergh was openly sympathetic to the Germans, it was easy to dismiss some of his assessments as prejudiced. He was one of the leaders of the powerful isolationist movement, composed of those who felt that the United States had committed a grievous error by allowing itself to be dragged into World War I and that, at all costs, it should avoid letting that happen again. Europe should deal with its own problems, the isolationists maintained.