as they were influenced by Hitler’s charisma, their support

was based to a large extent on this shared goal.

But it soon became clear that they were mistaken. This
was not a conventional war to reclaim lost
territory at all. As Professor Mary Fulbrook, who has made
a special study of this period, puts it, “If you look
at the invasion of Poland in September 1939 you
see in the very first week of the war the first mass
atrocities against civilians, against Jewish women and
children and old people … If you take just the
first week of the war and you look at Eastern
Upper Silesia you get burnings of synagogues with
people inside the synagogue dying in the flames.
You get atrocities with the killingof men, women, children
and old people in all the houses surrounding
the synagogue in Be¸dzin [on 8 September 1939]; this
is a massive atrocity … we’re talking about
several hundred civilians being burnt alive or shot while
they were trying to escape, or jumping into the river to
put the flames out and being shot if they popped their
heads out of the water for air.”4 Though these
attacks were smaller in scale than the mass murders
that would accompanythe German invasion of the
Soviet Union in the summer of 1941,they were,
as Fulbrook says, “nevertheless an outrage which is
not normal warfare and is not like the kinds of
things that we saw with atrocities in the First
World War, where there were atrocities but there was
some kind of legitimationin military termsfor them,in
a way that there wasn’t here. This was racial.” German
soldiers like Wilhelm Moses, who was a member
of a Wehrmacht transport unit, were shocked at what
they saw. He witnessed the SS Germania hanging
seven or eight Polesin a public square whilst
a brass band played. This, plus the other horrors he
saw, led him to be “ashamed abouteverything … And
I no longer felt German … I had already
 got to the point where I said, ‘If a bullet were
to hit me, I would no longer have to be
ashamed to say that I’m German, later, once the war
is over.’ ”5 The following year, 1940,Charles Bleeker
Kohlsaat also experienced an event that madehim realise
the true nature of the Nazi occupation of Poland: “We
were sitting on the balcony on a Sunday
having breakfast. Suddenly a cart droveinto the
courtyard … When I looked down I saw the
horses and recognised the farmer … So my
mother said, ‘Go and see what he wants.’ So I
ran to the courtyard and walked over to the
vehicle, where the farmer’s Polish farmhand was
sitting, whom I also knew, at
least by sight. And next to him sat a man whom I
did not know. He was still a young man, and
I took a look at him while he was talking to
himself. It was as if he was in shock and he
was babbling to himself. “When I got nearer to
the cart and took a closer look at the man, I
noticed that his feet were tied. And the man was saying
to himself, ‘Me good worker, can drive with horses.’
So I said to the farmhand, ‘Who is this?’ He said,
‘That’s a Jew.’ “So I ran back to the house
and told them all aboutit. I felt very important,
because that was the first living Jew I had ever seen.
Afterwards my mother said, ‘Go downstairs to see the
housekeeper and tell her to make him something to
eat.’ “So I went downstairs to see the housekeeper,
and she said, ‘Well, all I have left is a very
meagre meal indeed.’ And I was handed a blue
pot with a carrying handle, whichcontained milk soup,
a slightly sour- tasting soup with potatoes in it.
“When I was leaving the kitchen, I had to tell
them the story downstairs of course. That took a
moment and I had to wait for the food to heat
 through, so when I was leaving the house by
the side entrance, I heard voices coming from the
front steps. As I turned around, I saw my
grandmother standing at the top of the stairs and two
policemen at the bottom of the flight of steps, and
they said, ‘Where is the Jew?’ “To whichmy
grandmother said, ‘My grandson has just gone to bring
him something to eat.’ Then one of them got out his
truncheon, held the truncheon and said, ‘He can have a
taste of this first; [after we take him away] he will get
more,but until then this will have to do.’ To whichmy
grandmother, putting her hands on her hips, said, ‘Tell
me, are you not ashamed of yourself at all?’ But
he only shrugged and said, ‘But it’s only a Jew.’ They
then took the Jew away. He was probably hanged
there that very same day, I don’t know.” The Bleeker
Kohlsaats tried to come to termswith the terrible
events theywitnessed in Poland—allperpetratedunderthe
leadership of a man they had thought was a
“proper German”—by attempting to convince themselves
that all of those Poleswho suffered at the hands
of the occupying forces must have been guilty of some
offence or other.The man they had longed to save
them,to come to their rescue, could surely not be
ordering the murder of innocent people, could he?
As Kohlsaat says, “People would say, ‘Good
heavens, the great and glorious Adolf