rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

562 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHthe Polish capital, while directly south of the city, rolling up from Silesia andSlovakia, Reichenau’s Tenth Army captured Kielce and List’s Fourteenth Armyarrived at Sandomierz, at the junction of the Vistula and San rivers.In one week the Polish Army had been vanquished. Most of its thirty-fivedivisions – all that there had been time to mobilize – had been either shattered orcaught in a vast pincers movement that closed in around Warsaw. There nowremained for the Germans the ”second phase”: tightening the noose aroundthe dazed and disorganized Polish units which were surrounded and destroyingthem, and completing a second and larger pincers movement a hundred miles tothe east which would trap the remaining Polish formations west of Brest Litovskand the River Bug.This phase began September 9 and ended on September 17. The left wing ofBock’s Army Group North headed for Brest Litovsk, which Guderian’s XIXthCorps reached on the fourteenth and captured two days later. On September17 it met patrols of List’s Fourteenth Army fifty miles south of Brest Litovskat Wlodawa, closing the second great pincers there. The ”counterattack,” asGuderian later observed, had come to a ”definite conclusion” on September 17.All Polish forces, except for a handful on the Russian border, were surrounded.Pockets of Polish troops in the Warsaw triangle and farther west near Posenheld out valiantly, but they were doomed. The Polish government, or what wasleft of it, after being unceasingly bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe reached avillage on the Rumanian frontier on the fifteenth. For it and the proud nation allwas over, except the dying in the ranks of the units which still, with incrediblefortitude, held out.It was now time for the Russians to move in on the stricken country to graba share of the spoils.THE RUSSIANS INVADE POLANDThe Kremlin in Moscow, like every other seat of government, had beentaken by surprise at the rapidity with which the German armies hurtled throughPoland. On September 5 Molotov, in giving a formal written reply to the Nazisuggestion that Russia attack Poland from the east, stated that this would bedone ”at a suitable time” but that ”this time has not yet come.” He thoughtthat ”excessive haste” might injure the Soviet ”cause” but he insisted that eventhough the Germans got there first they must scrupulously observe the ”lineof demarcation” in Poland agreed upon in the secret clauses of the Nazi-SovietPact. 725 Russian suspicion of the Germans was already evident. So was thefeeling in the Kremlin that the German conquest of Poland might take quite along time.But shortly after midnight of September 8, after a German armored divisionhad reached the outskirts of Warsaw, Ribbentrop wired ”urgent” a ”top secret”message to Schulenburg in Moscow stating that operations in Poland were ”progressingeven beyond our expectations” and that in these circumstances Germanywould like to know the ”military intentions of the Soviet Government.” 726By 4:10 P.M. the next day Molotov had replied that Russia would move militarily”within the next few days.” Earlier in the day the Soviet Foreign Commissarhad officially congratulated the Germans ”on the entry of German troops intoWarsaw.” 727