The death of Donald Rumsfeld this week reminds us of how much irremediable harm incompetent politicians can do. The evil that men do lives on.
Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister from 1932 to the defeat of Poland in 1939, was an even more incompetent politician and his ineptitude had much greater consequences even than Rumsfeld's and George W. Bush's.
Most people think that after Germany marched into what is now Czechia in March 1939 it was clear that Hitler would attack more countries and a world war was inevitable.
They did at the time. The British Foreign Secretary the Earl of Halifax did.
But the truth is that Hitler did not follow a plan. When he was informed that the British ultimatum had expired in September 3 1939, Hitler turned to Ribbentrop and asked: “What next?”
Hitler was an Intuitive not a Thinking Type, to use Jungian terms. He improvised as he went along, as all politicians do. He was a bundle of nerves in the summer of 1939, forever changing his mind.
Chamberlain and Halifax, and who knows maybe Stalin, were also nervous and exhausted. But Beck remained imperturbable.
Richard Overy, in his book Countdown to War about the days before war broke out, says that
“it was Poland’s intransigent refusal to make any concessions to its powerful German neighbour that made war almost certain”.
This meant the destruction of Poland and the death of six and a half million Poles.
I hope it is not necessary for me to say that Poland is not to blame for being attacked by Germany in September 1939. Germany is entirely to blame. But clever statecraft by Beck would have prevented the attack, at least in 1939 and probably prevented it entirely.
Beck was convinced that Poland was a great power that could stand her ground against Germany. This was, to put it mildly, a very strange mistake.
Poland had been resurrected in 1919 because the three powers that had partitioned her in the 18th century had all been defeated. She then had not only saved Europe when she defeated the Bolshevik invasion in 1919 ('the miracle on the Vistula') but captured large expanses of Ukraine and Belorussia that most Western observers thought could not be justified on ethnic grounds. In the end, Poles were only 70% of the Polish Republic's population.
Poland's continued existence needed an alliance between Russia and France to restrain Germany, as they had sought to do in 1914, but such an alliance was impossible while the Bolsheviks were in power in Russia and international outlaws.
Impossible, that is, until attempts were made to ally in 1938 and 1939, which Beck sabotaged.
Finally, of course, after the old Europe had come to an end forever, Stalin and De Gaulle's Free French ended up as allies.
By then tens of millions had died and Poland was doomed to be Bolshevik for decades.
In the words of Richard Overy, "If Hitler was responsible for war in 1939, this still begs the larger question of what kind of war he wanted. Few historians now accept that Hitler had any plan or blueprint for world conquest, in which Poland was a stepping stone to some distant German world empire. Indeed recent research has suggested that there were almost no plans for what to do with a conquered Poland and that the vision of a new German empire in central and eastern Europe had to be improvised almost from scratch."
Hitler in early 1939 had no short-term or medium term plans to make further conquests, beyond the German-inhabited free cities of Memel (which Lithuania allowed him to absorb) and Danzig, where he sought Poland's agreement.
He told Martin Bormann in the bunker in 1945 that neither he nor anyone else in Germany wanted war (he meant a general war) in 1939.
He is not a trustworthy witness, but he was telling the truth.
He at first wanted Poland as a friend and later, faced with Beck's refusal to compromise and assured by the former champagne salesman Ribbentrop that France and England would not fight for Poland, wanted a small, short war with Poland.
What Hitler did not appreciate was how democracies work and that public opinion in France and England, which had wanted peace in 1938, now wanted war.
After Marshal Pilsudski's death Poland has been described as a dictatorship without a dictator, ruled by a triumvirate who quarrelled among themselves, of whom Beck was one.
Rereading AJP Taylor's brilliant, shocking and indispensable classic The Origins of the Second World War, a book that is older than I am, I see that Taylor says that Hitler was not concerned with the fate of the Germans in Poland.
He wanted good relations with Poland.
Poland had been useful to him during the Czechoslovak crisis. The Polish government was very different from the democratic Czechs. It was dictatorial, anti-Semitic, wanted to revise the 1919 peace settlement despite its favouring them greatly and despised the League of Nations.
Hitler felt Beck was more helpful to him than Mussolini and he was right.
Had Beck agreed to Hitler's proposal in October 1938 for the Free City of Danzig to become German and a German extraterritorial autobahn and railway through the Polish Corridor war he would presumably have avoided a German invasion.
A sovereign Poland could have useful to Hitler. Poles and Germans got on. Goering, for example, made innumerable hunting trips to Poland.
Hitler liked to work through allies. He found Slovakia and Croatia willing and useful allies throughout the war. The fact that Slovaks and Croats are Slavs did not seem to matter to him.
Instead, after the Czech lands were annexed, Neville Chamberlain gave Poland, Romania and Greece guarantees and, in Poland's case, in effect a blank cheque.
This is the first time in English history that such a guarantee had been given, at least since the Treaty of Windsor in 1386 which created an eternal alliance between Portugal and England. That treaty was forgotten until it became the reason why England went to Portugal's rescue from Napoleon.
Two days before the guarantee was given Beck, who had not replied to Hitler's proposal for five months, rejected it. He thereby signed Poland's death warrant.
I quote Taylor, whom Richard Overy once called the Macaulay of our times.
"Hitler's objective was an alliance with Poland, not her destruction. Danzig was a tiresome preliminary to got be out of the way. As before, Beck kept it in the way. So long as Danzig stood between Poland and Germany, he could evade the embarrassing offer of a German alliance, and so, as he thought to preserve Polish independence."
"Danzig was the most justified of German grievances: a city of an exclusively German population which manifestly wished to return to the Reich and which Hitler himself restrained only with difficulty. The solution too seemed peculiarly easy. Halifax never wearied of suggesting that Danzig should return to German sovereignty, with safeguards for Polish trade.
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