Prologue
This book addresses two world wars, two wars of horror and terror.
On 28 June 1914 were the two shots that killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The double murder, which was committed by the young Bosnian assassin Gavrilo Princip, had been prepared by nationalist Serbian conspirators from the secret society Black Hand and should compel the Serbian Prime Minister to extreme steps.
Europe held its breath. Vienna didnt want to start a war without German backing. Emperor Franz Joseph received the required backing from Berlin. Wilhelm II even urged Austria to a settlement with Serbia. On 5 June 1914 he even made out a blank check to Vienna. However, Vienna was slow with the settlement. But on 23 July 1914 Vienna delivered an ultimatum to Belgrade. The note with the ultimatum contained a demand that would undermine the sovereignty of Serbia, if it had been met. Belgrade rejected the note after it had underinsured Russian help. On 25 July Serbia ordered the mobilization. Austria followed with a partial mobilization and declared war on Serbia on 28 July. On 30 July Russia ordered the general mobilization and Austria responded one day later. On 1 August France announced the mobilization and Germany followed. England put its navy on the alert. Then, on 16 August, Japan ranked in the front of the German opponents and demanded the Chinese area around Jiaozhou Bay, which was in German hands. The First World War had broken out, the first war of material battles and mass extermination. Then, 1918, the world looked different. Tens of millions of people had lost their lives, lost in a senseless war. New states emerged, which were reason for future conflicts.
Many monarchies no longer existed after the war. It was November 9, 1918, when Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the Republic in Germany. It began a new era of German history, starting with the Weimar Republic.
The Weimar Republic existed only fifteen years. With it also perished the Second German Reich. There were the turbulent years in which the one sought to build and to consolidate the new state, while others tried to destroy it again. The terms of the Versailles Treaty had to be met. This led to the battle in the Ruhr area (Ruhr-Pott), which was occupied by Allied troops. The Versailles Treaty was also the cause of the horror inflation and the high unemployment. In addition to this, there was still the general economic crisis. For the Nazis these were reasons enough to blame others for the misery.
In 1933 Hitler comes to power. Hindenburg, the German Reich President, had dropped out for personal reasons Chancellor Heinrich Brning and General von Schleicher presented Franz von Papen as Chancellor. Franz von Papen repealed the SA ban that was a tribute to the NSDAP. But for this step the Nazi Party did not thank. Von Papen did also not reach a significant improvement of the miserable situation in Germany. Hindenburg was looking for a way out of this situation and believed to have found this way with the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor. Thus, on 30 January 1933, Hitler has seized power. He ousted von Papen and formed a cabinet of national collection. Paralyzed in an almost hopeless struggle against the enemies of the Republic and at odds with each other, the democratic parties resigned, leaving Hitler to power.
In 1934 President von Hindenburg died and Hitler also assumed the role of President. There were also no parties in the meantime, with one exception, the NSDAP, which determined everything. With the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich were wiped out the countries sovereignty. The full power over the press, radio, film, and public opinion was backed by Hitlers chief propagandist Goebbels, who also forced into line the whole German culture by laws, threats and persecutions. It followed the burning of books and boycott of Jewish businesses. But the worst was yet to come, the arbitrary persecutions, arrests and killings of dissidents and the establishment of concentration camps by the SA. But the holocaust was to surpass all this.
Austria became a part of the German Empire (Reich) again. The country of the Sudeten was annexed and Hitler demanded more. The world is facing a war. The Nazi rulers are getting ready, they want it, they want to lead the nation in the cruel war that the world had never experienced before, a war that was to be more cruel than the First World War.
We write 1 September 1939 and a new cruel wartime has begun. The war started with the attack on Poland. A British-French ultimatum with the request to cease hostilities remained unanswered. Thereupon the UK and France declared war on Germany on 3 September.
Poland was defeated in a five-week campaign. Eastern Poland was occupied by Soviet troops. A German-Soviet border and friendship treaty sealed the partition of Poland. Eastern Poland received the Soviet Union, Gdansk (Danzig) and parts of western and northern Poland received Germany. The remainder of the country was declared a German General Government (administrative zone), where established a brutal occupation regime.
In order to forestall an Allied landing operation, Germany attacked Denmark and Norway on 9 April, 1940. Denmark was occupied without fight; Norway ceased the fighting in July. Then, on 10 May, the western campaign began. Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were overrun. Little later, German troops occupied Paris.
The Second World War was planned by Germany as a raceideological war of extermination with the aim of acquiring habitat in the east and was also implemented accordingly. But Germany lost this insane war. The disaster began with the lost battle for Stalingrad. Instead of winning habitat, after the war Germany was forced to cede large areas in the east. There were areas that were colonized by Germans for centuries.
In the last months of the cruel war also the great escape of the Germans began, the escape of horror, as it was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Wilhelm Gustloff was the name of the German refugee steamship, which took off from Gdynia (Gotenhafen) on 30 January 1945. On board of the steamship were 10,000 refugees, mainly women and children, who hoped to escape the hell by this ship, the hell that broke over East Prussia. Taken by Soviet torpedoes, the ship sank. Not even 1,000 refugees were saved; the others were torn with the ship in the depth or died on the troubled sea, because they were not saved, could not be saved because there were not enough ships, which departed in search of shipwrecked. It was the greatest disaster in the history of seafaring. But, who knows the Wilhelm Gustloff and the sinking of this ship? About the sinking of the Titanic was much written. But the world knows nothing about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, although this sinking was much worse than the sinking of the Titanic. This book chronicles the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff.
