Dear Mom,
Today, I am sitting in one of the multiple recovery rooms of St. Peter's Hospital. I am slowly recovering from the several injuries I received during the German invasion of Poland which I was a part of. We, the Germans, won the battle, but as a person, I can't say I won. Bombs were dropped on helpless towns killing the screaming women and children in seconds. Tanks were coming in from every side of Poland leaving no one to know what was coming next. The Polish were greatly outnumbered with their 180 tanks, and 240 aircraft compared to our 2,600 tanks and 2,000 aircraft. They were not prepared for an attack like this and had no chance to win against our 1.8 million troops. I had been excited for war, but now I can hardly live knowing that I have killed so many innocent people for the good of Hitler. I try to assure myself that its the good of Germany and the rest of the Germans, but how can anyone obtain good from murdering and slaughtering people like you would chickens?
We invaded Poland from 3 fronts. East Prussia from the north, Germany from the west, and Slovakia from the south, forcing the Poles to retreat to the east. About two weeks after we started the invasion, on September 14, Warsaw was completely surrounded by our troops. This is when, on September 17, the Soviet Union attacked from the east leaving Poland completely surrounded by enemy forces. (Just a week before the attack, we signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a treaty of non-aggression between us and the Soviets which allowed us to attack Poland.) In order to get the rest of Poland under our control, we started using our "Blitzkrieg" tactics and also bombed many villages and towns which left the air black with smoke and the ground orange with fire.
By early October, Poland had surrendered to the German forces, but not without doing enough damage to us. They lasted twice as long as we had suspected killing about 50,000 men, and destroying 697 planes and 993 tanks. This wasn't the only damage the attack of Poland cost us though, on September 3, just 2 days after our attack, Britain declared war on us followed by France, and many other countries. Here I am at the hospital, getting better from these injuries while I think of all the people we killed, people who can never get better. People just like us, who won't get to live the rest of their life, and the people who are getting into war as I write, many who will die as young men. It is a requirement that I go into war again when I recover, but I hope to be home soon, and I hope this war ends soon before too many more lives are taken.
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