September 1939

September 1939 is both the date of Germany’s invasion of Poland and a recurring historical reference point in the novel’s investigation of Nazi rule. It marks the beginning of a war that erased Poland as a frontier state in the story, while the occupation’s machinery turned Polish land, art, and people into objects of German administration and exploitation.

The invasion and its later recollection

Years afterward, Xavier March crosses the Oder with Max Jaeger. The river no longer divides Germany from Poland, because, as March recognizes, Poland no longer exists. Looking toward Gleiwitz, identified as the town where the war began, March recalls newsreel images of the Wehrmacht’s Tenth Army advancing in September 1939: horse-drawn artillery, tanks, and marching troops. The memory of the cheering that accompanied an apparently easy victory sits uneasily beside the occupied landscape through which the two men are driving.

That retrospective image gives September 1939 a double significance. It is the opening of military conquest and, from the later vantage point, a reminder of how victory was publicly staged: as swift and celebratory, before the consequences of occupation came into view.

Occupation and the transfer of wealth

The General Government, established in occupied Poland, is presented as a place of hardship for German settlers as well as a source of extraordinary privilege for officials. State advertising promises free farms and guaranteed income, but accounts filtering back describe poor soil, exhausting work, vulnerable satellite towns, and the threat of local partisans. This contrast exposes the gap between the regime’s public promise of settlement and the lived conditions of occupation.

At the same time, March’s colleague Rudi Halder describes the wealth surrounding Hans Frank’s administration at Wawel Castle in Krakau. Paintings, tapestries, church treasures, jewelry, and other luxuries evoke an imperial court built amid the occupation. Halder speculates that Josef Buhler, based in the General Government, was involved in the corruption around it; March connects this possibility to Buhler’s house on Schwanenwerder. The scene links the invasion’s territorial result to private enrichment rather than treating occupation as merely a change of borders.

The scale of cultural plunder becomes measurable through an inventory compiled by Polish museum authorities in 1940. It records 2,700 paintings from the European school, 10,700 paintings by Polish artists, and 1,400 sculptures removed from Warsaw alone. According to the account March hears, Buhler could arrange for works to be shipped under escort to Wilhelm Stuckart at the Interior Ministry, where their subsequent storage or removal from the Reich could be made to look legal. Some went to official collections; others were exchanged for portable wealth such as cash, jewels, or gold. September 1939 thus stands at the start of a chain in which military occupation enabled administrative transfer and private appropriation.

From numbered accounts to concealed assets

The invasion also changes the circumstances in which wealth is moved beyond Germany. Before the war, Swiss banks had found German business increasingly risky, and the numbered-account trade had collapsed by 1939. After the invasion and the widening danger to property owners, demand rose sharply. Banks such as Zaugg responded with a deposit arrangement that provided a box, a number, a key, and a letter of authorization for a fee of 200 francs. Whoever possessed the necessary documents could claim the contents, without the bank becoming involved in the transfer itself.

This mechanism clarifies how occupation-era fortunes could be concealed and passed on while evading ordinary scrutiny. In the investigation, the arrangement is associated with Stuckart: the paperwork offers a formally simple route for assets to move across borders, even when their origins lie in the dispossession and plunder that followed the invasion.

The invasion’s longer historical shadow

The date also anchors documents that reveal the regime’s later policy toward European Jews. In a directive dated July 31, 1941, Hermann Göring assigned Reinhard Heydrich responsibility for preparing the organizational, technical, and material measures for a complete solution of the Jewish question within Germany’s sphere of influence. A sworn account attributed to Stuckart states that Heydrich described powers granted by Göring as authority to implement an unwritten Führer Order. Stuckart says he proposed putting the order in writing, but Heydrich rejected this on political grounds.

The documents place September 1939 within a widening history of aggression and state crime: the invasion begins the occupation, and the investigation traces the bureaucratic and financial structures that prospered within it alongside the later machinery of mass murder. The novel’s movement from the remembered advance of the Tenth Army to inventories, account documents, and secret orders makes the date more than a military milestone. It becomes the threshold after which conquest, administrative euphemism, and concealed profit are shown as connected parts of the same political order.