Hitler, Stalin and the Destruction of Poland

damages.

Introduction

The division and destruction of Poland is seen from a western perspective as the first act of the Second World War and as such this will be the first of many ebooks on that conflict. Without delving too deeply into semantics, I think it’s worth considering for a moment what we actually mean by the Second World War. The term itself is perhaps something of a misnomer, to describe it as one war is to oversimplify the most intense period of conflict in human history, it was a series of interlinked and overlapping conflicts, arising mainly from the unresolved tensions and animosities ignited by the First World War. The detonation of the first and second atomic bombs brought the war to a definite close in 1945, but without this, it is entirely possible, if not even likely, that the war would have evolved into a confrontation by the Western Allies not simply with Nazism, Italian Fascism and Japanese Imperialism, but Soviet Communism too.

In 1945 Joseph Stalin shelved plans that he had meticulously drafted to march the Red Army into Italy and France, after he witnessed the power of American nuclear weapons. At the same time Churchill’s chiefs of staff, after having to water down and veto five years of half baked schemes, finally lost their patience with the Prime Minister after he proposed Operation Unthinkable, a pre-emptive attack on the USSR in a vain bid to secure the freedom of Poland. The project, which was roundly criticised as suicidal madness hinged on dragging the Americans in to a fight that they had no interest in, and was quickly forgotten as soon as Sir Alan Brooke told Churchill how the Americans would abandon the British to their fate if they took on the USSR.

Churchill, who’s relevance as one of the ‘Big Three’ allied war leaders was in terminal decline, along with the status of the British themselves in the alliance, sought above all to champion the cause of Poland, the country that Britain had gone to war to defend.

Britain was as powerless to secure the rights of the Poles in 1945 as she had been in 1939, and five and a half years of total war had seen only a change in dictatorships, from Nazi to Soviet, as the Red Army swept across Poland on its unstoppable march to Berlin.

Few nations in the war suffered as the Poles did, and their destruction as a nation was planned by both Nazi and Soviet diplomats weeks before the outbreak of war. Hitler enforced ruthless racial doctrine on the Poles and Stalin’s attempts to destroy the Polish ‘bourgeois’ and other class enemies and counter revolutionaries was only marginally less bloody and brutal.

If one was to Google ‘Second World War’ Robert Capa’s iconic images of D-Day or the photo of US Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi might be the first search results. One might see splendid young Etonians gathered around a Spitfire, ready to fight in the Battle of Britain, or see British soldiers waiting stoically at Dunkirk. One might see Red Army soldiers raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag or defending the ruins of Stalingrad. These are our traditional notions of what war is, armed combatants fighting it out on land, sea and air, but war in the 20th Century, particularly the basket of conflicts that comprise the Second World War was for the most part a war against civilian populations and in this ebook the fate of Poland’s Jewish and non-Jewish people, along with that of the Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Romanians will be explored. I’ve deliberately discussed only the initial phases of the Holocaust, to discuss it in the depth it requires will be the task of a future title, but I would like this ebook to focus particularly on the complex set of decisions, events and circumstances that led to the commencement of mass killing between 1939 and 1941. In this first ebook to examine World War Two, we pick up where my previous title: Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich left off, and examine the destruction of Poland and the next title: Darkest Hour, Finest Hour will explore the fall of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, ending with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain.

Part One: The Fall Of Poland

Upon the surprise signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, Beatrice Webb, British Fabian Socialist and apologist for Soviet Russia wrote of her utter despair. She said:

A day of holy horror...a horrible thought for the friends of the Soviet Union.

Two days later she added:

The German Soviet Pact appears to be a great disaster for all that the Webbs have stood for....I am in a state of collapse.

After two decades of steadfast support for Soviet Russia and a wilful ignorance over the worst of Stalin’s crimes which occurred even whilst Beatrice and her husband Sidney Webb were visiting the USSR, the pact with Hitler was utterly shocking. The heights of the new civilisation, as the Webbs saw it, were now in league with the great barbarism of the age. The pact came as a terrible surprise to many fellow travellers across Europe and America and shook the faith of many members of European communist parties, though most of them stayed loyal to Moscow and did as they were told by Comintern, Stalin’s secretive foreign policy agency that coordinated communist parties throughout Europe, weeding out and crushing non Stalinist variants of communist thought. Communist parties such as Italy’s PCI believed the official Moscow line that the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact was a cunning way of outwitting western capitalist powers that would have liked nothing more than to see the USSR over-run by Hitler’s armies. The American Communist Party was rocked by the revelation, as US Communist John Gates recalled in his memoires:

The announcement on August 23, 1939, that the Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact came like a thunderclap, not least of all to the communist movement. Leaders and rank-and-file members were thrown into utter confusion. The impossible had happened. We looked hopefully for an escape clause in the treaty, but the official text provided none. For several days there was no clarification from Moscow and we American Communists were left painfully on our own. It would have been better if we had remained on our own.

Stalin’s manoeuvrings were born not just from his distrust of the west, but from a reciprocal antipathy. In March 1939 Neville Chamberlain had made no secret of his dislike of the USSR:

I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears. Moreover, she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller States, notably by Poland, Rumania and Finland.

But by April of that year the British, French and Soviets had made a pact to defend Poland, but not a full alliance. The Poles would not let Soviet troops on their soil, and the British, in Stalin’s eyes, would be next to useless, so the dictator put little store by treaties. Winston Churchill urged the Poles to reconsider, saying:

Ten or twelve days have already passed since the Russian offer was made. The British people, who have now, at the sacrifice of honoured, ingrained custom, accepted the principle of compulsory military service, have a right, in conjunction with the French Republic, to call upon Poland not to place obstacles in the way of a common cause. Not only must the full co-operation of Russia be accepted, but the three Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, must also be brought into association. To these three countries of warlike peoples, possessing together armies totalling perhaps twenty divisions of virile troops, a friendly Russia supplying munitions and other aid is essential.

The party faithful across Europe were unaware of the secret clause in the pact (and probably would have supported it if they had known of its existence) , which agreed to the territorial division of Poland. It read:

"Article I

In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.

Article II

In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.

The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments.

In any event both governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.

Article III

With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinterest in these areas.

Article IV

This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.

Moscow, August 23, 1939.

For the Government of the German Reich v. Ribbentrop

Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R. V. Molotov"

For the egotistical Joachim Von Ribbentrop, ever eager to please the Fuhrer and desperate to drive the pace for war forward, anxious to inflict heavy damage on the British, who he