On the Anniversary of World War II: Behind the Scenes of the War between Germany and Poland. Aug 24, 2009
On the Anniversary of World War II: Behind the Scenes of the War between Germany and Poland. Aug 24, 2009
By Sergei Brezkun
The war between Germany and Poland was the first phase of World War II. Actually, it could as well become the last phase of the conflict that later grew global and translated into the World War not due to any reasons that made the development imminent but solely because such were the interests of the Anglo-Saxon world.
The West, of course, conveniently claims that the USSR shared the responsibility for World War II with Germany. The notorious July 3, 2009 OCSE Resolution reflects the concept, but in reality Europe and the US are thus simply shifting the blame onto others.
One should keep in mind that Great Britain and France extended formal guarantees of security to Poland but– as it subsequently transpired – from the outset had no intention to back them with any actions. Washington, in the meantime, was reinforcing Warsaw's notion that Poland was able to remain afloat without a broader European collective security system.
Being largely a formality, the September 3, 1939 declaration of war on Germany by Great Britain and France nevertheless lifted the war between Germany and Poland to the pan-European level. The US was actively pushing Great Britain and France into challenging Germany, and thus the war quickly grew global.
As for the USSR, the truth is that it had nothing to do with the whole story.
The conflict that eventually escalated into the World War was sparked by the disagreement over Danzig and the Polish Corridor, which was in fact the only remaining serious problem on Europe's political landscape by the spring of 1939. Under the Versailles Treaty, Danzig, an ancient Polish-German city whose population had been almost entirely German for ages by the XX century, was proclaimed the Free City of Danzig, a quasi-state under the auspices of the League of Nations. The German territory was crossed by the Polish Corridor which linked Poland to the Sea and left East Prussia separated from the rest of Germany. This configuration imposed by the World War I allies was inherently explosive and not only infringed upon Germany's interests but presented a threat to Europe and the whole world as it literally programmed a conflict in the future.
Lloyd George wrote in the March 25, 1919 Fontainebleau Memorandum: “if she [Germany] feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 1919 she will find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors... The maintenance of peace will then depend upon there being no causes of exasperation constantly stirring up the spirit of patriotism, of justice or of fair play to achieve redress...
For these reasons I am, therefore, strongly adverse to transferring more Germans from German rule to the rule of some other nation than can possibly be helped. I cannot conceive of any greater cause of future war than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves [an implicit reference to Czechs and Poles – S. Brezkun], but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native land. The proposal of the Polish Commission that we should place 2,100,000 Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history must, in my judgment, lead sooner or later to a new war in the East of Europe”.
Poland stubbornly refused to consider any departures from the status-quo, nor even sought serious guarantees to maintain it, as for the country the only realistic guarantee could be based on a trilateral treaty involving not only Great Britain and France, but also the USSR. Poland did not consent to the deployment of Soviet troops in the case of a German attack on itself and even rejected the request of the Soviet Union, which potentially could act as its ally, to be granted the right to airbases. One can cite as documentary evidence the message sent by Polish Foreign Minister J. Beck to Polish Ambassador to France Lukasiewicz on August 20, 1939 (just 10 days before the outbreak of the war), in which he stated that Poland had no military treaties of any kind with the Soviet Union and had no intention to sign any such treaties.
Warsaw's position paralyzed the talks on military issues between the USSR, Great Britain, and France which opened in Moscow on August 12, 1939. Actually, the positions of the Soviet Union's partners – Great Britain and France – were not much more constructive. The “allies” did bring to the negotiating table an alternative option – a joint war against Germany – under such terms that the USSR would have to shoulder some 80-90% of its burden.
In the meantime Germany demanded resolutely that Warsaw address the Polish Corridor problem without delay, for example, via an internationally overseen referendum. Berlin’s plan was that Germany had to get the right to construct either a tunnel or an extraterritorial highway providing it with an outlet to East Prussia in case the majority of the Corridor's population favored staying under Polish control. Otherwise Poland was to get the right to extraterritorial communications with the Gdynia seaport and Danzig, the latter being incorporated into Germany.
Guided by London and Paris – and indirectly by Washington - the Polish government kept turning down Germany's bid. The actual decision-makers who were based on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean needed war, not peace. Their scheme was to let this smaller war evolve into the one between Germany and the USSR.
On the whole, neither Stalin nor Russia had any reasons to embrace the war, and on August 23, 1939 the USSR and Germany signed the Non-aggression Pact in Moscow, which, by the way, was based on the 1926 Soviet-German Neutrality Treaty prolonged by Hitler in 1933 and still effective by 1939.
I wish to cite two assessments of the Pact. The first one belongs to P.N. Milyukov, a prominent member of the Russian Constitutional-Democratic Party, who served in 1917 as the Foreign Minister in the post-tsarist provisional government. He said: “As for the agreement between Hitler and Stalin on Russia's neutrality – the Western democracies, should they decide to fight Germany, are going to make the decision voluntarily, already after the signing of the August 23 Soviet-German Pact... Is it possible to imagine that any Russians want the still not rearmed Russia to accept the entire burden of the war with Hitler's mighty army? What is Stalin to blame for under the circumstances? For opting for neutrality and thus winning time? Obviously the pact is not directed against democracies, and if some day the map of the world looks quite different from what they expected, they will have themselves and not the USSR to blame...”
The following is an excerpt from the encrypted message sent to Paris by the French Ambassador to Moscow: “The August 23 deal is not the treacherous blow to Poland and to us that Germany hoped it would be”.
The latter was absolutely true. It was equally true that the Soviet-German Pact made it impossible for Great Britain and France to act treacherously with respect to Russia and forced Poland to exercise an extent of realism. Sadly, it soon became clear that Poland and realism were fundamentally heterogeneous phenomena...
The independent Poland collapsed even earlier than anybody including Hitler could project. From the rational point of view, its demise rendered the “independence” guarantees Great Britain and France once submitted to the hopeless state totally meaningless, and it seemed the time came to start peace consultations to defuse the conflict. Nevertheless, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 1, 1939.
The whole sequence of developments was carefully planned ahead by the international “golden elite”, and of course there existed no chance of peace between Great Britain and France, on one side, and Germany, on the other. It is worth noting, though, that the war Great Britain and France waged against Germany had led to practically no fatalities until the spring of 1940 and remained in history under the name of a “strange” war.
Source: http://en.fondsk.ru/