Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  At the outset of the conflict, Polish independence had not been amongst the war aims of the Allied powers. In fact, until the outbreak of the First World War, the re-emergence of an independent Polish state seemed about as likely as the emergence of an independent Kurdistan was before the second Gulf War. Only a fundamental realignment, or the total collapse of one or more of the three occupying powers, could reignite the possibility of a truly independent Polish state. But, as with so many other wars, the First World War ushered in totally unforeseen consequences. The strain of war caused the Russian Empire to collapse; members of its royal family, the House of Romanov, who had ruled this vast empire for over three centuries, were murdered, and the country descended into a bitter and bloody revolution that cost Russia more lives than all the campaigns of the First World War. The revolutionary leaders of the Bolshevik movement were more intent on winning the revolution than the war and signed a costly armistice with Germany and Austria in early 1918. Poland was rid of one of her greatest oppressors but was now firmly in the clutches of the Central Powers.

  The prospects for full Polish independence did not immediately rise with Germany’s fortunes. Now free to concentrate all her forces in the West, Germany advanced swiftly and, by April 1918, briefly appeared to have victory in her grasp, before a combination of the relentless British blockade, utter exhaustion of all the original combatants, and the United States joining the fray, finally tipped the balance in the Allies’ favour. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and broke apart, Poland’s second occupier had imploded; only Germany remained, and she would soon be preoccupied with the chaos of revolution. One by one the alliance of nations that had carved Poland out of existence had fallen and a realignment of unprecedented magnitude had taken place in Europe. The United States, the nation that had tipped the balance in the war, became a champion of the Polish cause. Woodrow Wilson, the idealistic and internationalist American President, whose Fourteen Point Plan had induced the German military High Command to call for an armistice, expressly demanded the creation of an independent Polish state with access to the sea. Seven million Polish immigrant votes in the US played their part in making this a provision.

  The Poles seized their chance with both hands, but it was not long before one of their old oppressors sought to enslave them again. In the tumultuous heyday of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin and Trotsky dreamed of spreading revolution throughout the world, the Red Army invaded Poland. Lenin was desperate to link arms with the largest workers’ movement in the world, the home of Marx and Engels — Germany — in the hope that this would ignite revolution throughout Europe, but Poland stood in the way of his grand design. The invasion should have been a pushover but instead it gave the Poles a chance to give their old adversaries a bloody nose on the battlefield. Mother Russia has never suffered a greater national humiliation and it particularly irked Stalin, who had played his part in the catastrophe. Stalin nursed this grudge for more than a quarter of a century, until historical events again played a turn, giving him the opportunity to exact his revenge on both his enemies.

  An array of national groups emerged out of the three formerly annexed parts of Poland, all with totally different visions of how Poland should be governed and what Poland’s ‘natural’ frontiers were. The outcome was a national movement that looked in all directions at once and started believing its own nationalist rhetoric, particularly after victory over the Russians. Poland’s nationalists began to believe that anything was possible and agitated for a Greater Poland encompassing all the former territories of both her Piast and Jagiellon heydays. This set her on a course of major antagonisation of both her most powerful neighbours during the inter-war years. Poland even made claims upon the territory of her newly created southern neighbour Czechoslovakia.ccxx Ultimately, Poland antagonised all her neighbours, leaving herself friendless and alone in the hour of her greatest need.

  POLISH PRETENSIONS BETWEEN THE WARS

  Polish nationalist leaders likes Roman Dmowski, who became a leading ideologist of the National Democrats, saw Germany as the main threat to Polish interests. He laid claim to the Piast tradition of westward expansion to ‘regain the core Polish lands’ of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia, territory that had nominally belonged to the Polish crown but had held an entirely German-speaking population for centuries. The National Democrats had made it clear as early as 1897 that their aim was for the Polish border to be the Oder river in the west; they wanted the German population in these territories to be forcibly removed, irrespective of the fact that many of these areas were inhabited entirely by Germans and that no Polish community had lived there for 600 years or more.ccxxi (5)

  British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, saw the demands of the National Democrats for what they were. He felt they were totally over the top and predicted a new war in Eastern Europe in short succession if the Poles’ demands for vast expanses of territories both to the east and the west were acceded to. The National Democrats were disappointed by the outcome of Versailles; they got roughly half of what they wanted, gaining the provinces of Posen (Poznan) and Western Prussia, with Danzig becoming a ‘free city’. This still left the new Polish state with a sizeable German minority; a third of Poznan’s population was German, as was two-thirds of West Prussia’s, and virtually all of Danzig’s. Dmowski’s main opponent was Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who became the authoritarian leader of Poland from 1926. Piłsudski pushed the eastward-looking Jagiellon agenda of the old Polish-Lithuanian empire, and as such saw Russia as Poland’s natural adversary. Dmowski and Piłsudski represented the old Polish dilemma of whether to look east or west, an issue that was never resolved in the inter-war period, which had disastrous consequences on both fronts.

  Neither Soviet Russia nor Republican Germany accepted the territorial integrity of the newly created Polish state. In view of bitter public sentiment, no German politician could allow himself to recognise the new eastern frontier. They viewed a hard-won victory in the east had been unjustly negated, and a return to the frontiers of 1914 became a core demand of all mainstream political parties in the Reichstag. This soon led to troubles flaring on Germany’s eastern frontier. The first battles started over the referendums for self-determination, which Britain had pushed through at the 11th hour at Versailles against the wishes of France, that were set to decide the future of the southern part of East Prussia and the whole of Upper Silesia. Voting was to take place under Allied supervision, but Warsaw wanted to ensure the result was a foregone conclusion in their favour. Only two months after the signing of the Versailles treaty more than 10,000 Polish rebels attempted to occupy the industrial areas of Silesia and take over the workers’ councils. They were only stopped by elements of the yet-to-be-demobilised German Reichswehr army, who restored order after two days of fighting that left more than a hundred dead on both sides.

  On 20th January 1920 when agreements reached at Versailles came into effect, all units of the German army had to withdraw from areas in which plebiscites were to be held. The first referendum took place in the southern half of East Prussia and made a mockery of Warsaw’s claims to the ‘Polish character’ of these territories; 97.8 per cent voted in favour of remaining part of Germany, with only 2.1 per cent voting to join Poland. In the West Prussian region of Marienwerder (Kwidzyn), despite the fact that 92.4 per cent voted to remain part of Germany, a portion of this territory was still ceded to Poland. Polish authorities, in their delusional claims to these territories and their ‘Polish populations’, complained of massive vote rigging. But with the threat of the advancing Russian Red Army, Warsaw offered to forego its claims to Upper Silesia if the German army helped them fight the advancing Russians. Polish Nationalist activists were incensed by this offer and initiated an uprising in Upper Silesia in August 1920, clearly unafraid of fighting a war on two fronts.

  However, the new paramilitary organisation of the German Heimwehr, formed out of the many thousands of demobbed Reichswehr soldiers, quickly reassembled
to put down the rebels and protect the majority German population, and the uprising subsequently fell apart within two weeks. French troops, led by General Henri Le Rond, were openly sympathetic to the Polish cause and did little to prevent the Polish activists in their agitations until it came to protecting them from annihilation by the Heimwehr. The uprising had led to great embitterment all round, with acts of terror, murder, rape and wanton destruction occurring on both sides, and the region of Upper Silesia deteriorating into civil war.

  The second referendum in Upper Silesia, on 21st March 1921 saw the vote finally pan out with 59.4 per cent in support of remaining part of Germany and 40.4 per cent in favour of joining Poland. Recriminations persisted about those who no longer lived in the territory who had been bussed in to vote, but it had been agreed at Versailles that anyone born in the region could vote, and both Poles and Germans supported this at the time the decision was taken. Upper Silesia was divided according to ethnic lines, but before this could take effect, the Polish activist, Korfanty, organised the third Upper Silesian uprising to take place on 3rd May, a Polish national holiday. Forty thousand rebels occupied the entire territory Poland laid claim to. They were supported by the Polish military, with many front-line fighters being bussed in from across the Polish border. No regular German troops were allowed into the area to protect their population, so it fell to the paramilitary Freicorps to organise themselves to confront the invasion. On 21st May the Germans stormed the strategically important St Annaberg and began pushing the Poles back on their line, until British troops intervened to force a cessation of hostilities. Upper Silesia was ultimately divided, but untangling a population that had grown together over centuries proved no easier than the untangling of Serbs from Croats or Muslims in Bosnia would prove eighty years later. Industrial and communication centres were split and the most important industrial regions, centred around Kattowitz, were ceded to Poland, despite the fact that 82 per cent of its population had voted to remain part of Germany.ccxxii Poles were upset that they did not get more, and that this industrial gem was divided, while the Germans were distraught at the loss of so much territory. The Germans not only mourned the loss of key industrial and coal-producing areas, but were also afraid for so many of their compatriots who faced an unenviable and uncertain future beyond the protection of German forces, who were stranded on the wrong side of a new border which had been forced upon them.

  Poland also acquired a host of disaffected minorities in the eastern territories that she annexed from the Soviet Union following the Polish-Soviet War of 1920–21. Poland moved its eastern border well beyond the Curzon Line recommended by the peacemakers in Paris, and occupied territories with largely Ukrainian, White Russian and Lithuanian populations. Her territories also encompassed many Jews who the Poles classed as a separate ethnic group as opposed to a religious group. With this move eastwards, the proportion of Poland’s minorities grew to over one-third of her total population of 27 million.ccxxiii To placate their allies, the Poles had signed up to the ‘protection of minorities’ and had even included this in their constitution, but with the National Democrats, who fundamentally opposed the inclusion of any minority rights, forming the government of Poland from 1920–26; the future did not look bright for any of Poland’s minorities. Their fate became part of a thinly concealed policy that aimed to ‘integrate’ their ‘Slavic brethren’ — in other words to make their Slavic minorities Polish and to expel the Germans. The culture minister, Stanisław Grabski, removed any uncertainty as to the true sentiments of the government when he said, ‘The Foreign elements will have to look around and see if they might not be better off elsewhere. Polish land is exclusively for Poles.’(8)

  There were considerable similarities in the treatment of minorities by Poland and Czechoslovakia. The newly independent Polish government in Warsaw led a repressive crusade against all her minorities, legislating that there would be only one official language. Members of minorities who had held administrative posts were sacked and replaced by Poles; minorities found it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find work and compulsory purchase orders of land owned by minorities were commonplace, either at rock-bottom prices or just by means of outright confiscations. German firms in particular were hit with sudden and outrageous tax demands and company directors were arrested if these were not forthcoming. In addition, no German firms could receive state contracts, and the National Democrats called for boycotts against German shops. Schools for minorities were often closed on fabricated grounds, such as health and safety concerns about the fabric of the buildings, and attacks on Jews, Germans and Ukrainians were routine. In general, Poland’s minorities were left in no doubt that they were unwelcome in the new Polish State, and Piłsudski’s enforcer, Michal Grazynski, was given a free hand by the regime to make this clear. Being a minority in Poland was hard going, and many began to vote with their feet; they sold their belongings for whatever they could get and crossed the new border. During the inter-war period the percentage of the population who were Germans fell from 42 per cent to 2 per cent in Poznan (Posen), and from 77.5 per cent to 8.5 per cent in Bydgoszcz (Bromberg).(9) Of the 2 million Germans who had been stranded in the territories given to Poland, around 1 million were hounded out.

  The German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, who jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize with Aristide Briande for his work to end hostility with France, regularly accused both Poland and the League of Nations of repressing German minorities. In retaliation, he attempted to destabilise Poland’s economy by putting high tariffs on her coal and agricultural exports to Germany. Rapprochement was not on the cards for either side, as Poland’s ministers continued to demand the amendment of the Versailles agreements to give Poland more German territory and extend her borders to the Oder; they also angled for an alliance with France, to join them in action against Germany, for much of the first half of the 1920s. As in Czechoslovakia, the dispossessed and disenfranchised second-class minorities formed a resentful groundswell that largely welcomed the rise of National Socialism, seeing it as their opportunity for restoration. This was especially true for Germans in the so-called ‘Polish Corridor’, which had been created between Danzig and Pomerania, where the German population had seen their farms and businesses confiscated without any compensation, and had been forced to join the ranks of the growing numbers of Poland’s unemployed minorities.

  The Catholic Church in Poland played a less than Christian role in its treatment of minorities; at no time did they show any interest whatsoever in integrating the minorities into the new Polish state.ccxxiv Ever-greater visions of territorial expansion were beginning to emanate from Warsaw and its state-sponsored quangos. The Western Union, which was funded by the government, published maps and papers arguing for Poland’s border to be extended northward, to include the Latvian capital of Riga, the whole of Czechoslovakia, Saxony and parts of Brandenburg.(11) The Swiss historian and delegate to the League of Nations, Carl Burckhardt, was horrified when, in 1938, a leading Polish politician showed him documents detailing Polish plans for annexation and ethnic cleansing, which anticipated a swift victory over Germany in any coming conflict, thereby gaining Danzig, Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia. Polish newspapers were full of similar demands, replete with new maps, in the run-up to the outbreak of hostilities.(12)

  On 17th March 1938 the Polish Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, issued an ultimatum to Lithuania threatening invasion if diplomatic relations were not established. Both Beck and Piłsudski wanted to see the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth re-established whether the Lithuanians wanted it or not, and they were not averse to using force in international relations; Poland backed Franco during the Spanish Civil War, approved of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and took advantage of Czechoslovakia’s humiliation after the Munich Conference by seizing the Czech town of Teschen on 2nd October 1938.

  After a brief period of rapprochement between Poland and Germany, when Hitler considered adding Poland to his anti-Soviet A
xis, due to the Polish government’s resolute anti-communist stance, tensions between Nazi Germany and Poland rose again when Hitler seized the town of Memel (Klaipeda) back from Lithuania on 26th March 1939 (the Lithuanians had seized the town from Germany after the First World War), and renewed his demand for Danzig. As it became clear that Poland and Germany sought expansion into the same territories, any thoughts in Warsaw of appeasing Germany disappeared. Throughout the summer of 1939, tensions were increasing; Hitler made ever-shriller demands on Poland, and a new wave of German refugees were forced to leave as attacks on Germans in Poland escalated. On 3rd September, two days after German troops crossed the Polish border, retreating Polish troops massacred an estimated 500 German civilians in the city of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg).(13) As in Czechoslovakia, much of the remaining German minority greeted the Wehrmacht with open arms.

  HELL DESCENDS ON POLAND

  Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland did not foresee a renewed policy of Germanisation of the Polish people. Poland was to receive ‘special treatment’ from the start of the invasion, and there was never any intention to work with, or build up, a provisional government of pliable Poles. The Nazis had quite the opposite intention; the intelligentsia was to be eradicated, as was the state itself. Nazi plans for Poland were worse than the post-war Morgenthau plan would be for Germany; all remnants of the Polish state were to be destroyed and its entire people were to be systematically exterminated or enslaved. Evidence of this can be seen in the Generalplan Ost, developed and outlined in 1942, which foresaw the racial reorganisation of Eastern Europe after Nazi Germany’s victory. The plan envisaged the deportation of 31 million Slavs to Siberia; then Poland, Byelorussia and part of the Ukraine were to be resettled by Germans.(14) The Nazi High Command wasted no time in implementing their plan. Within weeks of Poland’s defeat, western and northern Polish territory had been annexed and its population began to be expelled without any rights. The only official language became German, and all Polish street names and place names were changed to German ones. The annexed regions, which formed a new German state called Wartheland, were to become a ‘model’ German colony with ethnic German minorities from across Eastern Europe being shipped in to replace the Poles who were being shipped out.ccxxv