Published June 5, 2009 | 
Let’s talk a little bit about Poland in World War II.
Poland is in a bad spot, geographically — a place ripe for invasion. The land was devastated by World War I. When the state was reconstituted afterwards, it had a mere 21 years to rebuild before the next world war.
France and England swore to intercede if Hitler should invade. They didn’t. When the Panzers rumbled in on September 1, 1939, Poland resisted as well as it could. Sixteen days later, the Soviets invaded from the east.
The country had no chance. They had less than a million soldiers, 600 tanks, 400 aircraft.
On one side, the Nazis roared in with 1.85 million soldiers, 2800 tanks, 2000 aircraft. On the other, the Soviets invaded with 1.5 million soldiers, 6000 tanks, 1800 aircraft.
Germany annexed some areas and started shipping out the Polish citizens (both Jewish and gentile) to make room for the Master Race. In the German-held territories, Jews began to be rounded up and resettled in ghettos.Of course you know already what the Nazis did to the Jews of Poland, as to the ones of France, Germany, Holland, Czechoslovakia.
What you may not know is that the Nazis wanted to destroy the Poles as well. It began before the war: in August 1939, 2000 Polish expatriate intellectuals were arrested and murdered in Nazi-held regions. During September and October 1939, Operation Tannenberg targeted Polish intellectuals: priests, former officers, activists. In a mere two months, Einsatzkommandos rounded up 20,000 people and slaughtered them in as many as 760 mass executions. The Germans conscripted many other Polish citizens to work as slave laborers. The Germans carefully calculated the expenses of food and clothing and how long the prisoners could be expected to survive on such rations. Not long.
On the Eastern front, the Soviets were busy, too. Many Polish citizens were deported to work in the Soviet Union. And the Soviets agreed with the Nazis that the Polish intelligentsia were dangerous. About 22 thousand Polish intellectuals, policemen, and officers were murdered by the Soviets. This genocide has taken the name of the forest where many were buried. Have you heard of the Katyn Massacre?
By the end of the war, 6 million Polish citizens were dead. Half were Jews. Half were Gentiles. (Yes, a much larger percentage of the country’s Jews died — virtually all of them. It was much worse to be a Polish Jew than to be merely Polish. However, it was no picnic to be a Catholic Pole, either. Poland suffered by far the greatest percentage of fatalities of any country in the conflict.) In 1939 there were less than 30 million Poles. More than one out of 5 died by 1945. The equivalent death rate in the US would take out 60 million people. In addition to the loss of citizens, the Polish economic base was utterly destroyed.
My mother-in-law graduated from high school in 1939. By 1945 she was the only survivor of her class.
Why weren’t we taught these things in school? My guess is that nobody wanted to bother with teaching about Eastern Europe while it was still behind the Iron Curtain. Moreover, Poland never was liberated; it went from Nazi rule to Soviet rule. Some of the people who survived the Nazi regime were sent to the gulags afterwards. My husband’s great-aunt and great-uncle were among them. He spent two years in Siberia; she spent five and came home limping from having broken a leg. Speaking out about what had happened, what was happening, would be punished, and everyone knew it.
I have seen Nazi propaganda films about their intentions with regard to Poland. I have read the translated memos and speeches of Hans Frank. I spent two years researching Poland from 1920 to 1945. I know damned well what happened there.
And Poland didn’t cause it. Not because Poland lost the war. But because they were minding their own business when two vast states invaded. The current Russian argument is the exact equivalent of a bully telling his victim, “You made me hit you.” Or a rapist: “I wouldn’t have raped you if you’d cooperated to give me sex.”
This is a familiar chorus.
Nobody but the Nazis made the Nazis invade. Nobody but the Soviets was responsible for the Soviet invasion. Hitler and Stalin, Himmler and Beria. Blame them. Don’t blame the Poles.
This was so silly it would be hardly worth rebutting, save for the seriousness of the revisionist attempt. So thanks for taking it on.
An additional point is that Hitler was never satisfied with his “reasonable” demands. This was a deliberate negotiating strategy on his part, and it had already been seen in full bloom in Czechoslovakia, after the Munich agreement. He would demand something, claim it was his last demand ever, and then when he’d browbeaten his victims into offering it, claim that it wasn’t enough, usually by dint of feeling hurt at the resistance to the earlier demands. When Hitler occupied Prague (and the rest of the country) in early 1939 after swearing that he’d only wanted the Sudetenland, even Neville Chamberlain’s eyes were opened. That’s when Poland got its guarantee.
Yet another additional point is that the Nazis manufactured an imaginary border raid by Poland as a final, immediate excuse for the invasion.
I don’t think you mean Otto Frank, however. Otto was Anne’s father. You mean Hans Frank.
I knew about Poland because my father, born in 1930, turned himself into a WWII scholar because he was so obsessed, for so long, by what happened and *why* it happened. And he taught me.
I am speechless. I am not surprised. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
I don’t even know where to start with this. has the best point, I think. Anyone talking about Hitler’s “reasonable demands” suffers automatic and permanent loss of credibility.
When my jaw finally gets of my chest, there may be some shouting.
It will most likely be “Really?! REALLY?!” until the word no longer means anything.
I hope the ghost of my neighbor Frank who fought both the Nazis and the Soviets in the Polish army goes and makes the walls of whoever’s trying to pass this off as history bleed.
*sigh*
I understand some folks have been expecting this “revisionism” from the Russians/ex-Soviets for quite some time.
I’m disappointed, but not surprised. But I don’t see how any sufficient pressure can be brought to bear on the Russians to convince them that this legislation (and political stance) is a BAD idea.
I’ll have to ask my father-in-law (American expat, living in Warsaw) what the reaction is on the ground over there. Not good, I’m guessing…
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Ouch.
But yes.
That’s some serious ugliness!
I know this is serious, but I keep hearing Basil Fawlty say, “No, you started it.” And he was right.
I feel strongly about this subject bc my paternal grandparents were right there when it happened. They both ended up VOLUNTEERING to go to a labor camp bc at that time, it seemed like the only alternative to slowly starving to death, which that invasion essentially brought about for the common people.
My oldest aunt and uncle were born in the camp. Until they were toddlers, they were constantly lice-infested, starved, etc.
And, yes, of course Poland had no choice. Militaristically, their army, even present day, is no match for any other country’s. But just because of that, are they just supposed to bow down and let someone else take over their country and culture?
Re: destroying the Polish race — One of my father’s biggest peeves is the fact that whenever the average person thinks of the Holocaust, they go, “Oh, the Jews!” No one ever talks about all the Christians who were slaughtered, the Poles, etc.
Speaking as a Pole presently invading the US to steal American jobs, I can only say this….
Damn it! They’re ON TO US!!!
All countries teach history as politics.
It was not until I became a serious Cold War wonk that I discovered that the West had sent an expedition into Russia after World War I. This minor footnote in the history books of the West was taught to generations of Russian schoolchildren in lavish detail.
I am unsurprised but somewhat alarmed. Russian xenophobia is part of the culture. When it turns expansionist rather than paranoid, it is time to be very, very wary.
You’re right on all counts.
Do let me know. I’m no longer in touch with my ex-in-laws, so I don’t have the contacts in Poland I used to have.
Labor activists. Romany. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Homosexuals.
And yes — Hitler planned to work the Polish nation to death.
When I visited the site of a death camp north of Berlin in the 80′s, the East German version of the story was all about the socialists killed there.
One wonders how Medvedev will explain Katyn Forest?
The mayor* of the town I grew up in came to talk to my high school history class. Fought with the Nazi army in WWII. He was Polish and feared Stalin more than he feared Hitler. It made for an interesting presentation and discussion.
*it’s been a decade, he’s not mayor any more.
My favorite Polish joke
Q: “You are being rushed by a German and a Russian. Which one do you shoot first?”
A: “The German. Business before pleasure.”
A former coworker of mine – a Russian expat who can’t stand any of his former countries “leaders” – says “Russia is a country with a volatile past.” The official history changes every few years. Under one leader, Stalin is considered a hero, but under the next one, he is considered a villain. Wait a few more years, and he is a hero again.
Medvedev’s attempt to jail anybody who questions the official history reminds me of the Iranian president’s bluster about the Holocaust. You just can’t argue with somebody in denial.
I’ve often said, in regard to Polish vodka, “If you lived between Germany and Russia, you’d drink too.”
Thanks for sharing that, it was very well-written, and i”m not surprised at all that it’s being revised. “History” is usually from the conquerers’ POV.
…and Stalin made the trains run on time, too.
And person with disabilities, as part of the Action-T4 “euthanasia” project.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/t4.html
That may be a corollary of Godwin’s Law.
Not just American jobs. American women!
Oh, I know how we all spin things. God knows we in the US are always claiming that we’re the good guys, helping preserve our profits global hegemony democracy and crusading against anybody to the left of Louis XIV anybody who gets in our way evil.
In the end, almost all crimes are self-defense.
Same way Stalin did: The Nazis did it!
Unless he decides it was mass suicide under the leadership of a Polish Jim Jones.
That’s interesting. It actually makes sense, nased on what was publicly known at the time.
I remember when in second grade my teacher brought in an elderly man — still nearly skeletal after 20 years — who showed us the tattoo on his forearm and talked about Auschwitz.
The hell?
I think it’s part of the general Don’t Trust A World War II Buff principle — that is, you have to watch out for the ones who say things like “Sure, Hitler did a lot of bad things, but he was a total genius” or, in this case, “I don’t know why people were so upset about Hitler wanting XYZ, it was totally reasonable.”
The problem, I think, is that Jewish people were one of the few groups designated for immediate extermination, though even that wasn’t consistent — but when people think of “the Holocaust,” they think of people coming off the trains and going straight to the gas chambers, and that’s mainly the Jews. Everyone else got to do hard labor on about five hundred calories a day and suffer brutal violence at the hands of the guards and their fellow prisoners, but you know, they weren’t being killed.
/sarcasm
*waves* Hi, one of my friends directed me over here to your great post. I, too, saw this article today and had a mini-rant moment on my own LJ about this. Being a student of German language and culture, I’ve read much into the history too. When I was on an exchange in 2000, I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp as well… a very solemn and emotional experience.
My husband’s father is Lithuanian and as a child had to flee with his family from their country during WWII. My FIL’s father was the director of the Ministry of Forestry in a local gov’t and were part of the intelligentsia. If they had not escaped with few possessions, they might have ended up exiled to Siberia or, even worse, executed in the genocide that occurred. He was old enough to remember much of what happened and still has many items he kept from that time… having to flee the Soviets and living in Nazi Germany (in Bayern/Bavaria for a time) then on to Australia as displaced persons, and eventually here to the states.
My coworker’s wife is Lithuanian too, her grandparents were exiled to Siberia and her mother was born there with both a Russian and Lithuanian name (depending on who was asking). They ended up like Tom Hanks’ character in the movie The Terminal when trying to get beyong the Iron Curtain when the Soviet Union was going to force her brother into the military but the USSR officially fell as they were escaping, thus making their passports somewhat invalid.
My husband I had the chance to visit Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia back in 2007 as part of a Europe trip we planned. The people of those countries are so proud and strong, wanting to show themselves to the world as contributing people rebuilding after a terrible period in their histories. I met some wonderful people including a Polish taxi driver who drove us around to all the important places in Gdansk after we met on common ground of speaking German to one another and a respect he shared with their Lithuanian cousins. There was our tour guide in Klaipeda, Lithuania who was forced to be a translator for the important Soviets when they would visit… and her father was exiled to Siberia for speaking out against the Communists. They do believe Russia intends to take over their lands again, it is only a matter of when, not if.
It just angers me so much Medvedev and others shall say that these people and my husband’s family are liars. Thank you for your piece, I hope it keeps people aware and informed who do not know much of history.