History of Poland (1939–1945)

Minister Beck, disappointed with the lack of recognition, issued an ultimatum on the day of the Munich Agreement to the government of Czechoslovakia, demanding an immediate return to Poland of the contested Zaolzie border region.

[12] The attitude of the Polish leadership was also reflected by Foreign Minister Józef Beck, who, apparently confident in the French and British declarations of support, asserted that the security of Poland was not going to be guaranteed by a "Soviet or any other Russia".

[6][14][15] On 1 September 1939, without a formal declaration of war, Nazi Germany invaded Poland using the pretext of the Gleiwitz incident, a provocation (one of many)[16] staged by the Germans, who claimed that Polish troops attacked a post along the German–Polish border.

[30] The several Polish armies were defending the country in three main concentrations of troops, which had no territorial command structure of their own and operated directly under orders from Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły; it turned out to be a serious logistical shortcoming.

[34] For the optimal "political motivation" (a collapse of Poland having taken place), Molotov wished to hold the Soviet intervention until the fall of Warsaw, but the city's capture by the Germans was being delayed due to its determined defense effort (until September 27).

It adjusted and finalized the territorial division, placing Lithuania within the Soviet sphere and moving the Soviet-German agreed boundary east from the Vistula to the Bug River,[40] and authorized further joint action to control occupied Poland.

The General Government was the nearest to Germany proper part of the planned Lebensraum or German "living space" in the east, and constituted the beginning of the implementation of the Nazi grandiose and genocidal human engineering scheme.

[65] The future fate of Poland and Poles was stipulated in Generalplan Ost, a Nazi plan to engage in genocide and ethnic cleansing of the territories occupied by Germany in Eastern Europe in order to exterminate the Slavic peoples.

[78][93] The wave of arrests led to the forced resettlement of large categories of people (kulaks, Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors or osadniks, for instance) to the Gulag labor camps.

As the Soviet-German war progressed, the Home Army fought against both invaders, including the Soviet partisans, who often considered the Polish underground as enemies on a par with the Germans and from June 1943 were authorized by their command to denounce them to the Nazis.

[58] The Underground State was endorsed by Poland's main prewar political blocks, including the peasant, socialist, nationalist and Catholic parties and absorbed many supporters of the Sanation rule, humbled by the 1939 defeat.

The Underground State maintained the continuity of the Polish statehood in Poland and conducted a broad range of political, military, administrative, social, cultural, educational and other activities, within practical limits of the conspiratorial environment.

He became aware and informed Stalin of the Nazi-planned Operation Barbarossa, but the Soviet leader did not take his – nor the similar alerts from his top intelligence officer in Japan, Richard Sorge – advance warnings seriously regarding the imminent Nazi invasion.

Stalin had no interest in the uprising's success and following the failure of the talks with Mikołajczyk, the Soviet TASS information agency stated in the 13 August broadcast that "the responsibility for the events in Warsaw rests entirely with the Polish émigré circles in London".

Soviet supply flights continued from 13 to 29 September and an American relief operation was allowed to land on Soviet-controlled territory, but by that time the area under insurgent control had been greatly reduced and much of the dropped material was lost.

[165] According to the writer and researcher Anna Bikont, most Jews who escaped the Nazi ghettos could not have survived the war even if they had been in possession of material resources and social connections because ethnic Poles diligently and persistently excluded them from Polish society.

[178] According to historian Jan Grabowski, about 35,000 Polish Jews survived the war in Poland, but he counts the Jewish deaths caused directly or indirectly by ethnic Poles in hundreds of thousands (victims of the Blue Police and of civilians).

At Treblinka (a site that, together with Auschwitz, produced the highest number of Jewish victims) and other extermination locations, Heinrich Himmler ordered measures intended to conceal the Nazi crimes and prevent their future detection.

[131][202][205][206] At the Moscow Conference of foreign ministers of the three Allied great powers (October 1943), at the request of the Polish government borders were not discussed, but US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already expressed his support for Britain's approval of the Curzon Line as the future Polish-Soviet boundary.

As the Red Army was marching into Poland defeating the Nazis, Stalin toughened his stance against the Polish Government-in-Exile, wanting not only the recognition of the proposed frontiers, but also a resignation from the government of all elements 'hostile to the Soviet Union', which meant President Raczkiewicz, armed forces commander Sosnkowski, and other ministers.

[144][211][212] Mikołajczyk's disagreements with his coalition partners (he was unable to convince the ministers that restoration of the prewar eastern border of Poland was no longer feasible and further compromises were necessary) and his departure created a vacuum, because the British and the Americans were practically unwilling to deal with the Polish government that followed.

In the context of the westbound offensive but also to support the clearing of East Prussia and the forces engaged in the Battle of Königsberg, the First Polish Army was directed northwards to the Pomeranian region, where its drive began at the end of January.

[63][220][227][b] The communists constituted only a small, but highly organized and influential minority in the forming and gaining strength Polish pro-Soviet camp, which also included leaders and factions from such main political blocks as the agrarian, socialist, Zionist, and nationalist movements.

The Polish Left in particular, with considerable support from the peasant movement leaders, both critical in respect to the Second Republic's record, was inclined to accept the Soviet territorial concepts and called for the creation of a more egalitarian society.

[222] The tripartite Allied commission made up of Vyacheslav Molotov and the British and American ambassadors in Moscow worked on the composition of the Polish government of national unity from 23 February, but the negotiations soon stalled because of different interpretations of the Yalta Conference agreements.

The former prime minister in exile Stanisław Mikołajczyk, approached by representatives of the communist-controlled Provisional Government, refused to make a separate deal with that body, but on 15 April made a statement of acceptance of the Yalta decisions.

[161] Government Delegate Jan Stanisław Jankowski, chairman of the Council of National Unity Kazimierz Pużak and thirteen other Polish Underground State leaders were invited to and on 27 March 1945 attended talks with General Ivan Serov of the NKVD.

[237][v] As the Soviets and the pro-Soviet Poles solidified their control of the country, a political struggle with the suppressed and harassed opposition ensued, accompanied by a residual but brutally fought armed rebellion waged by unreconciled elements of the former, now officially disbanded underground and the nationalistic right wing.

Stalin urged them to start implementing the land reform without any further delay, not to worry excessively about legal proprieties, because it was a revolutionary action, and to take advantage of the fact that the Red Army was still in Poland to help.

The regime did appeal to citizens' patriotism and generosity and several major fund raising efforts, often led by opposition groups and politicians (some of whom returned at that time of danger from political exile), resulted in donations of considerable magnitude, which by and large ended up not utilized.