Poland's War Calculation in 1939 E-Book

Stefan Scheil

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 81

Beschreibung

Poland's Reasons, Hopes and Aims in 1939 - Get a new view on the origins of the war between Poland and Germany which eventually became World War II. How Poland became the "betrayed ally" of the Western Powers

Leseprobe

Poland’s Reasons, Hopes and Aims in 1939 - Get a new view on the origins of the war between Poland and Germany which eventually became World War II

“Heathen land is no-man’s land. In this case, who owns today the German land which claims to be neo-heathen? Would Reichsleiter Rosenberg be able to provide a perfectly honest answer?”

Józef Kisielewski (From: The Earth saves the bygone days, 1939)1

“After the upcoming war ..., Poland should annex Danzig, East Prussia, Upper and Central Silesia including Breslau, and Central Pomerania including Kolberg; furthermore, Poland should set up under her protection and leadership a number of buffer states along the Oder and Neisse rivers.“

Jedrzej Giertych (From a newspaper article, summer of 1939)2

1 Quoted from Kisielewski, Earth, p. 97 et seq. Józef Kisielewski (1906–1966) was a Polish journalist, writer and politician.

2 Quoted from Giertych, Pol wieku poslkiej polityki, p. 180 et seq. Giertych (1903-1992), in 1939, was a member of the Central Committee of the National Democratic Party and the founder of a minor political dynasty. His grandson, Roman Giertych was assistant head of state of the Polish Republic until 2007.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Basis: the new Polish nationalism

Europe’s seminal catastrophe seen as a chance – the First World War from the Polish point of view

Poland’s phantom dilemma after 1919: Empire or failure

Poland’s war calculation - The necessary international constellation

Execution – Western offensive guarantee and Eastern backing

Summary – Questions and answers

Literature

List of Abbreviations

The Author

Introduction

Let us begin with a clarification of the terms used in this book. Poland’s war calculations of 1939 were part of the consequences of Poland’s fight for its rebirth as a state, for its borders and for its establishment on the international stage. This fight went on incessantly in the years between 1918 and 1939, initially, more often than not, as a Hot War, with interspersed Cold War phases; occasionally, there even appeared to be phases of détente with respect to neighboring countries.

Still, for Poland, these never-ending disputes took on an existential significance, because the right to exist as a political entity in the shape envisioned by Poland at its recreation in 1918 did not go without opposition. Poland claimed sovereignty over other peoples and ethnic groups. These claims collided with the principles behind the international standard of “self-determination of nations” that had just been proclaimed in 1919; on a more practical level it also clashed with a long list of political interests of other states. The Polish empire in the inter-war years was an anachronism.

The conflict with Lithuania, another country that had been put (back) on the map at the end of the First World War, is a case in point. It concerned the city of Vilnius (Wilna) and turned out to be the only such case which Poland, in 1938, was able to bring to a successful end without outside help. No such successes were achieved in other cases under dispute. Polish claims for the Ukraine and White Russia were rejected by the Soviet Union, a state which Warsaw did not even recognize. Polish agencies were working towards the dissolution of these states under the label of “Prometheism” and were confident that the break-up take would place before the end of the Second World War.3 By the criteria of international law and from the point of view of domination over other ethnic groups, Polish-German relations were particularly explosive. The aims and actions of the Polish republic in respect of the German state and the ethnic Germans in Poland were clearly at odds with the right to self-determination and were inacceptable for any German government.

This latter problem became decisive in 1939. This is not to mean that Poland eventually bore the unique responsibility for the German-Polish war of 1939 or for other wars. In an era of world wars, there are no unique causes. Any such explanation would be inadmissibly deficient. The present book does try, however, to retrace the road to war from the Polish point of view. When Poland opted for a confrontational course with respect to its German neighbor in early 1939, she did have certain ideas. Long envisioned aims were to be realized by this step.

As we shall see, the intellectual roots of these aims reached back far into the 19th century. A fight with Germany for a Polish expansion westward, up to the Oder river and northward, up to the coast of the Baltic Sea, a fight for territories that, at some time in history had been or were alleged to have been Polish lands in Pomerania, Silesia, and Brandenburg, was an objective that had been conjured up as inevitable by numerous Polish authors over many decades.

Among them we have poets and intellectuals, historians and geographers and, last not least, politicians and soldiers. The year 1939 was thought to be favorable for such a battle because the international constellation looked promising. From a Polish point of view, such an assessment was realistic and understandable. Therefore, up to the coast of the Baltic Sea, a fight for territories that, at some time in history had been or were alleged to have been Polish lands in Pomerania, Silesia, and Brandenburg, was an objective that had been conjured up as inevitable by numerous Polish authors over many decades.

Over the last so many decades, much has been written about Polish and German ideas in respect of the disputed areas; Poland’s expansionist plans have been clearly demonstrated, yet this has in no way altered the thesis that on 1st September 1939, Germany launched a surprise attack on Poland. In the minds of authors dealing with contemporary history, there are no Polish plans preceding the above date – a completely erroneous position, to say the least.

In Germany, the Polish assessment faced fundamental anti-Polish opinions and tendencies. Poland had every right to fear for her very existence. In the early Weimar republic, no German chancellor or politician worth his salt, was in any way inclined to respect Germany’s eastern border which the Germans had been forced, literally at gunpoint, to accept at Versailles. It went without saying that they strove for a readjustment of the border with Poland, but they also questioned the very legal and practical bases of Poland’s existence as an independent state.

Both Gustav Stresemann and Joseph Wirth, German chancellors, subscribed to a policy of “Poloniam esse delendam”. The head of the Reichswehr, General Seeckt, considered the existence of Poland to be “incompatible with German interests”. Bernhard von Bülow, longtime Chief Secretary of the German Foreign Office and certainly no National Socialist, demanded “one last partition of Poland”. Significant segments of the German political scene had thus not yet accepted the existence of the new state of Poland and considered it to be the very symbol of the German defeat in 1918. We will not elaborate on this point, its aspects are well-known.

What is less well-known, on the other hand, are Poland’s own expansionist plans. This is quite surprising, as they were just as fundamental in their scope as those of the Germans. It is true that only a few lines of thought went so far as to deny the Germans – be they Germanic or simply across the board – the right to exist to the south of Denmark. However, when we come to the advancement of the Polish border far into central Germany, or the displacement of the German capital from Berlin to Frankfurt on the Main, or the carving up of Germany into a desirable number of smaller states, there is no shortage of radical utterances by famous and influential Polish personalities.

In the text which follows, we shall describe briefly the ideas then ‘en vogue’ on the Polish side and their effects on Warsaw’s political decisions in the period before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. We realize that this is a delicate subject and can easily be misinterpreted. The author published, in June 2006, a lengthy article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, entitled “Central European visions of power after Versailles” and describing the Polish political considerations. It provoked a rebuttal by Gesine Schwan, at the time president of the “Europa-Universität Viadrina” at Frankfurt on Oder, who, in a lecture at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., maintained that Scheil, an independent historian, had described the German “Drang nach Osten” as a mere reaction to a Polish “Drang nach Westen”.4 This was never stated nor intended as an interpretation. The essential thesis was: In the spring of 1939, the Polish government took a conscious decision. It decided to launch the long-expected conflict with Germany within the year. The present booklet attempts to describe, from the perspective of the Warsaw government, the assumptions on which the decision rested and the ensuing events. Quite obviously, there exist many other ways of describing the events of 1939; in this case, we have chosen to examine the Polish point of view.

3 In November 1943 the Polish foreign ministry, in a memorandum, requested the dissolution of Russia as well as the extension of Poland toward the east beyond the prewar borders. “We make no hasty claims for a break-up of Russia , but if such possibilities should arise we support the independence of the Ukraine and the Caucasian Federation. We strive for the transformation of the all-Russian empire into national states ... . In the east, in case of a transformation of Russia, we desire a rounding-off including Kamieniec and Minsk. Lithuania must form a unified state with Poland, in which case we are ready to confer complete equality of rights to the Lithuanians. Furthermore, we are eying minute border corrections concerning Romania and possibly Latvia.” Quoted after Gelberg, Entstehung, p. 36.

4http://www.ghidc.org/files/publications/bulletin/bu040/039.pdf, p. 46.