History of Poland (1939–1945)
Invasion and occupation
On 1 September 1939, without a formal declaration of war, Germany invaded Poland. Its pretext was that Polish troops had committed various "provocations" along the German-Polish border, but the real reason was that the occupation of Poland was a necessary first step in Adolf Hitler's plan to conquer eastern Europe to create "living space" (Lebensraum) for the German people, and to exterminate the large Jewish populations living in Poland and the Soviet Union.
The Polish armed forces resisted the German invasion with great tenacity and heroism, but their strategic position was hopeless since Germany and German-occupied Czechoslovakia surrounded Poland on three sides. In Poland the Germans first used the tactics known as the Blitzkrieg or "lightning war:" the rapid advance of the Panzer (armoured) divisions, the use of dive-bombers to break up troop concentrations and of aerial bombing of undefended cities to weaken civilian morale. The Polish Army and Air Force had little modern equipment to match this onslaught.
Britain and France honoured their pledge to Poland by declaring war on Germany, but there was no practical assistance they could render. The Soviet Union could have assisted Poland, but the Poles feared Stalin's communism nearly as much as they feared Hitler's Nazism, and during 1939 they had refused to agree to any arrangement which would allow Soviet troops to enter Poland. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 had ended any possibility of Soviet aid.
The Polish military regime had compounded their strategic weakness by insisting on massing their forces along the western border, in defence of Poland's main industrial areas around Poznan and Lodz, where they would be easily surrounded and cut off. By the time the Polish command decided to withdraw to the line of the Vistula, it was too late. By 14 September Warsaw was surrounded. On 17 September the Soviet Union began to occupy the eastern areas of the country under the terms of the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
The Polish government and high command retreated to the south-east and eventually crossed into neutral Romania. There was no formal surrender, and resistance continued in many places. Warsaw was bombed into submission on 27 September, and some Army units fought until well into October. In the more mountainous parts of the country Army units began underground resistance almost at once.
The Polish government re-assembled in Paris and chose General Wladyslaw Sikorski as the Prime Minister in exile. Most of the Polish Navy escaped to Britain, and thousands of other Poles escaped through Romania or across the Baltic Sea to continue the fight. Many Poles took part in the Battle of Britain and other operations beside British forces.
German Administration
Hans Frank
Once the fighting had stopped Germany immediately annexed not only all the lands it had surrendered to Poland in 1918 under the Treaty of Versailles, including Danzig, the Polish Corridor, West Prussia and Upper Silesia, but also other areas i.e. Lodz. In addition, the Soviet Union, under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, annexed all Polish territory east of the rivers Bug and San, except Wilno that became a capitol of Lithuania. These territories were largely inhabited by Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews, Poles, Tartars, Armenians and others.
The remaining block of territory was placed under a German administration called the Government General General Government (in German Generalgouvernment für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete), with its capital at Cracow. Hans Frank was appointed Governor-General of the occupied territories on 26 October 1939. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, further territory in Galicia was added to Frank's domain. Frank oversaw the segregation of the Jews into ghettos in the larger cities, particularly Warsaw and Lodz, and the use of Polish civilians as forced and compulsory labour in German war industries.
The population in the General Government's territory was initially about 12 million, but this increased as about 500,000 Poles were expelled from the Germany-annexed areas and "resettled" in the Government General. Offsetting this was the German campaign of extermination of the Polish intelligentsia and other elements thought likely to resist. From 1941 disease and hunger also began to reduce the population. Poles were also deported in large numbers to work as forced labour in Germany: eventually about a million were deported, and many died in Germany.
It was German policy that the (non-Jewish) Poles were to be reduced to the status of serfs, and eventually replaced by German colonists. In the Government General, all secondary education was abolished and all Polish cultural institutions closed. In 1943, the government selected the Zamojskie area for further German colonisation. German settlements were plannned, and the Polish population expelled amid great brutality, but few Germans were settled in the area before 1944.
The Holocaust in Poland
Persecution of the Jews, particularly in the urban areas, began immediately after the occupation. In the first two years, however, the Germans confined themselves to stripping the Jews of their property and herding them into ghettoes and putting them to work in war-related industries. During this period the Jewish community leadership were able to some extent to bargain with the Germans.
In 1942, however, the Germans began the systematic killing of the Jewish population. Six extermination camps were established in which the most extreme measures of the Holocaust, the mass murder by gassing of millions of Jews from Poland and other countries, was carried out between 1942 and 1944. Of Poland's prewar Jewish population of 3 million, only about 50,000 survived the war.
There were examples of conspicuous courage by Poles in hiding Jewish families, but also a cases in which criminal Poles betrayed Jews to the Germans, or made their living as "Jew-hunters." Polish resistance set the capital punishment for everyone, who helps Germans during Holocaust, so many such a criminals were actually executed.
Jews were also killed by Jewish units working for the Nazis and Jews directly employed by them. At the areas of former Soviet occupation, Germans tried to inicite hate against alleged Jewish collaboration with Soviets, so they could perform genocide local hands. It is alleged that this strategy initially succeeded in the town of Jedwabne. However, the truth about this incident is hotly disputed.
Governments in exile
Wladyslaw Sikorski
The Polish government in exile, based first in Paris and then in London, was recognised by all the Allied governments. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Polish government in exile established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, despite Stalin's role in the destruction of Poland. Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Soviet Union in eastern Poland in 1939 were released and were allowed to leave the country via Iran. They formed the basis for the Polish Army led by General Wladyslaw Anders that fought alongside the Allies at Cassino, Arnhem and other battles.
But in April 1943 the Germans announced that they had discovered the graves of 4,300 Polish officers who had been taken prisoner in 1939 and murdered by the Soviets, in a mass gave in Katyn Wood near Smolensk. The Germans invited the International Red Cross to visit the site, and they confirmed both that the graves contained Polish officers and that they had been killed with Soviet weapons. The Soviet government said that the Germans had fabricated the discovery. The Allied governments, for diplomatic reasons, formally accepted this, but the Polish government in exile refused to do so. Stalin then severed relations with the London Poles.
Stalin immediately set up the nucleus of a Communist controlled Polish government, and began recruiting for a Communist Polish Army. By July 1943 this army, led by General Zygmunt Berling, had 40,000 members. Since it was clear that it would be the Soviet Union, not the western Allies, who would liberate Poland from the Germans, this breach had fateful consequences for Poland. In an unfortunate coincidence, Sikorski, the most talented of the Polish exile leaders, was killed in an aircrash near Gibraltar in July. He was succeeded as head of the government in exile by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk.
During 1943 and 1944 the Allied leaders, particularly Winston Churchill, tried to bring about a resumption talks between Stalin and the London Poles. But these efforts broke down over several issues. One was the massacre at Katyn and the fate of many other Poles who had disappeared into Soviet prisons and labour camps since 1939. Another was Poland's postwar borders. Stalin insisted that the territories annexed in 1939, which were to become mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian in composition, should remain in Soviet hands, and that Poland should be compensated with lands to be annexed from Germany, so called Regained territories. The London Poles, led by Mikolajczyk, refused to compromise on this issue, even when Churchill threatened to cut off relations with them. A third issue was Mikolajczyk's insistence that Stalin not set up a Communist government in postwar Poland. Fundamentally, the issue was that the Poles did not trust the Soviets, while Stalin was determined that he alone should determine Poland's future.
Resistance
Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski
Resistance to the German occupation began almost at once, although there is little terrain in Poland suitable for guerilla operations. The Home Army (in Polish Armia Krajowa or AK), loyal to the Polish government in exile in London, was formed from a number of smaller groups in 1942. From 1943 the AK was in competition with the People's Army (Armia Ludowa or AL), backed by the Soviet Union and controlled by the Polish Communist Party. By 1944 the AK had some 200,000 men, although few arms: the AL was much smaller. The AK killed about 150,000 German troops during the occupation.
In April 1943 the Germans began deporting the remaining Jews from the Warsaw ghetto, provoking the Warsaw Ghetto Rising, April 19 to May 16, the first armed uprising against the Germans in Poland. Some units of the AK tried to assist the Ghetto rising, but for the most part the Jews were left to fight alone. The Jewish leaders knew that the rising would be crushed but they preferred to die fighting than wait to be deported to their deaths in the camps.
In August 1944, as the Soviet armed forces approached Warsaw, the government in exile called for an uprising in the city, so that they could return to a liberated Warsaw and try to prevent a Communist take-over. The AK, led by Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, launched the Warsaw Rising. Soviet forces were less than 20km away but on the orders of Soviet High Command they gave no assistance. Stalin described the rising as a "criminal adventure." The Poles appealed for the western Allies for help. The Royal Air Force dropped some arms but, as in 1939, it was almost impossible for the Allies to help the Poles without Soviet assistance.
The fighting in Warsaw was desperate, with selfless valour being displayed in street-to-street fighting. The AK had between 12,000 and 20,000 soldiers, most with only small arms, against a well-armed German Army of 20,000 SS and regular Army units. Bór-Komorowski's hope that the AK could take and hold Warsaw for the return of the London government was never likely to be achieved. After 63 days of savage fighting the city was rubble and the reprisals savage. The SS and auxiliary units recruited from Soviet Army deserters were particularly brutal.
After Bór-Komorowski's surrender the AK fighters were treated as prisoners-of-war by the Germans, but the civilian population were ruthlessly punished. About 500,000 people were sent to labour camps, while over 245,000 died. The city was almost totally destroyed after German sappers systematically demolished the city. The Warsaw Rising allowed the Germans to destroy the AK as a fighting force, but the main beneficiary was Stalin, who was able to impose a Communist government on postwar Poland with little fear of armed resistance.
Liberation
As the Soviets advanced through Poland in late 1944 the General Government collapsed. The Communist controlled Committee of National Liberation was installed by the Soviet Union in Lublin, the first major Polish city to be liberated, in July, and began to take over the administration of the country as the Germans retreated. The government in exile in London had only one card to play, the forces of the AK. This was why the government in exile was determined that the AK, and not the Soviets, would liberate Warsaw. The failure of the Warsaw Rising marked the end of any real chance that Poland would escape postwar Communist rule.
Frank was captured by American troops in May 1945 and was one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. During his trial he converted to Catholicism. Frank surrendered forty volumes of his diaries to the Tribunal and much evidence against him and others was gathered from them. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and on 1 October 1946 he was sentenced to death by hanging.
In 1945, Stalin carried out a major redrawing of Poland's borders. The eastern territories which he had occupied in 1939 were permanently annexed to the Soviet Union, and most of their Polish inhabitants expelled: today they are part of Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. In compensation, Poland was given former German territory (so called Regained Territories: the southern half of East Prussia and all of Pomerania and Silesia, up to the Oder-Neisse Line. This entailed the expulsion of some 2 million Germans. The defence of this frontier made Poland dependent on Soviet support.