Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Poland between hammer and anvil 1918-1945

Situation of Poland between Nazi hammer and Soviet anvil began with the Bolshevik decree of February 7, 1919 entitled “Target Vistula” and resulted in the defensive doctrine of Poland, which was applied in earnest starting on January 26, 1939 when German minister von Ribbentrop was told in Warsaw that Poland will not join the pact against Russia. Poles followed the advice of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who wrote in his last will and testament, that in order to preserve not only the independence of Poland, but in fact Poland’s very existence, the government of Poland had “to veer between Germany and Russia as long as possible and then bring the rest of the world into the conflict, rather than subordinating Poland to either one of its two neighbors.” The choice of the verb “to veer” indicated that Piłsudski was fully aware of the reality, that Poland formed a barrier between two main protagonists and most powerful contenders on the European continent: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Stalin feared a two front war: Japanese attack from the east and German attack from the west. When Poland refused to join Germany on January 26, 1939 Stalin thought that he had a chance to entangle Germany in a relatively long lasting war on the western front, as had happened during WWI. Stalin was willing to pay any price to postpone Hitler’s invasion of the USSR and not let Russia be caught in a two-front war between Germany and Japan.

Poles, threatened by Hitler with complete eradication of the Polish state in the historic Polish lands, knew that Stalin threatened Poland with terror and enslavement. However, Nazi Germany then was the worse of the two evils as far as the very existence of Poland was concerned. Poles made a rational decision and refused to help Germany to defeat Russia. Poland’s refusal to attack Russia saved the Soviet Union from destruction. The Russians so far do not want to admit this fact and they revive the cult of Stalin.

During the 1930ties the League of Nations was trying to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. Then, on August 11, 1939, Hitler finally said to Jacob Burkhardt, Commissioner of the League of Nations: "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and blind to grasp this, I shall be compelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beat the West and then, after their defeat, turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces. I need the Ukraine so that they can not starve me out as happened in the last war." (Roy Dennan "Missed Chances," Indigo, London 1997, p. 65). Hitler talked about Russia being “German Africa” and Russians as “negroes” to be used by the superior German race.

Hitler’s plan to create “Greater Germany” populated by “racial Germans from the River Rhine to the Dnepr River in the Ukraine,” was known to marshal Piłsudski, who understood that Hitler planned eventual eviction and mass murder of Poles and Ukrainians in their historical lands. Earlier, on March 3, 1918, in Brest Litovsk, a town occupied by Germans, Lenin’s government signed a humiliating capitulation, which yielded to German dictate and agreed to make Russia a vassal state of Germany. Berlin planned to treat Russia like Britain treated India and make a colonial empire ruled by Germany from the Rhine River to Vladivostok. In 1939 the territory of Poland blocked Germany from the direct access to the Ukraine and to Russia when Hitler was about to start building his “Germany for next 1000 years.”

Hitler cultivated Darwinian belief that the war for German Lebensraum was an inevitable life-and-death struggle for the “survival of the fittest.” Hitler was willing to let Germany perish in his attempt to implement the doctrine of Lebensraum rather than to let Germany turn back and be “disgraced forever.” Hitler was surprised when for all practical purposes Stalin offered to divide Poland between Germany and Russia by inviting the German-Soviet cooperation on March 10, 1939 in a speech broadcast by radio and addressed to the 18th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow.

Eventually the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was signed in Moscow and dated August 23, 1939.  The news of German-Soviet pact and German betrayal, came to Japanese in the middle of a military disaster in the battle of Khalkhim-Gol, which lead to a cease fire and the end of hostilities between Japan and the Soviet Union on September 16, 1939 after Japan lodged a formal protest in Berlin against the “Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact.” It should be remembered that from May 28, 1938 on, the largest air battles in history up to that time, were fought in Asia and involved 140 to 200 Soviet and Japanese aircraft (A. Stella, Khalkhim-Gol, "The Forgotten War", Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 8, 1983). Heavy Japanese loses and betrayal by Germany, were to bring an end to Japanese-Soviet war on September 16, 1939 and on the next day on Serptember 17, 1939 the Red Army free of the involvement against the Japanese Army.

The fall of Germany at the threshold of the nuclear age destroyed German chances to be world wide super-power. Japan was the first victim of a mass-murder by two nuclear explosions used by US air force. The only Catholic Cathedral in Japan was used as the ground zero for the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.

The Nuremburg trials of the Nazi dignitaries as war criminals were unique in modern times. No Communist mass killers were brought to justice partly because Russia won the war and partly because so many Jews were involved in communist crimes so that influential Jews in the West and especially in the USA, were opposed to such trials, while the American global empire was built mainly at the expense of the British Empire. Thus, during the career of Winston Churchill the British world empire disintegrated and Britain became and island dependent on the USA for its security.

The end of WWII in 1945 brought liquidation of the State of Prussia, with its megalomania to create an empire from the Rhine River to Vladivostok. Now Poland is no more between German hammer and Russian anvil as it was after the partitions of Poland during the hegemony of the Kingdom of Prussia over other independent principalities and small states of Germany.

29 grudnia 2010 r., prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Blacksburg, US www.pogonowski.com