Invasion of Poland

Date: 1939 From: Encyclopedia of World War II, Volume II World War II began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland fell quickly and remained occupied throughout the war. In proportion to its population of 35 million at the outbreak of hostilities, it suffered the highest rate of casualties among all combatants: 6 million killed—about 17 percent of the population. In addition to deaths, many hundreds of thousands of Poles were made refugees, and it is estimated that 500,000 homes were destroyed. The invasion of Poland was part of Adolf Hitler's aggressive expansion of Germany in search ofLebensraum, living space, for the German people. After annexing Czechoslovakia, Germany demanded the incorporation of Danzig (Gdańsk) into the Third Reich, along with a road and rail link to East Prussia. As Hitler expected, Poland rejected these incursions into Polish sovereignty. What Hitler did not expect was that the British government would guarantee Poland's

independence and conclude a Mutual Assistance Pact with Poland. This prompted Hitler to denounce Germany's 1934 Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and to conclude the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact withJoseph Stalin on August 23, 1939. The pact made certain territorial concessions to the Soviet Union in return for Stalin's pledge that he would not ally the Soviet Union with Poland to resist Hitler's expansion there; indeed, he would participate in and benefit from the invasion. With the way prepared—and despite the British guarantee—Hitler ordered the invasion to proceed. The Blitzkrieg advance was a one-sided battle between a highly mobile modern army and a gallant but outnumbered and outgunned force of defenders. To make a desperate situation utterly hopeless, on September 17, the Red Army also invaded Polish territory; however, Hitler quickly altered the terms of his original agreement with Stalin, which had divided Poland along the Vistula River, putting the

western portion under German control and making the eastern portion a puppet of the Soviets. Now that the invasion was an accomplished fact, Stalin was compelled to cede a large portion of Poland to Hitler, and the dividing line was placed at the Bug River. During the period before the outbreak of war, the Polish government was ostensibly a democracy, although it was dominated by followers of Marshal Jósef Piłsudski, the strongman-cum-dictator who had governed the nation since its independence in 1918 until his death in 1935. The president in 1939, Ignacy Mokicki (1867–1946), who had been a close associate of Piłsudski, maintained an authoritarian government with a strong

military air. Dissent was not tolerated, and the government moved steadily toward a monolithic one-party system. The repressive climate gave rise to various rebellious undercurrents; however, once the invasion began, Poles universally rallied to the defense of their nation. The resulting unity was short-lived. With the rapid collapse of the Polish military, recriminations against the Mokicki government came in abundance. The government fled south to Romania on September 18, and was interned there. Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, commander in chief of the Polish armed forces, interned with other officials, ordered all military personnel to seek sanctuary in neutral states and then move on to France, where the Polish army would be re-formed. With the government interned, leadership of Polish resistance to the invasion was temporarily suspended. On September 30, Mokicki officially transferred his powers to Władysław Raczkiewicz, former interior minister and marshal of the Senate who happened to be in France at the outbreak of the war. Raczkiewicz turned immediately to General Władysław Sikorski and charged him with forming a government in Paris. Sikorski had been a close associate of Piłsudski, but had fallen from grace and lived mainly in the French capital. His distance from the late regime gave him a certain credibility that enabled him to create a coalition government in exile that included representatives of the parties that had been suppressed by Mokicki. France recognized the new government instantly, and the Polish cause was thereafter identified with Sikorski. Although Sikorski assumed a great deal of authority, he also authorized the creation of a National Council (Rada Narodowa) in December 1939, which functioned as a kind of parliament in exile. Members were not elected, however, but chosen from 20 prominent Polish politicians who happened to be in France. The council was advisory in nature and had no legislative authority. Nevertheless, thanks to its first president, the charismatic Ignacy Paderewski, a world-famous pianist and composer as well as a Polish nationalist and patriot, the council wielded considerable moral force. This did not

mean that Poland enjoyed much practical influence in the conduct of the war. Sikorski understood that his exile government existed at the sufferance of France and, after the fall of France in June 1940, of Britain and (later) the United States and the Soviet Union as well. Unfortunately, most of the Polish army in France was lost in the Battle of France before it could be evacuated to England. Indeed, Sikorski fell under heavy criticism for his inept handling of the crisis attendant on the fall of France, especially his acquiescence in the deportation of Poles to the Soviet Union. President Raczkiewicz called for the dismissal of Sikorski, but the British stood by him, and Poland, weak as it was, stood as Britain's only ally against Hitler's Germany after the fall of France and until the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, which propelled the USSR into the fight against the Germans. The entry of the Soviets into the war against Germany motivated the Polish government in exile to sign a treaty with the USSR on July 30, providing for full military cooperation against Germany. Despite the treaty, Poland's military (except for forces that had fled to England) was under virtually total control by the Soviet Union during the rest of the war. On July 4, 1943, Sikorski was killed in an aircraft accident. The result was a division within the ranks of the Polish government in exile that greatly diminished Poland's voice in its own postwar fate and ensured that its future would be dominated by the Soviets.