In this constellation Poland’s invaders enjoyed every possible advantage. The German Command possessed roughly the same 60 divisions as its Polish adversary, but, thanks to the occupation of Czechoslovakia, it had Poland surrounded from three sides at once. It enjoyed a decisive superiority, both in mechanical forces and in air power, which would inflict a hundred Guernicas on Poland in the opening days. Above all, it could confidently launch its Panzer divisions deep into Polish territory, secure in the knowledge that its Soviet partners would take any Polish counter-measures in the rear. The Soviet Command held the trump card. Declining any joint timetable with the Germans, the Soviet generals could watch and wait until Poland was stretched on the German rack before marching in to deliver the
coup de grâce
. In the Polish campaign of September 1939, therefore, military operations were overshadowed by politics and treachery. The Poles did their duty, fighting on for five weeks against hopeless odds. The Western Powers declared war on Germany, but declined to confront the Soviet Union, even when Soviet complicity became evident. Nor did they intervene in the fighting. The British could not, and the French would not. French mobilization procedures had been designed to prepare for a long war: they required all front-line divisions to be stripped down to the status of temporary cadres, during a long period of reorganization which precluded any immediate offensive operations. So Hitler and Stalin had everything their own way.
At dawn on 1 September, German columns stormed into Poland from the north, the west, and the south. The Polish defence lines close to the frontier were circumvented. Warsaw was surrounded from the 9th. The civilian population was subjected to unprecedented bombardments. A German fifth column was operating behind the lines. Nazi Einsatzgruppen appeared in the rear, shooting resisters, stragglers, and Jews. Screaming Stuka dive-bombers destroyed railways, roads, and bridges, together with the refugees that crammed them. Warsaw, half-reduced to rubble, dug in for a long siege. The Polish army regrouped in the south-east for the defence of Lwów, whilst mounting a determined counter-attack in the centre on the Bzura. On the 15th a Nazi communiqué falsely announced that Warsaw had fallen. (It held out for two more weeks.) But Stalin may have thought that he was losing out. The blow was struck on the 17th, when Red Army troops poured over the eastern frontier. They sowed total confusion by their own false communiqués about saving Poland from the Nazis. In fact, they drove straight to the agreed demarcation line on the River Bug, and to the southern frontier with Romania and Hungary to seal it off. The Germans and Soviets held a joint victory parade in Brześć (Brest-Litowsk) before fixing the details of their victory.
The German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Demarcation signed on 28 September reached much further than the pact of five weeks before.
It redrew the demarcation line, putting Lithuania into the Soviet sphere in exchange for a slice of central Poland. And it contained yet another secret protocol which envisaged joint action against Polish ‘agitation’. These measures were put into place as Warsaw finally surrendered. The Polish Government had escaped into exile. Large numbers of Polish troops took to the woods, or fled abroad. The final capitulation took place on 4 October, the day when Hitler arrived in Warsaw to receive the salute of his admiring legions. Everything to the east of the Bug was taken by the Soviets.
Hitler’s thoughts at this juncture were recorded by his faithful propaganda chief:
The Fuehrer’s verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive and amorphous. And a ruling class that is an unsatisfactory result of a mingling between the lower orders and an Aryan master-race. The Poles’ dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgement is absolutely nil…
The Fuehrer has no intention of assimilating the Poles … Had Henry the Lion conquered the East … the result would certainly have been a strongly slavicised race of German mongrels. Better the present situation. Now we know the laws of racial heredity and can handle things accordingly.
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The double occupation of Poland brought two laboratories of totalitarianism into being side by side. For two years the Nazi and Soviet vultures feasted on Poland’s fallen body undisturbed. In the German zone the Western districts were annexed to the Reich, and subjected to an intense regime of racial screening and germanization. All other districts were thrown into a so-called General Government of Poland under SS and military rule. This ‘Gestapoland’, subject neither to Polish nor to German law, became the ultimate test-bed of Nazi ideology. It was the only part of occupied Europe where, in pursuit of their eastern
Lebensraum
, the Nazi planners had the time to apply their racial policies with full vigour to the whole population. After Himmler’s first inspection, the aged and mentally handicapped were seized from the hospitals, orphanages were raided for boys and girls suitable for the stud programme of the
Lebensborn
organization;
71
and concentration camps were organized at Auschwitz and Majdanek to deal with the Resistance. In an act of cold-blooded genocide, the so-called
AB-Aktion
, some 15,000 Polish intellectuals, officials, politicians, and clergy were selected for shooting or for consignment to concentration camps. As from late 1939, Poland’s large Jewish community was ordered into designated ghetto districts, which were then gradually walled, locked, and totally segregated; Jewish councils, supported by a Jewish police force, were recruited to run the ghettos under Nazi supervision.
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[
AUSCHWITZ
]
In the adjoining Soviet zone, phoney referenda were staged to justify the claim that ‘western Byelorussia’ and ‘western Ukraine’ had opted for annexation. This ‘GPU-land’, which remained cordoned off from the rest of the USSR, was scourged by the full force of the Stalinist terror. Some forty categories of people, from policemen to philatelists, were selected for instant arrest and deportation. By the summer of 1941 between 1 and 2 million individuals had been transported
either to the Arctic camps or to forced exile in Central Asia. The Terror was directed not only at all former Polish state officials, down to village teachers and foresters, but equally at all communal organizations of Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews. The peoples who had supposedly been ‘liberated from Polish rule’ were scourged as mercilessly as everyone else. In an act of cold-blooded genocide, some 26,000 Polish prisoners of war—mainly reserve officers, and hence intellectuals, officials, politicians, and clergy—were taken from their camps and shot in a series of massacres known under the collective name of Katyń. On the frontier bridge over the Bug at Brest, people entering the USSR met others, including Jews, who were seeking haven in the Reich. ‘Where on earth are you going?’ exclaimed an SS-officer on one occasion; ‘we are going to kill you.’
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The full extent of co-operation between the SS and the NKVD in these years has never been properly established. The Nazi files went missing; and Soviet archives remained closed. Even so, a high-ranking Soviet liaison officer was attached to SS HQ in Cracow right up to 1941. Nazi and Soviet delegations attended joint conferences; prisoners were exchanged; Nazi and Soviet propaganda worked in unison, and at full blast. As from 24 August the Soviet press reversed its previous policy, and took to quoting the
Völkischer Beobachter
as a credible source of information.
Pravda
announced that ‘German-Soviet friendship is now established forever’.
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[
KATYO
]
The impotence of the Western Powers undoubtedly gave encouragement to Hitler and Stalin. What a French politician dubbed the
drôle de guerre
or ‘phoney war’ was only droll for those not directly involved. In the 20 months after the fall of Poland, 13 European countries were due to be overrun—8 by Hider, 5 by Stalin. Stalin took the lead by sending the Red Army into Finland on 30 November 1939.
The ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40 revealed serious deficiencies in the Red Army, whilst testing the tolerance of the Western Powers to the limit. For five months, well-motivated Finnish troops held off the Soviet invader. In the early months they inflicted bloody slaughter on clumsy Soviet attempts to storm the Mannerheim Line. Soviet tactics and equipment were made to look inferior, Soviet policy was condemned for blatant aggression. When the League of Nations expelled the USSR, the Western Powers could no longer pretend, as with Poland, that Stalin’s depredations were somehow more legitimate than Hitler’s. In the spring, as the Red Army prepared for an overwhelming assault, the British Government was obliged to consider Finnish pleas for aid and assistance via Narvik and the Lapland railway. There was even a scheme to bomb the Baku oilfields in retaliation for Soviet supplies to Germany. Squadrons of British bombers, repainted with the swastika emblem of the Finnish air force, were standing by when news of a Finno-Soviet Treaty saved London from its dilemma. Finland was to remain independent and neutral, though forced to cede a large tract of eastern territory, in Karelia. The German General Staff can hardly have missed the implications about the USSR’s apparent weakness.
The Finnish campaign exposed the vulnerability of German interests in Scandinavia, notably in the Swedish iron ore exported via Narvik. Hitler struck on
9 April 1940. Denmark was quickly overrun, and Norway invaded shortly afterwards. An Allied expeditionary force sent to Narvik was repelled with heavy loss. This was the first occasion on which British intelligence chose to withhold life-saving information rather than betray their knowledge of the Nazis’ Enigma Code, whose secrets had first been penetrated by the Poles.
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Henceforth, Scandinavia lay firmly under German control. Denmark retained its King and government; Norway was handed over to a native collaborator, Vidkun Quisling; Sweden was to retain its neutrality, so long as the iron ore continued to flow. Here were signals that German policy in the West was to be incomparably more lenient than in the East.
KATYN
O
N
5 March 1940, Stalin signed an order authorizing the NKVD to shoot over 26,000 Allied prisoners-of-war. The prisoners, who had been captured during joint German-Soviet operations in Poland the previous September, were being held in three separate Soviet camps—at Kozielsk, Oshtakovo, and Starobielsk. They were nearly all Polish reserve officers—doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, policemen, priests, and one woman—who had been separated out from a much larger pool of POWs in the USSR. They were driven in small groups to secret killing-grounds, bound and blindfolded, shot in the head, and buried in mass graves. The operation was concluded on 6 June.
During those same months, in pursuance of a secret clause in the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Demarcation, the Nazi SS and Soviet NKVD were co-operating closely. Hidden from the outside world, both occupying powers conducted a series of parallel massacres and deportations.
2
Whilst the West was transfixed by the ‘Phoney War’, their Polish allies were being systematically and cynically murdered.
In 1941, when the Nazi-Soviet Pact collapsed and Stalin signed an alliance with the exiled Polish Government, the Poles sought news of their missing officers. In one exchange in the Kremlin, Stalin told General Sikorski that they must have fled. ‘But where could they flee to?’ ‘Well, to Manchuria for instance.’
3
In April 1943, during the outbreak of Warsaw’s Ghetto Rising, the Nazi authorities in Poland released a newsfilm showing the bodies of c.4,500 murdered Polish officers unearthed in the Katyh Forest near Smolensk (they had found the victims taken from Kozielsk). They said it was a Soviet crime. The Soviets said that it was a Nazi provocation. The exiled Polish Government appealed to the International Red Cross for an enquiry. For this, they were denounced as ‘Fascist collaborators’ by the Kremlin, which promptly withdrew diplomatic recognition. One international commission which visited the site in 1943 under German auspices supported the German claims. A second commission in 1944, under Soviet auspices, supported Soviet claims.
4
The Katyń Massacres presented a major embarrassment for British policy. Whilst playing host to the Polish Government, London was deeply committed to the alliance with Stalin. An official but unpublished British report had concluded that Soviet guilt was a ‘near certainty’. But the superior moral purpose of the Allied cause could be put at risk. So every effort was made to suppress the facts. Official agencies encouraged belief in the Soviet version. War censorship kept contrary accounts out of circulation.
5
The situation was summarized in confidential SOE files: ‘The official line in the UK has been to pretend that the whole affair was a fake … Any other view would have been distasteful to the public, since it could be inferred that we were allied to a power guilty of the same sort of atrocities as the Germans.’
6
More surprisingly, little honest information was forthcoming in peacetime. The Katyń murders were raised by Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal; but the charges against Germans were soon dropped, and the case was not pursued. Throughout the Cold War, Polish emigres in London were prevented from erecting a public memorial; and British officers were forbidden to attend the annual services of remembrance. Despite the unequivocal findings of a US Congressional Committee in the 1950s, a British Foreign Office minister was still proclaiming in 1989 that the rights and wrongs were unclear. In 1990–1, when Soviet responsibility was confirmed by President Gorbachev in part, and then by President Yeltsin in full, the British War Crimes Act was carefully designed to exclude Allied criminals from its purview. Several of the alleged NKVD murderers were reported alive and well in Russia.
7
In the USSR and in communist-ruled Poland, ‘Katyń’ remained a non-subject for exactly fifty years.
8
A major Soviet memorial to Nazi barbarity was erected at a nearby Byelorussian village called Khatyń, to which millions of visitors were taken in a calculated policy of disinformation.
The Black Book of Polish Censorship
classed Katyń as an event which could not be mentioned, even to blame the Nazis.
9
Possession of the
Lista Katyńska
, a roll-call of the victims published abroad, was a criminal offence.
10
Throughout that half-century, ‘Katyń’ offered a litmus test for the professional honesty of historians and their grasp of the realities of the Grand Alliance. It was by no means the most extreme of Soviet acts of violence. But it was the issue
par excellence
which forced commentators to choose between the growing weight of evidence and the self-serving statements of the victorious Western and Soviet governments. Those who chose to tell the truth stood to be dismissed as ‘unscientific’.
11