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 an 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.
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