Why the west likes neither Molotov, nor Ribbentrop 8 страница
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Who made Hitler attack Stalin
Once again General Doumenc gives a vague answer:
— I am not aware of any negotiations between the governments; I only know what my government has informed me of1.
Reading shorthand notes of proceedings, as well as cablegrams from ambassadors and other documents of the day, one cannot divest oneself of the idea that the Western diplomats were making efforts to confuse the Soviet leadership to achieve their aim. Something came amiss…
Poland was doomed by England and France to annihilation in order to make Hitler start his big war and steer in the right direction. In half a year France, in her turn, will experience the trappings of the British policy, its treachery and perfidy.
But before Hitler entered Paris, there was Warsaw…
AVP USSR. F. 06. OP. 1a. P. 25. D. 12. L. 118–126 // The USSR in the struggle for peace… P. 635.
The betrayed Poland
The Englishmen claim that they have nev-
er lost wars. They have lost quite a num-
ber of wars, and in each they fought to
the last ally.
Adolf Hitler 1
An enemy does not betray.
French proverb
The history of the Second World War knows nothing more short-sighted, irrational and surprising than the conduct of the Polish government in 1939. In fact, that government did all it could to ensure Hitler’s aggression against Poland and her resounding defeat.
The Polish leaders
‰ took a hostile attitude to Germany, brusquely rejecting all her proposals; ‰ flatly refused the chance to make an agreement with the USSR2;
‰ ignored the latest German proposals to negotiate the discord betweenGermany and Poland.
The speech of the Reichschansellor Hitler on an anniversary of the “beer putsch”. Munich, November 8, 1942.
On May 11, 1939 the Polish ambassador in Moscow Grzybowski made the following statement: “Poland does not find it possible to conclude a mutual assistance pact”.
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Who made Hitler attack Stalin
Hitler tried not to quarrel with his British patrons and hoped, right to the end, to settle the Polish conflict peacefully. On August 29, 1939 he demanded that an authorized representative of Poland should urgently come to Berlin. But nobody came on the 30th and the 31st of August. Yet, on the 31st the Polish ambassador Lipski came to see Ribbentrop. Asked if he had authorization to hold negotiations, the Pole answered negatively. “Then it is no use to continue the conversation”, — said the Minister of Foreign Affairs and said good-bye to the ambassador. The German invasion was to begin in about 10 hours…1
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Didn’t the Poles realize that the situation might lead to war with the Third Reich? Certainly, they did and were preparing for war. But they meant a different war…
In spite of the evident menace of a bilateral conflict, the Polish army did not make any military defense works on the German border. There was nothing to prevent Hitler’s armored spearhead from splitting, surrounding and routing the Polish Army2.
Why were there no military defense works? There were none, because the Polish generals had been preparing for war not against Germany, but for Germany in her attack on the Soviet Union3. That was why all the Polishfortifications were on the eastern border, i. e. against the Red Army. Poland’s western border was meant to be the home front, apart from the battlefront in the east. <The western border> “had no fortifications, but was full of ware-houses and depots. Besides, in the West of the then Poland, there were engineering structures of the military and economic nature, the center of Polish industry…Thus, in the West, the area where the Poles deployed for action against Germany was their back, not the front”4.
The Poles made an error in identifying their enemy. It was not the USSR, which had never attacked Poland, but the friendly Germany that decided
Ovsyany, I. D. The secret of the war trigger assembly. P. 301.
The Germans thought that Poland had been defeated as early as on the 5th day of the war (September 5, 1939). On that day General Halder had a conference with General von Brauchitsch and General von Bock. After analyzing the current situation, they came to the conclusion that “the enemy was defeated”. General Halder made a corresponding entry into his famous diary (source: Shirer W. The Collapse of the Nazi empire. P. 43)
Meltyuhov, M. Stalin’s lost chance. P. 97.
Isserson, G. S. The new forms of fighting. M., 1940. P. 29–30.
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The betrayed Poland
to wipe Poland off the map of Europe. Didn’t Poland notice that before? Of course, she did. But all the same, she did not take care of any defensive installations in the West; nor did she withdraw eastward her warehouses and industrial objects located close to the German border. Warsaw never took this sort of things into account. “The Polish Army was trained for war in the East, because it was the Soviet Union that had been for a long time the potential adversary. Warsaw began to work out its Western war plan in haste, only in the spring of 1939”1, — says Pawel Wieczorkiewicz, the Polish historian quoted in the previous chapter. The modern Russian researcher M. Meltyukhov draws the reader’s attention not only to the name of Poland’s basic war plan (Zachod), but gives a more precise date of elaborating the Polish military designs — March 19392. Apart from other historians, the author of this book can give an even more precise date of changing the Pol-ish military doctrine: March 21–22, 1939. It is clear what political wind changed the heading angle of Poland from a sworn friend into a sworn enemy of the Third Reich.
“They had not even attempted to take care of field fortification at the pre-war time, before hostilities. The Polish General Staff declared with complete unconcern, that there was no need to do that, because the forthcoming war would be a war of maneuver”3, — writes Isserson, a Soviet commander, in his research. The conduct of the Polish military decision-makers is really surprising. What war of maneuver did they mean? Was it the German blitzkrieg? Did they try to do their utmost to help the German Wehrmacht rout the Polish Army?
The Poles talked about “a war of maneuver”, because they were themselves going to enter into the territory of Germany!
It turns out that “it was the offensive strategy that underlay the Polish strategic posture aimed at seizing Danzig and East Prussia”4. So instead of defense, the Polish Army was going to execute an offensive! It is not even funny. At the time when Germany’s giant military machine was going to pounce on Poland, the Polish leadership is planning to invade the German territory! Winston Churchill was careful to take note of that peculiarity of
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The newspaper Rzeczpospolita. 28.09.2005.
Meltyukhov, M. Stalin’s lost chance. P. 97.
Isserson, G. S. The new forms of fighting. M., 1940. P. 4.
Ibid. P. 33–34.
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Who made Hitler attack Stalin
the Polish military planning in his memoir: “In numbers and equipment the Polish Army was no match for their assailants, nor were their dispositions wise. They spread all their forces along the frontiers of their native land. They had no central reserve”1.
The German aggression against Poland was a success, because the Poles counted on their Western friends. The German soldiers demolishing a frontier bar
Poland’s pre-war behavior was characterized by a great number of blunders. The blunders were in everything: estimation of the adversary’s might, military plans, resources and directions of attack. Why were the Polish generals mistaken in literally all the aspects of the forthcoming war with Germany? The point is that from the spring of 1939, when war-clouds began to gather over Poland, until August 1939, it was possible to do something to strengthen the defense. The Poles did nothing at all. How can it be explained?
“The consolidation of the German forces was growing from month to month, from week to week”2 . The decision-makers in Warsaw knew about this, but, oddly enough, did not worry. Either the military and
Churchill, W. The Second World War. P. 396.
Isserson, G. S. P. 34.
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political leadership of Poland came from the same lunatic asylum, or the Poles in their strange passivity took into account some other important factors. These factors were relations of alliance between Poland, on theone hand, and England and France, on the other hand, and these factors caused the Poles to make the silliest and fatal mistakes. Poland had blind faith in her “friends”, while England and France slowly, but surely led the Poles to their national catastrophe. So the oddity of the Polish political course is no mystery. England and France undertook such commitments to the Poles with reference to military assistance that they never feared Germany’s aggression.
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Britain used Poland in the same way fishermen use bait fish in order to catch a large predator. The First World War clearly showed that the Kaiser’s Germany was unable to efficiently fight on two fronts. Hitler’s Germany did not possess great natural resources and munitions, so it could not withstand a double whammy: from Poland, on the one hand, and from England and France, on the other hand1. That was what caused an incredible feeling of optimism among the Poles. They were under the impression that with such allies any war with the Germans would, for sure, end in Germany’s defeat.
Earlier (at the bidding of London) and later (on the basis of their own war plans) the Poles looked on their task as not being too complicated: to withstand the first German blow and then launch a counteroffensive2. As the French army was a real military force, the Germans were expected to leave a considerable number of troops on the Western front, to oppose the French. Warsaw did not doubt that only part of the German Army would be deployed against Poland. Why? The point is that on the border with France there is the Ruhr industrial area that was vitally important for Germany. Having seized this area, the French Army might easily win the war. Adolf Hitler fell in with such an interpretation. Speaking to his generals in the Chancellor’s office on November 23, 1939, he explained quite frankly how to efficiently rout the German Reich.
“Out of the required amount of munitions for four months only 25 % was available. The anti-aircraft service ammunition and air bombs sufficed only for three months… and fuel inventories supplied a need of only four war months”, — the German historian G.-A. Yakobsen writes (source: The Second World War: two approaches. P. 11).
Meltyukhov, M. Stalin’s lost chance. P. 97.
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“We have a chink in our armor, — said the German fuehrer, — this is the Ruhr area. The course of war depends on controlling Ruhr. If France and England strike a blow at the region, we are in extreme peril. The German resistance will come to an end”1.
The reader should not be puzzled by the date: both in 1939 and in 1940 the Ruhr area was a fairy tale egg that contained the death of “Kashchey the Deathless”. Germany’s vulnerable place has always been Ruhr. As early as in 1923 France occupied that territory to cause Germany to make repa-rations more actively. So the French were quite aware of the geographic peculiarity and significance of the Ruhr area. That is why Poland, an ally of France, looked to the future with optimism. Hitler could hardly have left his industrial pearl without adequate protection. If his troops were insufficient, the French would occupy Ruhr and end the war; if he left too many troops to protect Ruhr, he would not have enough military force to attack Poland. At any rate, the Polish generals did not see, why they should be scared of Hitler…
The Polish leadership acted the way that excluded any peaceful settle-ment of the crisis, because they were sure that England and France would really stand up for their allies. That was why Poland exposed her stubborn blindness, estimating the situation so inadequately. London and Paris kept feeding Warsaw with promises of assistance, but it was all a pack of lies. Poland did not worry about German planes and tanks, because England had already promised Poland to deliver 1,300 planes and start bombing Germany in case of war2. The French party undertook an analogous com-mitment to initiate air raids on Germany. The Poles thought that in such a situation the Germans would not be in the mood for fighting Poland. Such were war perspectives in the minds of the Polish leadership lulled by the promises of their western allies. They thought that if the Ruhr area could not be occupied, it might just as well be bombed out…
The Polish government thought that Hitler’s attack on Poland would be the beginning of his rapid and complete defeat and ignored the obvious signs of the imminent war. The first sign, as usual, was the economic one. For example, The “Gazeta Polska” announced that Germany had stopped paying for food stuffs and mineral resources supplied by Poland. Some
Bezymenskiy, L. The Special file “Barbarossa”. P. 159.
Ibid. P. 159.
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The betrayed Poland
German credits successfully negotiated earlier were blocked. Instead of delivering machinery, Germany increased supplies of beads, harmonicas and other “consumer goods”.
Following the increase on supplies of harmonicas and other “strategic goods” instead of machinery and provision, the international crisis concern-ing Danzig deteriorated. As is known, Poland had declared that all attempts to annex Danzig would lead to war and fanning tensions by Germany related to that delicate question indicated its readiness for a large-scale military conflict. On August 22, 1939, at the same time when Ribbentrop came to Moscow to sign the non-aggression pact with the USSR, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein paid “a courtesy visit” to Danzig (Gdansk). The Polish government had not been informed of this visit in advance, for the reason that the visit of the battleship was the starting point of a “mild coup d’йtat”. On the following day the members of the City Council who were nearly all of them ethnic Germans declared Gauleiter Forster the head of the city1. Though Danzig was not yet officially included into the German Reich, its leadership, now loyal to Hitler, was introduced into the Nazi power system. It suggested that the head of the “free- town” was one of German official figures subordinated personally to Hitler, which de facto meant annexation2.
Naturally, the Poles had good reasons for being worried. Three days later the least doubts of the Polish leadership concerning the war ought to have vanished into thin air. One should remember that the first attack date planned by Hitler was the 26th of August. But the German fuehrer decided to put off the invasion at the last moment, because Great Britain responded to the Soviet-German pact by concluding an agreement with Poland. Hitler, who by no means wanted to be at war with England, waivered and decided to resort to diplomatic measures. But some units of the German Weh-rmacht had not managed to receive the order that recalled the attack on Poland. As a result, one of the raiding parties began to carry out the earlier
The administrative areas in Hitler’s Reich were Gaus; hence gauleiter means literally “gau-manager”.
This camouflage lasted till the beginning of the war. On the morning of September, 1 Forster ordained the law of annexing Danzig into Germany. On the same day the German Reichstag voted for including Danzig into the German Reich. The battleship Schleswig-Holstein, without leaving the harbor, began to shell the Polish fortress Westerplatte...
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order. At dawn, on August 26, 1938 a subversive group of 14 men headed by Lieutenant Heinzel penetrated into the territory of Poland at the settle-ment of Silen near the former Polish-Czechoslovak border. Their task was to seize a strategically important tunnel between Silen and Krakow, as well as the local railway station, and control these objects until the arrival of the 7th infantry division. The Germans carried out their mission splendidly: over a hundred Polish soldiers and frontier guards were disarmed and detained in the basement structures of the station. A few hours passed waiting for the division before Lieutenant Heinzel suspected something wrong and decided to contact his commander by radio. He learned that except himself and his 13 men no one was fighting against Poland. It is unknown whether the German officer apologized to the Polish guards for this imbroglio or not. What remains a fact is that the German raiders returned home without losses, having stayed on the territory of Poland nearly 24 hours!
It must be clear to every military specialist well aware of this strange operation by the German commandos that the German Army was in the last readiness phase before the aggression1. What conclusion did the Pol-ish General Staff make from this information? Did they take measures to announce mobilization?
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