Poland: a Victim of Geography : A Warsaw View of World War II

This week most of the world will pause to mark the 40th anniversary of the end in Europe of history’s most destructive war--the West on May 8, when Germany’s surrender was announced, and the East on May 9, when Stalin chose to tell the Soviet people.

For the West, the anniversary offers a moment to remember the millions who perished and to reflect on the lessons learned. Some will emphasize the price of failing to restrain tyranny when there was still time. Others will prefer to recall when East and West were allied in common cause for survival.

For Moscow, simple commemoration is not enough. The Soviet state has spent an entire year working up to a lavish display of self-congratulation, not just for its role in defeating Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War, but for the role Moscow purportedly plays today as a guardian of world peace against the machinations of American “imperialism.”

Another point of view--Poland’s--will go largely unheard.

That is too bad, because Poland is not only the place where the war began, but its principal victim, the home of the Holocaust, the only country in World War II subjugated by two tyrannies at once.

Poland endured 2,078 days of war and occupation. For no reason other than location, Poland lost independence and 6 million of its 37 million people, a proportional toll far greater than any other nation, including the Soviet Union.

Better than any others, Poles appreciate the monumental paradox of World War II: The Soviet Union, whose enormous sacrifice ultimately played so great a role in defeating Germany, was no less responsible than Nazi Germany for the outbreak of the war.

The Polish authorities, of course, will dutifully echo other Warsaw Pact governments in celebrating the Soviet victory over facism. The Polish people, however, have a different perspective. Their memories of how the war began are more vivid than memories of the “liberation.” For them, the celebrants this week include one of the guilty parties.

Certainly the central ingredient of the war was German National Socialism and Hitler’s quest for what he called Lebensraum--living space for the German nation. Poland and perhaps points farther east were to be depopulated of their “subhuman” Jewish and Slavic inhabitants to make room for a superior race.

Yet how far this odd amalgam of militarism, geopolitics and genetic jingoism would have carried Germany by itself remains an open question. War may have been inevitable, as Stalin believed. But what Poles remember is that the Soviet Union provided its catalyst, set its timing and sealed the fate of Eastern Europe.

The catalyst was the nonaggression pact signed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany with unseemly haste in Moscow on the night of August 23-24, 1939. A secret protocol to the pact provided for a coordinated German and Soviet attack on Poland and the division of its territory.

Hitler was to have a free hand in the western two-thirds of Poland and, by implication, in Western Europe, because he would not have to contend with a second front in the East. In return, the Soviet Union was free to invade Finland, to annex eastern Poland and the independent Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as parts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

As a result of its pact with Germany, the Soviet Union emerged from World War II as the only nation with more territory and more people than it started with, having seized a quarter-million square miles of neighboring lands inhabited by 23 million new Soviet citizens. On Sept. 1, 1939, one week after the nonaggression pact was signed, German armies struck Poland from three directions. Britain and France promptly, but ineffectually, declared war on Germany. On Sept. 17, as the reeling Polish army fought on alone, hopelessly outnumbered, the Soviet army marched in from the east.

Photographs exist, but have not yet found their way into Soviet history books, of grinning Nazi and Soviet officers meeting and shaking hands along the new border at Brest-Litovsk.

“Without the assurance of Soviet collusion, the Wehrmacht could not have risked a unilateral attack on Poland,” wrote British historian Norman Davies in his 1984 book, “Heart of Europe.” Davis added: “Whatever his motives at the time, Stalin was no less responsible for the outbreak of war than Hitler.”

This point of view is not original. Winston Churchill shared it. So did Edouard Daladier, the French premier.

Moscow’s deal with Germany prompted Churchill’s famous remark that Russia is a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But in an observation as apt today as then, Churchill went on to suggest a key to the enigma: Ideology and moral scruples did not count; what did count was “a cold policy of self-interest.”

Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders later justified the Nazi pact as a painful but necessary maneuver to buy time to prepare for an inevitable war with Germany, and to gain a defensive buffer.

The Soviet Union was not above fostering a stalemate by lending Germany strategic aid and comfort. Relations with Germany over the 23-month life of the pact developed far beyond what might have been expected from a reluctant accommodation between two bitter ideological foes.

Earlier, between 1921 and 1933, the Soviets had given impetus to Germany’s clandestine rearmament under a series of secret agreements that allowed Berlin to evade restrictions imposed on German forces at the end of World War I.

These agreements, suspended only after Hitler came to power in 1933, provided for the manufacture and field testing of poison gas, construction of Junker aircraft and training of German army units--all on Soviet land. The Germans provided technical aid to Soviet munitions factories and received munitions in return. The Soviets gained a window on Western military technology and the Germans gained a nascent Wehrmacht. After a six-year lapse, the German-Soviet relationship blossomed again in 1939, into something that looked strangely like an alliance.

German submarines berthed at the Soviet port of Murmansk. In exchange for grain and raw materials, the Soviet Union received machinery and a naval cruiser. In the summer of 1940, Soviet oil flowed west to fuel the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Britain and the Nazi invasion of France.

“We made all our deliveries punctually,” Nikita S. Khrushchev would later recall. Pravda, in editions no longer available at Soviet libraries, heaped praise on the Nazi victories in Europe. The German Gestapo and the Soviet NKVD cooperated in hunting down Jews and suspected political opponents from the Baltic to Romania. While the Germans opened forced labor and extermination camps in Poland, the Soviets in Poland began mass deportations under conditions scarcely better.

The German invasion of June 22, 1941, abruptly ended the Nazi-Soviet pact, and in the heat of battle the Western Allies soon forgave, or at least forgot, the transgressions of its new comrade-in-arms. Not so the Poles, who added to the centuries-old list of offenses that still underlies Polish contempt for things Russian, including Marxist-Leninist ideology.

The catastrophe that befell the Soviet Union, with its loss of perhaps 20 million people, was surely not in Stalin’s calculations. The courage and tenacity of the Soviet army in evicting the Nazi invaders was undeniably immense. But when the Soviets arrived back in Poland in 1944, on the long drive to Berlin, they behaved less like liberators than conquerors.

The Soviet use of Majdanek, the first Nazi death camp liberated in Poland, gave a taste of things to come. No sooner had the survivors been freed than the NKVD filled the camp with interned partisans of the non-communist AK, the home army that had spent the war fighting the Nazis. Thereafter, the Soviets proceeded systematically to liquidate centers of the resistance to make way for Moscow’s imported Polish government and army. One of its officers is now the Polish premier, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski.

On the scale of treachery, Poles rank the Soviet army’s behavior in the Warsaw uprising second only to the Nazi-Soviet pact. Encouraged by Radio Moscow’s call to arms, and by the arrival of Soviet tanks in the Warsaw suburb of Praga across the Vistula River from the main city, the poorly armed AK began its tragic uprising on the afternoon of Aug. 1, 1944.

For 63 days the Poles fought unaided through the streets and sewers, until 250,000 partisans and civilians lay dead.

Through it all, the Soviet army hunkered down a mile away--and watched. Soviet generals explained that a frontal assault on the city was not feasible. Stalin would later denounce the leaders of the rising as “criminals” and “adventurers.”

The city the Soviet army finally liberated on Jan. 17, 1945, was more thoroughly devastated than Dresden or Hiroshima--entirely lifeless. The Germans had long since evacuated Warsaw and shipped many survivors to concentration camps.

Four months later, the Soviet Union signed yet another friendship treaty, this time with the People’s Republic of Poland. This agreement permitted the crowning insult: Poland had to pay what were, to all intents and purposes, war reparations, in the form of coal exports to the Soviet Union at prices far below world market value.

Poles celebrate May 9 with mixed feelings. They remember the end of the killing, the nightmare of German occupation with unqualified relief, and the role of Polish soldiers with justifiable pride. They also remember how the war began.