Nazis, Soviets, Poles, Jews
I thought I had a decent knowledge of history, yet I never knew that the Nazis had been wooing the Poles:
The Nazi foreign minister had lost his patience with the Poles. ‘You are stubborn on these maritime questions,’ he told Polish diplomats in January 1939. ‘The Black Sea is also a sea!” Joachim von Ribbentrop had been trying for years to induce Poland to join Germany in a war against the Soviet Union. Germany would annex from Poland districts by the Baltic Sea; the two countries would invade the USSR; and Poland would be compensated with conquered Soviet territory on the Black Sea.
So begins a fascinating review, “Nazis, Soviets, Poles, Jews,” in the current New York Review of Books (subscription required) by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale. He adds: “That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war.” And Snyder concludes:
The further study of the war and its victims will require a firmer grasp of the history of the peoples who lived alongside the Jews. In this important respect, the history of the Holocaust has yet to be written.
In between the reviewer gives details about the Polish resistance and the destruction of Warsaw that cast a new light for me upon those dark times. Professor Snyder is at work on a book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, that, on the basis of this review, promises to be must reading.
Except that the German idea of “wooing the Poles” was to put a Luger to their heads and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Well the Poles apparently did refuse, and it is hardly surprising that the did. They certainly knew that the Nazis considered all Slaven (Slavs) to be potential Sklaven (Slaves). Why give up the Polish Corridor for the promise of a piece of the coast of the Black Sea. Hitler’s behavior towards Czechoslovakia was hardly reassuring about German promises.
I do wonder for how many “years” von Ribbentrop was trying to use his charm on the Poles.
In my teaching and reading, there is very little historical research around some of these pre-WWII instances. In addition, the overtures to the Poles, Ukranians, and other nationalities is rarely written about – their collaboration with the invading German armies, etc.
Here is a link to a current, on-going study about how the German armies ignored, caused, and/or allowed Polish/Ukranian/Belarus villagers, rougue groups or German army to massacre Jewish citizens almost at will. It is estimated that 2 million Jews died this way before the actual Final Solution camps began their killings.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/112109
How much of this was part of the attitude represented by your initial thread – history needs to tell this side of the story. Political and foreign policy intrigue that may or may not have set the stage for the later Holocaust.
Recent book by a catholic priest, Rev. Desbois – http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2176328/posts
There also are very few books that detail the “slave” camps or internment camps that the Germans ran for 7+ years – taking Czech, Slovaks, Polish, French, Dutch, etc. citizens and transporting them to Germany to live and work basically as slave labor. Whether these governments in exile knew about this – there is very little documentation – these people were forgotten about and left to survive in the camps for endless years.
Bill DeHaas,
One of the books that Snyder reviews is “The Holocaust in the Soviet Union” by Yitzhak Arad. Snyder writes: “Arad provides the full scholarly contours of what we are learning to call “the Holocaust by bullets.” As you suggest, this slaughter of more than two million Jews preceded and accompanied the killing in the gas chambers
Also, discussing the other book under review, “The Third Reich at War,” by Richard Evans, Snyder writes: “it was, as Evans notes, the Poles who told the British and Americans about the Holocaust, not the other way round.”
Very interesting piece by Snyder, and I think his book will be fascinating when it appears. I was vaguely aware of the Nazi wooing of Poland. Not surprising, given Polish suspicions of Russia, both Soviet and pre-Soviet (it was after all in the late 18th century that there began the partitioning of Poland, in which Russia played a major role.) But of course so did Prussia, in the days before “Germany” existed as a nation state. So the Poles were highly suspicious of both their mighty neighbors, by whatever names they traveled over the centuries. And rightly so, as it turned out, since in 1939 it was the Germans and the Soviets who did the job once again. (It used to be the case, and perhaps still is, that among members of what might be called the orthodox left, the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 Sept 1939 was not an “invasion” at all, but simply a heroic move to liberate Poles and save them from the Nazis. Wonderful what you can to with history, if you control the writing of the textbooks.
In the two decades between the wars, Poland also formed part of the so-called cordon sanitaire (Georges Clemenceau’s phrase, I think) which the French sought to bring into existence after 1919 as a buffer of the new east European states against the Soviets. But that was never very effective. In the light of history, at least from the 18th century on, Poland’s existence as a separate state from 1945 to the present is rather amazing (granted that from 1945-89 it was a Soviet puppet, albeit often a restive one.)