History of Poland - World War II: Invasion and Partition

World War II: Invasion and Partition

On September 1, 1939 Hitler ordered his troops into Poland. Poland had signed a pact with Britain (as recently as August 25) and France and the two western powers soon declared a war on Germany, but remained rather inactive and extended no aid to the attacked country. On September 17, the Soviet troops moved in and took control of most of the areas of eastern Poland having significant Ukrainian and Belarusian populations under the terms of the German-Soviet agreement. While Poland's military forces were fighting the invading armies, Poland's top government officials and military high command left the country (September 17/18). Among the military operations that held out the longest (until late September or early October) were the Defense of Warsaw, the Defense of Hel and the resistance of the Polesie Group.

Fighting the initial "September Campaign" of World War II was the most significant Polish contribution to the allied war effort. The nearly one million Polish soldiers mobilized significantly delayed Hitler's attack on Western Europe, planned for 1939. When the Nazi offensive did happen, the delay caused it to be less effective, a possibly crucial factor in the case of the defense of Britain.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Poland was completely occupied by German troops.

The Poles formed an underground resistance movement and a Polish government in exile, first in Paris and later in London, which was recognized by the Soviet Union (diplomatic relations, broken since September 1939, were resumed in July 1941). During World War II, about 300,000 Poles fought under the Soviet command, and about 200,000 went into combat on western fronts in units loyal to the Polish government in exile.

In April 1943, the Soviet Union broke the deteriorating relations with the Polish government in exile after the German military announced that they had discovered mass graves of murdered Polish army officers at Katyn, in the USSR. The Soviets claimed that the Poles had committed a hostile act by requesting that the Red Cross investigate these reports.

As the Jewish ghetto in occupied Warsaw was being liquidated by the Nazi SS units, in 1943 the city was the scene of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The eliminations of the ghettos took place in Polish cities and uprisings were fought there against impossible odds by desperate Jewish insurgents, whose people were being removed and exterminated.

At the time of the western Allies' increasing cooperation with the Soviet Union, the standing and influence of the Polish government in exile were seriously diminished by the death of its most prominent leader — Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski — on July 4, 1943.

In July 1944, the Soviet Red Army and the People's Army of Poland controlled by the Soviets entered Poland, and through protracted fighting in 1944 and 1945 defeated the Germans, losing 600,000 of their soldiers.

The greatest single instance of armed struggle in the occupied Poland and a major political event of World War II was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The uprising, in which most of the Warsaw population participated, was instigated by the underground Armia Krajowa (Home Army) and approved by the Polish government in exile, in an attempt to establish a non-communist Polish administration ahead of the approaching Red Army. The uprising was planned with the expectation that the Soviet forces, who had arrived in the course of their offensive and were present on the other side of the Vistula River, would help in battle over Warsaw. However, the Soviets stopped their advance at the Vistula and were mostly passive as the Germans brutally suppressed the forces of the pro-Western Polish underground.

The bitterly fought uprising lasted for two months and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and expelled. After a hopeless surrender on the part of the Poles (October 2), the Germans carried out Hitler's order to destroy the remaining infrastructure of the city. The Polish First Army, fighting along the Soviet Red Army, entered Warsaw on 17 January 1945.

As a consequence of the war and by the decision of the Soviet leadership, agreed to by the United States and Britain beginning with the Tehran Conference (late 1943), Poland's geographic location was fundamentally altered. Stalin's proposal that Poland should be moved very far to the west was readily accepted by Polish communists, who were at that time at the early stages of forming the post-war government. In July 1944, a communist-controlled "Polish Committee of National Liberation" was established in Lublin, which caused protests by Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk and the Polish government in exile.

By the time of the Yalta Conference (February 1945), seen by many Poles as the pivotal point when the nation's fate was sealed by the Great Powers, the communists had established a provisional government in Poland. The Soviet position at the Conference was strong, corresponding to their advance on the German battlefield. The three Great Powers gave assurances for the conversion of the communist provisional government, by including in it democratic forces from within the country and currently active abroad (the Provisional Government of National Unity and subsequent democratic elections were the agreed stated goals), but the London-based government in exile was not mentioned.

After the final (for all practical purposes) settlement at Potsdam, the Soviet Union retained most of the territories captured as a result of the 1939 German-Soviet pact (now western Ukraine, western Belarus and part of Lithuania around Vilnius). Poland was compensated with parts of Silesia including Breslau (Wrocław) and Grünberg (Zielona Góra), of Pomerania including Stettin (Szczecin), and of East Prussia, along with Danzig (Gdańsk), collectively referred to as the "Recovered Territories", which were incorporated into the reconstituted Polish state. Most of the German population there was expelled to Germany.

Scientific and numerically correct estimation of the human losses suffered by Polish citizens during World War II does not seem possible because of the paucity of available data. Some conjectures can be arrived at and they suggest that assertions made in the past have been incorrect and motivated by political needs. To begin with, the total population of 1939 Poland and of the several nationalities/ethnicities present there are not accurately known, since the last population census took place in 1931.

Modern research indicates that during the war about 5 million Polish citizens were killed, including 3 million Polish Jews. According to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 1.9 to two million ethnic Poles and 3 million Polish Jews were killed. Millions were deported to Germany for forced labor or to German extermination camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz. According to a recent estimate, between 2.35 and 2.9 million Polish Jews and about 2 million ethnic Poles were killed. Over 95% of the Polish Jewish losses (less directly also many of the rest) and 90% of the ethnic Polish losses were caused by Nazi Germany; 5% of the ethnic Polish losses were caused by the Soviets and 5% by Ukrainian nationalists. This Jewish loss of life, together with the numerically much less significant waves of displacement during the war and emigration after the war, after the Polish October 1956 thaw and following the 1968 Polish political crisis, put an end to several centuries of large scale, well-established Jewish settlement and presence in Poland. The magnitudes of the (also substantial) losses of Polish citizens of German, Ukrainian, Belarusian and other nationalities are not known.

In 1940-1941, some 325,000 Polish citizens were deported by the Soviet regime. The number of Polish citizen deaths at the hands of the Soviets is estimated at less than 100,000. In 1943–1944, Ukrainian nationalists (OUN and Ukrainian Insurgent Army) massacred tens of thousands of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia.

Approximately 90% of Poland's war losses were the victims of prisons, death camps, raids, executions, annihilation of ghettos, epidemics, starvation, excessive work and ill treatment. There were one million war orphans and 590,000 war disabled. The country lost 38% of its national assets (Britain lost 0.8%, France 1.5%). Nearly half the prewar Poland was expropriated by the Soviet Union, including the two great cultural centers of Lwów and Wilno. Many Poles could not return to the country for which they had fought because they belonged to the "wrong" political group, or came from prewar eastern Poland incorporated into the Soviet Union (see Polish population transfers (1944–1946)), or having fought in the West were warned not to return because of the high risk of persecution. Others were pursued, arrested, tortured and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for belonging to the Home Army (see Cursed soldiers), or persecuted because of having fought on the western front.

With Germany's defeat, as the reestablished Polish state was shifted west to the area between the Oder–Neisse and Curzon lines, the Germans who had not fled were expelled. Of those who remained, many chose to emigrate to post-war Germany. According to a recently quoted estimate, of the 200-250 thousand Jews who escaped the Nazis, 40-60 thousand had survived in Poland. More had been repatriated from the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and the February 1946 population census showed ca. 300,000 Jews within the new borders. Of the surviving Jews, many chose or felt compelled to emigrate. Most Ukrainians remaining in Poland were forcibly moved to Soviet Ukraine (see Repatriation of Ukrainians from Poland to the Soviet Union), and in 1947 to the new territories in northern and western Poland under Operation Vistula. Because of the changing borders and of mass movements of people of various nationalities, sponsored by governments and spontaneous, the emerging communist Poland ended up with a mainly homogeneous, ethnically Polish population (97.6% according to the December 1950 census). The remaining members of the minorities were not encouraged, by the authorities or by their neighbors, to emphasize their ethnic identity.