At 4am on 17 September 1939 troops from the Soviet Union poured into Eastern Poland. The country had of course been resisting the attack of Nazi forces for the past 16 days from the West and had been suffering heavy losses and aerial bombing of its cities.
The Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, declared that since the German invasion the Polish government had abandoned its people and ceased to exist. He said that the Soviets had a duty to step in to "defend" Russians and Ukrainians living in Poland and to extricate the Poles from a war they were dragged into by their "unwise leaders".
At this time, the Poles still had control of a number of major cities such as Lwów, Grodno, Lublin and the beautiful capital, Warsaw. There were around 650,000 Polish soldiers fighting the Germans. The historical consensus is that they could still have held out for a significant time against the Wehrmacht. This was a sizeable force: the regular British army consisted of just over 200,000 men at the time. The Soviets invaded with seven armies consisting of anywhere up to 1 million men. 17 September 1939 was a mortal blow to Poland.
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| Soviet Tank invading Poland 17 September 1939 |
Britain and France had gone to war to defend Polish territorial integrity. The Polish Ambassador to London reminded the British Foreign Secretary of the Polish-British Common Defence Pact, under which Britain had promised Poland assistance in the case of attack. The treaty was less than a month old. The ambassador was abruptly told that it was His Majesty's Government's decision whether to declare war or not. Neither Britain nor France did so.
Chamberlain decided not to issue a statement pledging support for a restoration of the occupied territory to Poland. More remarkably, less than 2 weeks later, Churchill spoke on the radio to defend the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland. He said that their actions were "clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace".
Soviet Occupation
A few days after this, on 6 October 1939, Poland was removed from the map. It had been annexed and divided between Hitler and Stalin.
During the Polish campaign, the Soviets took well over 250,000 Polish prisoners. 13.5 million Polish civilians fell under Soviet rule. Estimates vary, but around a minimum of 320,000 of these were deported to gulags in Siberia, of whom 50% died. 5 months into the occupation, the Soviet Politburo passed a memorandum to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps. 22,000 were murdered mainly in the Katyn forest massacres: officers were shot in cold blood, as well as Polish intelligentsia, which included "intelligence agents, police, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, officials and priests".
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| Katyn Massacre Memorial |
Whilst the East of Poland was occupied, and assuming they did not fall into one of the categories the Soviets sought to eliminate, Jews living there had a "safe haven" from the psychopathically anti-Semitic German regime. This of course changed rapidly after June 1941 when Germany crossed the line it had drawn down Poland with the Soviets and began its attack on the country. For the Jews of the East they had had only a temporary respite. Up until that point, in any case, the decision to systematically murder all of European Jewry had not yet been taken by Berlin and the death factories were not operational.
If you want to read an extraordinary account of what life was like in Poland under both Soviet and Nazi rule, I can strongly recommend "Those who trespass against us" by Countess Karolina Lanckoronska. She was a Polish patriot and resistance fighter who fought both occupying forces, loathed both of them, survived Ravensbrück Concentration Camp and died in 2002 aged 104.
Why didn't we go to War?
So why didn't Britain go to war over the Soviet invasion? There are several plausible reasons. Some of them are: a powerlessness to do anything (although this applies equally to the declaration of war against Germany); internal government opposition and population apathy; an assessment that Germany was a greater threat, particularly to Western Europe, than the Soviets represented; a desire to keep trade with the Soviet Union; the hope of a future alliance with Stalin against Nazi Germany. I am not seeking to contend that this decision was necessarily wrong, taking everything into account. I am not a historian and there is certainly no point in engaging in "what ifs" in any case.
What interests me more is that the invasion of Poland by the Soviets is seldom discussed, weighed up, or even acknowledged in Britain. One lone voice in the West who does not fall into this category is Professor Norman Davies. He refuses to characterise the events of September 1939 as simply the "German invasion", but instead also emphasises the mortal blow to Poland administered by the Soviets. He contends that the War was not a simple victory of good over evil, but the defeat of one totalitarian state, by another. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 and Britain allied itself with Stalin, we entered into league with an evil, murderous regime. As Davies writes, Stalinist Soviet crimes where in every way as vast, if less diabolical in execution, than those of Nazi Germany.
The Final Irony
Finally, when we come to 1945, there is a terrible irony in that fact that Britain and France declared war in 1939 to defend Poland's borders. Up to 60 million people had died, including almost a staggering one in five of the population of Poland itself (Britain lost around 0.5% by comparison). The costs involved in defeating Germany and its allies were staggering, yet somehow the reason for actually entering the War was apparently forgotten.
As the War ended, Stalin pushed to retain his territorial conquest of Poland which began on 17 September 1939. Britain, France and the US agreed to his demands and the people of Poland were once again hung out to dry. In order to make way for millions of Poles forced out of their villages and towns because of this decision, in turn some 14 million Germans fled or were expelled from their homes, my own family amongst them. Poland, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, would fall on the "wrong side" of the Iron Curtain, and suffered a further 44 years of Soviet domination as a puppet state. To this day, Poland's Eastern border is the point where Stalin's armies stopped in October 1945.
Tales of Hunting
There is that wonderful African saying "Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter". In the case of World War Two, Churchill quite literally got to write the history and the Polish viewpoint in this was somewhat lacking.
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| Lions too deserve their historian |
From a British perspective, the Second World War was as "just" a war as it gets, and the decision to go to War against Nazi Germany in 1939 was without doubt an incredibly brave, principled one. I don't believe, however, that this basic fact is detracted from by a critical and thorough examination of the whole of the circumstances, a full 73 years on.
The decision by Britain not to declare war on the Soviet Union, its non-condemnation of the invasion of Poland (and indeed its defence by Churchill), the joining of forces with Stalin in 1941, and the agreement to the Soviet annexation of the whole Eastern half of Poland in 1945, all warrant proper recognition and discussion. To do so need not be seen as disloyal or unjustified criticism of those who led our country through the War, and of the people of the time who suffered so badly.
I think probably because they do not fit the simple narrative of wanting to be (at all times) "the good guys", all of these facts are glossed over, ignored, or excuses are made for them. The people of Poland will remember today as one more grim event in their long, painful history. I personally think it is right to join them in marking the day and bringing to light all of what happened.
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