Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Territorial and political plans for Poland had not been finalized before the invasion. They were improvised and amended as events unfolded in September and October 1939. Hitler had, in fact, shown remarkably little interest in Poland before autumn 1938. As an Austrian, his main anti-Slav antipathies were directed at the Czechs, not the Poles. For Prussians, the age-old antagonisms revolving around the disputed territory on the eastern borders of the Reich tended in the opposite direction. In the face of traditional anti-Polish feeling in the Foreign Ministry and the army, Hitler had pushed through the pact with Poland in 1934 and repeatedly expressed admiration for the Polish head of state, until his death in 1935, Marshal Pilsudski, victor over the Red Army in 1920. Though the pact had obvious tactical value during the build-up of rearmament, and was presumed by many Nazi followers to be merely a ploy with limited life-span, Hitler’s preference continued in autumn 1938 and spring 1939, as we have seen, to have Poland as an ally (if now more or less as a German satellite). The British Guarantee had changed all that. But the new aim of destroying Poland by military force in summer 1939 was still not coupled with clear plans for the post-war future of the country. Neither in Mein Kampf nor in subsequent writings or speeches had Hitler had much to say about Poland. In his Second Book he had indicated that Poles ought to be removed from their property and the land given to ethnic Germans. He rigorously opposed, in this brief passage, the incorporation of Poles in the Reich (as had happened before 1914). ‘The völkisch state,’ he declared, ‘must on the contrary take the decision either to seal off these racially alien elements in order not again to allow the blood of our own people to be debased (zersetzen), or it must remove them forthwith and transfer the land (Grund und Boden) made available to our own people’s comrades.’²⁶ Otherwise, there was remarkably little on Poland. The vast expanses of Russia, as he had often stated, were what he had in mind as the answer to Germany’s alleged ‘space problem.’ But Hitler had repeatedly shown that he was prepared to put off long-term ideological goals in favour of short-term advantage.

The pact concluded with the Soviet Union in August, and in particular its secret protocol agreeing to partition Poland, naturally altered the situation. ‘Living space’ further east dropped for the foreseeable future out of the equation. Any resettlement of populations and ethnic experimentation would now have to take place in the former territory of Poland, not farther east. Whether a Polish state should continue in existence had been left open in the secret protocol. A country divided among two occupying powers held little prospect of sustaining even a puppet state. However, the lack of immediate invasion by the Soviets and Hitler’s hope even at this point of persuading the West, faced with the fait accompli of a Polish defeat, to pull out of the war and strike a deal with him left German plans still uncertain.²⁷

On 7 September Hitler had been ready to negotiate with the Poles, recognizing a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France), together with an independent western Ukraine.²⁸ Five days later he still favoured a quasi-autonomous Polish rump state with which he could negotiate a peace in the east, and thought of limiting territorial demands to Upper Silesia and the Corridor if the West stayed out.²⁹ Another option advanced by Ribbentrop was a division between Germany and Russia, and the creation, out of the rump of Poland, of an autonomous Galician and Polish Ukraine — a proposal unlikely to commend itself to Moscow.³⁰ The belated Soviet occupation of eastern Poland on 17 September in any case promptly ruled out this possibility. Hitler still left open the final shape of Poland in his Danzig speech on 19 September.³¹ During the next days, Stalin made plain his opposition to the existence of a Polish rump state. His initial preference for the demarcation line along the line of the Pissia, Narev, Vistula, and San rivers was then replaced by the proposal to exchange central Polish territories within the Soviet zone between the Vistula and Bug rivers for Lithuania. Once Hitler had accepted this proposal — the basis of the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship signed on 28 September 1939 — the question of whether or not there would be a Polish rump state was in Berlin’s hands alone.³²