Stalin полностью

Stalin had managed to undo the Soviet defeat in the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, reclaiming imperial Russian lands at the cost of just 700-odd lives. (Not that he cared about Soviet casualties.) The Germans in Poland, by contrast, had lost between 11,000 and 13,000 killed. At least 70,000 Poles were killed and nearly 700,000 taken prisoner by the aggressors on both sides.²⁷⁶ Hitler, in improvisational fashion, toyed with leaving a rump independent Poland of some sort, but Poland’s state effectively vanished again, partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as Lithuania and Slovakia. Members of Poland’s government fled into Romania, hoping to proceed to France and set up a government in exile to continue the fight, but they were placed under house arrest.²⁷⁷ The Polish supreme commander’s efforts to have surviving troops evacuated via Romania or Hungary to form a new Polish army in France were interdicted by the NKVD, which sealed the border along the Zbruch River. Many of the Polish army’s now 190,000 troops, taken prisoner by the Soviets, were interned in Gulag camps, with the intention of exploiting them as slave laborers. Thousands of Polish officers were separated into special camps.²⁷⁸

Poland’s immense Jewish population of nearly 3.5 million had experienced trying times under the Polish government. Between 1935 and 1937, 79 Polish Jews had been killed, and significant incidents of anti-Jewish violence had been recorded in 97 towns; quotas introduced in 1937 had halved the number of Jewish university students. Indeed, Jews could be discriminated against within the framework of Polish law, including by exclusion from chartered professional associations. In 1937 alone, 7,000 trials took place of Jews accused of “insulting the Polish nation.” When the government suspended the validity of the passports of its citizens who had been living abroad for five years or more consecutively, in an attempt to preempt a mass flow of Jewish immigration from Nazi-annexed Austria (which had ceased to be a refuge), the act precipitated the expulsion of 17,000 Polish Jews from Nazi Germany in October 1938. The Polish regime refused to allow them back into Poland; many were trapped in a no-man’s-land, without shelter or food. Several thousand who managed to cross the border at Zbąszyń ended up in a hastily formed restricted camp—with some begging to be let back into Nazi Germany. The head of the Catholic Church in Poland, Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, had accused the Jews of “spreading atheism and revolutionary Bolshevism . . . [and] contributing to the decline of Polish morals.”²⁷⁹ On December 21, 1938, the leader of the politically powerful National Unity Camp had reiterated the oft-stated view that Jews hindered the development of the Polish nation, and urged the government to take energetic action to reduce the number of Jews. Some Polish military leaders called a departure of Jews a matter of national security.²⁸⁰ But all that turned out to be prelude: with the Nazi occupation, SS Einsatzgruppen (special action groups), as well as militarized regular police—both of which were under Heinrich Himmler—began scouring the land to murder Polish Jews and torch or dynamite synagogues.²⁸¹

The SS also targeted non-Jewish Poles. Nazi terror against the “racial enemy” in these conquered lands far eclipsed what had descended on Germany itself since 1933, and further empowered the SS institutionally. The atrocities would continue long after the main combat was over.²⁸² More than a million Poles would be forced to work as slaves in Germany. Nazi propaganda portrayed the war as having been imposed on Germany, a necessity for the very survival of the German race—a mutilation of the truth that a majority of Germans appear to have accepted, leavened, as it was, with lurid fables of Polish atrocities and German victimhood.²⁸³