POLAND

Germans troops parade though Warsaw, Poland in September 1939

POLAND

After easily annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia, Adolf Hitler began plotting his next conquest. Vast reservoirs of Soviet oil, grain, and other natural resources were needed to fuel his Third Reich, but Poland would come first. The country had won its independence following the First World War, and with it, significant territory from a vanquished Germany that cleaved off ethnic Germans in Danzig and East Prussia from their native land.

There was little enthusiasm among most Germans for further aggression, Memories were still vivid of a costly and humiliating defeat two decades earlier, and though many had supported Hitler’s previous moves, those had come without bloodshed. Most Germans were wary about the possibility of war with a defiant and fully armed Poland. To sway public sentiment, the Nazis staged a series of phony border provocations in August 1939. The most notable operation involved dressing concentration camp prisoners as Polish Army soldiers. After the men were poisoned, their corpses were sprayed with bullets and dumped outside the German border town of Gleiwitz. A wave of Nazi propaganda followed, denouncing the illusionary Polish “attack” on German soil.

Hitler vowed retaliation, and on September 1, 1939, German forces stormed into Poland. Led by their Luftwaffe (air force) and panzers (tanks), the Germans introduced a revolutionary form of warfare known as blitzkrieg (lightning war), smashing through the Polish defenses with unprecedented speed and firepower. The Poles fought tenaciously with their million-man army—the fifth largest in Europe—but they had invested little in modernization, and their antiquated aircraft and armor were no match for the Nazi juggernaut.

The final, shocking blow came two weeks into the invasion, when the Soviets invaded Poland from the east – a move secretly agreed to in the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact signed one month earlier. With German and Soviet armies converging on the remaining Polish defenses, Warsaw soon fell, and after just five weeks of resistance, Poland surrendered.

More than 70,000 Polish soldiers were killed in the fighting and another 900,000 taken prisoner, with most transported to Germany for use as slave labor on German farms and factory floors.

Polish soldiers, part of an anti-aircraft unit, during the battle for Warsaw, September 1939

Though the Germans would commit countless wartime atrocities in Poland, the Soviets were complicit in such crimes as well, including the slaughter of 15,000 Polish Army officers captured in the East. Many of the corpses were discovered in 1943 in the Katyn Forest, near the Russian city of Smolensk.

SS Einsatzgruppen

Trailing German invasion forces were SS Einsatzgruppen – barbaric security units that operated as executors, targeting Jews and members of the Polish elite, including municipal leaders, aristocrats, intellectuals, and clergy. By the end of the war, SS Einsatzgruppen had murdered more than two million civilians in Poland, the USSR, and other German-occupied territories.

Britain and France had pledged to aid Poland if Hitler’s forces invaded, and two days after the first panzers crossed the border, the Allied countries declared war on Germany. They did little else, however, unwilling to commit forces still underprepared for war, leaving the Poles entirely on their own.

Did You Know?

Britain and France had pledged to aid Poland if Hitler’s forces invaded, and two days after the first panzers crossed the border, the Allied countries declared war on Germany. They did little else, however, unwilling to commit forces still underprepared for war, and leaving the Poles entirely on their own.