WWII - who really was the first to help Poland?

Everyone's to blame in one way or another.

Please list the help which Britain could have provided and failed to provide.

Poland was foolish in believing that the help Britain could provide would have been enough to enable Poland to fight off the Germans.

They say it was an empty coffin at the Memorial Service organized by Hitler in Berlin in 1935.
Nevertheless, Pilsudzki though 'national hero' (he was Lithuanian) -accredited for Poland's independence - had signed a pact with Hilter over Pomerania, Wielkopolska and one other region (name escapes me for the mo) Pilsudzki had one thing in common with Hitler - camps.

Sorry Pan, but that's how I read this history too...


As did Stalin...camps were quite a common measure of internal and external politics in many countries in these times...

Ridiculous. German economy, at first thriving from temporary morale vibe/work ethic renewal, was burned just as fast by silly Nazis who thought that their economy, and their army, was quite as invincible as DC Superman. Hell, they even stopped turning profits in their death camps! How does one lose money on slave labor???

The British, on the other hand, were happily enjoying plentiful hand-outs from the US long before 1942. Which, incidentally, they still haven't paid back...


Only as long as the German economy could sustain it. In this case, not very long at all.


I think perhaps your timeline is a little... different... from the rest of ours. What year, again, did Germany attack the USSR? After invading France, wasn't it? Which they did after France attacked them, didn't they?


History proves no such thing. If you were even remotely correct, why did Hitler's attempts to negotiate with Britain fail in 1940? Why did Britain even enter the war in the first place?!


This doesn't exactly help your point any.


They would, and they did. Japan's attacking them was all that was needed to tip the scales and send them in all the way.

Note that the US at this time was not a military power by any stretch... they basically built a military from the ground-up (as did Britain) and still clobbered Nazi Germany and her ally Japan at the same time with it! I think perhaps Germany was not quite so strong as they at first thought (and apparently as you still do...).


Ugh... no...
I was referring to Bratwurst's statement.
I, on the other hand, claimed no such thing.


Arguably not. I still like to poke fun at the Germans by claiming that they could have, but for the Russians...


One camp, actually.

Not true! Poland had only one pre-WWII concentration camp.

Bereza wasn't even nearly as much deadly as German concentration camps

Defending, indeed.
How does 'joining the fascists in invading Poland after an agreement to divide the country between them and not to attack each other' count as 'defending Poland from the fascists', again?

Shame more of them didn't die during the course of this highly benevolent and unselfish defense of their neighbor!

Nun ja...if you think so...


I believe they paid back everything...it was in the news...



That wasn't the question.
The "What if" you brought on was if Germany could have gotten away with it if they had been content with Poland, not about their economy.


Again...in your "What if" there would be no further war..not with GB nor with Russia and everything points to that if Germany had sat quietly on Poland alone and had left the other powers to their own nothing else would had happened than just lot's of exchange of diplomatical niceties.


Because they saw Germany as the one real threat to their european balance?
Why do you think Britain didn't declare war to the Russians too (who also invaded Poland)?

Face it, this all has nothing to do with the cuddly Poles but everything with tough european power games.


No they wouldn't have if GB hadn't lobbied for years...

The phony war between Germany, France and GB (you know the whole time the Wehrmacht was having fun in Poland) was only broken by the german invasion of France and Germany getting uncomfortable close to the british islands.

GB had to do something about it and called Washington.
Then Hitler thought that a good moment to wake the other behemoth...well...we know the rest.

Scratch that and Germany would still sit on Poland!

something doesn't fit here - why didn't Poland take say whole Moravia ???

the lands in question would have probably fallen into the German hands had Poland not demanded them and sent troops to occupy them after the Czech government withdrew its military and police from the area (following Polish ultimatum)

having said that i still think it was a grave mistake not to fully support Czechs and at least try to form an alliance with them against the German expansion - frankly speaking I have no idea wether there were any serious attempts at that and who failed

Ethnic tensions? Old grievances??? It's always a good guess for a reason if logic and common sense failed...

Grammar!!!

The death camps were not slave labour camps and always cost money.


Yes they have.

BTW: Germany is still paying reparations for WWI.


Agreed. However, it was a concentration camp.

gumishu
Nevertheless a camp.

We moved on to 'you think Germany would have won the war if not for invading the USSR?', to which you replied, enthusiastically, that of course it would. Since they'd already been at war for so long then, and with nobody on the other side showing any signs of backing down while Germany's money, which makes war and troops and the like a possibility, went to the incinerators, the question becomes 'could Germany, economy failing and troops and people exhausted, have defeated Great Britain and the US, with only the help of Japan?'



You'll note that GB entered a state of war with Germany because of and immediately after they invaded Poland???
I mean, come on, it's kind of hard to see how you don't realize that this sort of blows your whole argument straight out of the water.


Which A) GB certainly would have, since they were at war and needed/wanted help, B) they would have anyway, after having been provoked by Japan blowing up almost all of their entire navy.


Sadder yet is that they couldn't get camps that exercised both slave labor and mass killings to still be able to support themselves economically.


Oh, excuse me. "Which, incidentally, they just managed to pay back not quite three years ago."

Well..they obliged the treaty, didn't they?
Didn't help Poland one bit I think...
Did you never ask yourself why they didn't declare war on Russia too as they invaded Poland or why you were given away to the Russians at Yalta so easily?

It was never about you as the people but about the power structure in Europe.
Just a pawn...

To believe anything else is truly foolish!


No, I don't think so.
The Nazis needed the war to keep themselves up and running.
They would had been grinded to a halt (even if only for exhaustion) sooner or later in any case!
...but I doubt many people knew that at that time...it's a gift of hindsight.

The real unavoidable clash was between Nazi-Germany and Soviet-Russia...Europe was just to small for two of that kind.
Poland was doomed to be the battlefield (since they didn't ally with either of them)...

quite naive - the Soviets were preparing to conquer Europe - at the outbreak of German-Soviet war they had guess double the amount of tanks, and perhaps also double the amount of war planes - Hitler just managed to gain initiative and this only because Stalin held Hitler for an idiot and would not believe the Germans would attack the SU while presented with many intelligence sources that clearly showed Germans were preparing for the attack


yes I believe this - even though Churchill really intended to and tried to stop the Soviet advance into the Middle Europe (proposed landing in Balkans and not in France - but Roosevelt has been already strongly influenced by Stalin (trusted Stalin - due to the events that took place before the Teheran conference)

Hitler also made an offer, accepted by the Soviets, to create an alliance against Poland.
How long did that last? Were Poles to blame for the collapse of that alliance too?

Just a pawn... which defeated the Red Army and hounded them back into Russia where they belong. Which also quite rightly should have just gone ahead and slammed the Great and Glorious nation of Germany (around which political Europe wholly revolves) when they had finished the same, instead of waiting for confirmation that it was beyond doubt the right thing to do.

Perhaps you'd like to talk about how that was Poland's mistake? Instead of it being 'not sucking up to Germany or Russia', it was 'not just booting the Germans in the rear while they had the chance'? What do you think Germany would have been able to do about it, say, 1934?


Poland was always doomed to the battlefield: it contains little in terms of geographical barriers, it's in the geographical center of Europe, and, not of little importance, terrible neighbors.

done some reading:

it appears during the Munich crisis Poland was approached by the British diplomacy to enter a large anti-German block (including the British (don't know about the French but seems obvious), Czechoslovakia and baltic states) but minister Beck did not react

then it was all too late

btw Poles did not trust Czechoslovaks because they had strong ties with the Soviet Union, as far as I can remember they did not want any help from Poland itself but rather wanted Poland to let the Soviet troops through its territory to their support - Poles feared this and it's not completely obvious that it was 100 per cent reasonable fear

I don't. But then again I have read the Agreement of Mutual Assistance between the United Kingdom and Poland signed in London, August 25, 1939 and so know that it specifically excludes Russia.


Read a little about the death camps, you may learn something.


If you bothered learning a little about history you would look less foolish: the loans were supposed to have been paid back over a 50-year period starting in 1945. With mutually accepted deferment, the final payment of $83.3 million (£42.5 million) due on 31 December 2006, it was made on 29 December 2006, i.e. ahead of schedule.

Well....yes....

The rest are all "what if's" again! :)


Nope...nothing was carved in stone. Smart allegiance could have changed alot.
Foolish polish diplomacy is much to blame for Polands fate.

You only whine if Poland is on the receiving end. Your country wasn't always a blessing to it's neighbours either...get a grip man!

Poland was a small bully (who greatly overestimated itself) who got trashed by a bigger bully...nothing what not had happened to most countries now and then in the past too.

Your "terrible neighbors" were also often enough weak and only the battlefield for foreign armies in it's history.

Ever heard of the thirty years war in Germany?
We lost percentual more people than Poland during WWII.
And weren't Poles with Napoleons army invading Russia ???

That's Europe...get over it!

Excuses! Someone fails at diplomacy they are invaded? What if we used that line of logic on Germany next time they do something in their best interest that we don't like? Not something necessarily wrong by international standards, but something that everyone is okay with and helps Germany out. Do we have an excuse to invade Germany over that?

Ask the Czechs: Poland invaded them when they failed at diplomacy.

Well, that's european history in short for you....just read up...it's mostly like that!


That's what the NATO is for...a lesson after WWII.
(Okay throw in nukes as deterrence and the decades of the cold war but you get the drift)

When someone would scrap the NATO and the EU and every country would be again out for themselves you would find very soon alot of those little and bigger alliances again...squabbling and maybe even clashing...I promise you that!

I probably would. Such tends to happen when I read things.
The subject does not particularly interest me, however.


Right, so as I said... they managed to pay them back not quite three years ago. I did not say that they were behind schedule, or less than two whole days ahead of schedule.


I don't see it as a 'what if' that Poland trashed the Red Army. :)


We can say this with the benefit of hindsight (or, in the case of WWII, we can't say this at all, not even with hindsight).

As a side note, my father agrees with you. If someone mentions WWII (for his neighbors in the States are Germans), he launches into a tirade on how Poland should have joined Hitler and trashed the Soviets again and whatnot (oh, wait... on second thought, I'm not sure that he mentions this around the neighbors so much...). So that much for children voting as their parents... but, wait! My views of the States politics while studying there more or less equated his. Whoops.


I never said it was. However, we are here discussing WWII.
Also, why would I whine about my country not being on the receiving end? That doesn't even make sense! :)


I maintain that it was trashed not by a bigger bully but by multiple smaller bullies. Hah!


At which time it was still not much beneficial to Poland, so...


Yes.


Really.


Indeed (officer who's name and rank I have no rememberence of because he was French) even ordered his sentinels to borrow the uniforms of sleeping Polish soldiers "to keep the Cossaks at a safe distance". :)


I am not complaining. Merely noting disagreement with your points.


They started it.

Tell your father that the Nazis were a dead end for everybody (hindsight).
It was a "damned if you do/damned if you don't" situation more or less (hindsight of course).


Okay....but I rarely see a honest debate about the not-so-cool points in polish history (or if than not without much white washing).
Whereas nearly no week goes by without some thread about WWII and how saintly Poland was betrayed by everybody and his grandmom..


Okay :)

Short version for you: the death camps used slave labour only to run the camp (carrying bodies, sorting clothing, shaving heads, etc).


Not "they managed to pay them back not quite three years ago": "which it was agreed that they would pay back over a 50-year period which ended in 2005". Although at least your latest version is an improvement on your first version....


No they didn't. Poland tried to hold elections in the Polish controlled sector despite having signed an interim agreement stating that no sovereign rule was to be executed in the region. Polish arrogance coming before a fall, yet again.

Read John Keegan's book 'The First World War'.

Well...till I'm done this thread is most probably already closed..

Do tell!