Russian POW Camp records

Bobko - As to finding anything else, it is a piecemeal attempt to strengthen my claim towards Polish citizenship. Right now, not being able to find verifiable records that can prove his citizenship. With what I have, I could apply for citizenship but it would be difficult. With some kind of records that state his military service and citizenship may make my application easier. Now to get in touch with Bundearchiv or Deutsche Dienststelle. As for mixed marriages, My grandfather did not get married until he was 50 and my grandmother was already married and having marital problems with her husband. then she got a divorce/annulment in Sept 1949 and got married to my grandfather 2 months later. He may have been of German background and she may have been of (Ukrainian) Polish background.

Who are you referring to?

The Polish government at the time.

What do you mean?


If those records were destroyed during war in Poland then maybe some trace survived in London. Your grandfather was awarded that second medal in 1948. I'm thinking that the Polish government-in-exile in London had to have some kind of record of your grandfather's service in order to award that medal. 🤔


Try asking about that unit and your grandfather on that Polish forum about World War II I linked to.


Do you have your grandfather's birth certificate or baptism records?

From my understanding of what happened:

1) Poland refused any kind of cooperation with the USSR pre-war. When Britain and France tried to include the USSR in a mutual defense pact against Germany, Poland flatly refused. It would not allow movement of Soviet troops through Polish territory, even in the case of a hypothetical German invasion. Stalin interpreted this not as a Polish veto, but more foot dragging and scheming from the Brits. This pushed him into the embrace of Hitler.

2) Poland's expert community judged the USSR as "too weak" to mount an invasion, especially in the aftermath of Stalin's purges. The general expectation was that the USSR would not be able to reconstitute its forces well into the 1940s.

3) Poland saw the Nazis and Bolsheviks as ideological enemies. Even though they were aware of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (though not its secret sections), they calculated that mutual hostility between Germany and Russia would make any such alliance unstable and temporary. Certainly not durable enough to pull off a joint military operation.

4) Poland tried to pursue its age old policy of "Equal Distance", trying to balance between Germany and Russia, and deterring them through diplomatic rigidity. In reality it left Poland friendless and exposed. What it had to do - was make the difficult decision of choosing between the lesser of two evils.

Exactly. Pure emotionalism. Zero brains.

I wonder how many Poles offered to join the Red Army or at least go to work before ending up in Katyn.

Instead, just as here, they were probably very proud to insult their Russians captors and Russia...

Stupid part of Polish DNA is forever...Almost as stupid as the Polish Jews who did everything possible to stay Jewish while the SS were looking for them.

How about shaving clean, dying your hair, and not wearing that stupid yarmulka...Too complicated to figure it out without my help?

@Novichok

I forgot to mention a couple other very important reasons. But I suspect Iron is aware of those.

A big one - misplaced faith in France and Britain. The same way Poles today worship America, thinking it will protect them.

Next - total and complete intelligence failure. The Soviet secret services had managed to weed out nearly every single Polish agent. Even after the USSR attacked, for some hours the Polish leadership thought it was only a "tactical" move, and not a prelude to the total destruction of Poland.

--//--

To recap:

1) Poland refused to align with the USSR,
2) overestimated Western guarantees
3) underestimated the risk of German-Soviet cooperation.

The result was a strategic catastrophe: a two-front war that no mid-sized power could survive.

Their doctrine assumed they'd be fighting one giant, not two together. In geopolitics, isolation plus hubris is fatal.

Given the knowledge they possessed at the time, the curse of actions was clear: joining Germany as a junior partner. Germany proposed an alliance after all.

This shocks me - that you say this.

I also read this in Polish archives. Polish leadership preferred a "hot war" with Germany, to occupation by the Soviet Union.

They thought if they could hold off the Germans long enough, the French would come to help. But if they ended up in Russian slavery again, then no one could save them.

This was a huge mistake.

As you know - they ended up in Russian slavery anyway, but minus 5 million people.

The correct choice was not to ally with Germany, but to come to the Kremlin on your knees, and beg forgiveness from Stalin.

Guys, that's not what this thread is about. There are other threads for such discussions. Don't trash gjene's thread about his grandfather :/

@Paulina

Noted.

Proper order. Balancing and going the middle way is the most commonsensical thing to do. What were we supposed to do? Ally ourselves to brown madmen or to red maniacs?


We don't need friends. You are all lunatics.


Sometimes it's better to lose when other alternatives are below our dignity.


By then we knew exactly who Germans were. Poland would never be allies with such abomination.

As to coming to anybody on our knees and begging... I thought you knew us better than that. :)


Hey! Let gjene learn something about the country he wants to be the citizen of!

Well... likely if you lost just to us, instead of the Germans, then the war would largely happen on your territory instead of Ukraine's.

We would have recruited millions more Poles than we actually recruited, and they would have died in large numbers. Disproportionately more than our own soldiers.

We would use your men to breach lines, and break fortresses.

So maybe you would end up in the same place you ended up in, and nothing would have mattered.

Hard to be a Pole.

@Bobko

All in all, I think Poland made good choices in WW2 (maybe apart from starting the Warsaw Uprising). We avoided allying ourselves to either of criminal totalitarianisms, we fought the undeniable baddies from the first day of the war to the last, and at the end we were betrayed and sold to the commies - no fault of our own, nobody can blame us.

We achieved the only victory worth achieving - moral victory. Total moral victory.


No kidding.

This is true. I have a military family, going back many generations. Everyone has only good words to say about Polish bravery.

Poles played the sh*t hand of cards they got, as well as they were able to play it.

But they never allowed themselves to скурвиноваться.

Even the behavior of Polish officers at Katyn, caused
Russian executioners to lose their nerves. Poles were relaxed and jovial - as if they would still reach us in the next life. Truly brothers.

Precisely.

My paternal grandpa always said: "W życiu nie trzeba być świętym, wystarczy nie być kurwą".

I have been consistently telling these idiots here that "America" may be many things - good and bad - but it's not suicidal.

No, Poland is not worth dying for - so take that Article 5 and shove it...

OK, that was too harsh...glue it to the wall in your favorite bathroom so you can read it while going number 2...

No, for sure, those officers in Katyn met their death with honor.

They were Polish. They sucked meeting death with honour with the milk of their mothers.

Bravery too often replaces numbers and probabilities.

"We don't beg for freedom, we fight for freedom."

gen. Witold Urbanowicz, commander of the famous 303 Squadron

He settled in New York, btw.


*sigh*

But maybe other people will find this thread useful in their search in the future and you're derailing it...

This is our Slavic inheritance. Nobody can take it away from you.

Although... many years ago, there was a video of an Italian special operations operator caught in Islamic State occupied Mosul. They took him, and his colleagues, outside the city and shot them.

They recorded the video and posted it to YouTube. Idiots. It backfired.

The Italian in the video tries to pull off his hood, and says: "Vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano!"

"Come, see how an Italian dies!"

When I first saw this video, it made me cry. To be in the middle of nowhere, with a hood on your head, and on your knees - and to muster this kind of a riposte...

Even an Italian became Russian for a moment.

I don't even know if it's even bravery in the proper sense of the word.

At some point we stop caring and just want to spit our enemies in the face one last time (see Warsaw Uprising). It's something between bravery and the urge to make history choke on us. I don't know how to explain it...


Well, there's a reason why Poland has Italy in our national anthem, and they have Poland in theirs. :)


Then they will also learn something about Poland (e.g. that there are more important things for us than a thread being derailed).

You must see this.

He maintained his dignity, and did not give these homosexuals one moment of satisfaction.

Reminds me of the captured Ukrainian soldier who said "Slava Ukraini!" a moment before Russian soldiers shot him. I won't post the video but you can find it if you want.

I know this man, and every Russian knows him.

Again - respect. This is strength. This is faith. This is Jihad.

You don't understand us Russians... we respect this.

As long as you exclude those who shot him, and called him a b*tch right after, from this collective "we".

You are presuming that the war would have concluded similarly.
----

Not really, that is where they went wrong. Given a proper assessment of their circumstances, the correct decision would be to stick with Germany for the time being.
--

Soviets can't be trusted.
--

We are discussing politics, not an afternoon at the country club. I assert that Poles have lost their ability to comprehend geopolitics and the unspoken rules of politics. It's no surprise that they are not taken seriously.
--

Oh, for crying out loud, Iron...


Oh yeah?

OK, just for the sake of argument - let's roll with your scenario of Poland allying herself to the nazi abomination (even if it makes me want to throw up).

Hitler was a couple of divisions (3... maybe 4) away from capturing Moscow in 1941. If he didn't have to fight Poland in 1939 and on top of that had around 70 Polish divisions at his disposal from the first days of Operation Barbarossa (which would have started much earlier in your scenario than June 1941), the Soviet Union would have fallen and Nazis would have been victorious.

What would such scenario mean? It would mean the doom of the Russian nation, our blood brothers (whether you like it or not). This would have been kurewstwo of the first order if we had helped with that. Besides, what on earth would we have earned? Germans would have taken away all of Silesia from us anyway, and the pathetic shards of Pomerania that we had, probably Toruń and Poznań as well. Lebensraum and all that. We might have been offered some compensation in the East, but what would we have done with those lands full of Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian minorities? Back then they weren't ours anymore and would never have been again.

We would end up as galactic-scale kurwas. And for what? For nothing.

Maybe we have criminal and barbarian understandings... possibly.

But all criminals and all barbarians respect strength.

Russia is a one thousand year exercise in building strength.

We want to be strong, and we respect only strength. Poland - just like Ukraine - is incredibly strong. You,
Yourself, do not understand how strong you are.

Together with us, we can be unstoppable. We will dominate this sorry planet, and then make every other world we encounter our b*tch.

If you want a strong planet - you want a strong Russia.