History / Is there a list of those in the Polish Army during WWII? [193]


The Polish Parachute Brigade was formed with the purpose of capturing airfields in Poland for use in the planned uprising. They were held in reserve for this purpose until the British brought political pressure for its use in liberating France and the Netherlands in June 1944. Since the Poles required support from the Brits for the planned uprising, they didn't feel they could decline the request. (In the event, British support for the uprising was inadequate, to say the least.) Subsequently, the Polish parachute brigade was committed to Montgomery's folly in the Netherlands in Operation Market Garden, which was an unmitigated disaster. One school of thought is that the Polish paratroopers were sent on that mission to keep them unavailable for service in Poland, and the political issues with Stalin which would have arisen from their activity with the AK. Another perspective is that they were sent to gain battle experience, although considering the high mortality rate of paratroopers, this seems unlikely. Understand that the Poles in exile had placed their hopes for liberation in their paratroopers.

To understand the prestige of the Polish paratroopers, only the U.S., Britain, and the Poles among the Allies had significant paratroop brigades. Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth nations had none worth mention. After D-Day, the British had only one functional airborne unit, and the Poles were needed to enhance them. However, the incompetence of the operation retarded progress on the battle front. The 2,000 Poles who served in the parachute brigades desperately wanted to fight in Poland, but were denied this by the politics of appeasing Stalin. For more about this see M. A. Peszke, The Polish Underground Army, the Western Allies, and the Failure of Strategic Unity in World War II (2009)

History / Should Poland organize March of the Living in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland? [64]


Ethnic Poles were not the majority here, but ethnic Ukrainians were not either. Ethnic "Ukrainians" were a subgroup or Ruthenians. Many Ruthenians had rejected the Ukrainian ethnicity before WWII. Some had intermarried with the Poles for hundreds of years, or claimed to be descendants of the Ruthenian szlachta and were Polonophiles. Others were Carpo-Rusyns, like the Lemkos, who spoke a different language and rejected the Ukrainians as chauvinists attempting destroy their unique language and culture. After the war and the ethnic cleansing by Stalin and the Ukrainian fascists, these Ruthenians were declared to have been Ukrainians who just weren't aware that they were. Since the Soviets also destroyed the periodicals archive in Lwow, it is difficult to "prove" what existed there prewar. (Pre-war residents have different recollections of events than post-war communist historians.) Communist historians and Western historians predisposed to discount the legitimacy of the Second Polish Republic's borders have accepted the Stalinist orthodoxy of Rutheinian being a synonym for the Ukrainian endonym. Slowly this is changing. Dr. Robert Magosci has been at the forefront of changing this perception:


britannica/topic/Rusyn-people

Wolyn had been under Russian administration since the last partition of Poland. Its lesser nobility were so oppressed by the greater nobility that they intermarried with the peasants and Ruthanized. The people in Wolyn were overwhelmingly Orthodox in contrast to the Catholic Ruthenain Galicians. Modern Russian social scientists distinguish the two groups as two distinct ethnic groups. Remember that Stalin forced the Uniates to renounce the Pope after annexing Galicia.

History / Polish conscripts to German army [132]

Harvey Sarner in his book about Anders Army, General Anders and the Soldiers of the Second Polish Corps (1997), noted that II Polish Corps was resupplied with Polish conscripts from German POW camps in the tens of thousands. This was compelled by the break with the Soviets which eliminated recruits from the East. Since these soldiers had served in Wehrmacht they were in danger of being shot at deserters if they were recognized as such. So, it is not surprising that some used assumed or borrowed identities. However, once the tide turned against the Nazis, many found that risk preferable to being viewed as Nazi collaborators at the end of the war. It was so successful that by the time II Polish Corps was demobilized, it had a "surplus" of soldiers in excess of the limit that the Brits had placed on it. Norman Davies has also recently released a book about the Second Polish Corps Trail of Hope: The Anders Army - An Odyssey Across Three Continents (2015)

History / Polish conscripts to German army [132]

Officially, the Germans didn't recognize that they were ethnic Poles. Post-war academics have generally attempted to divide RP II 's population into somewhat arbitrary ethnic groups by religion and language without acknowledging that many were "transitional" people who could assimilate into the population on the other side of the border. They rarely were given a choice to "vote with their feet" by either the Nazis or the Soviets, who assigned them an ethnicity to further their territorial ambitions and claims. Anders' Army was the one notable exception, but even then, the Soviets took a very restrictive view of whom they declared to be Polish, and thus permitted to fight under Polish command. The Polish graveyard at Monte Casino has quite a few Jewish Star of David's, as well as Orthodox and Greek Catholic crosses bearing witness to the religious diversity of the Poles from the Kresy.

Feedback / Member warning system to prevent abuse / spam / off-topic posts [145]

Will certain repeat offenders get permanent bans for second or third banishments? They drive people away from the forum with their anti-Polonism.

Genealogy / Are Sorbs Polish? Does anyone know about Sorbish enthnicity? [62]

Fundamentally, people are who and what they, themselves, claim to be and not the labels that others wish to impose on them. (What happened due to the involuntary changes in Poland's borders after WWII) Modern Europe has learned to embrace this diversity which is very much in contrast to pre-WWII nationalists who claimed otherwise. Polish historian Henryk Zieliński wrote quite a bit about the Germanization of its Slavic peoples (in Polish) before the war. I haven't read him, but he eventually rejected communist historiography and was likely murdered as a result.

The major caveat with regard to communist era academia is that they tended to support, at least implicitly, Stalin's post war forced borders with regard to transitional peoples which never had the opportunity to decide anything for themselves. I would not be surprised to learn that communist historiography suggested that Germany's Western Slavs were either Polish, or close enough to be "rightfully" Polonized. The fact is that more likely, these transitional groups preferred living where they could maintain their own language and ethnicity as distinct from that which was larger but somehow similar, e.g., the Carpo-Rusyn language and culture has flourished in Poland, while it has largely disappeared in Ukraine. When such people were not able to resist, their distinct language and culture has disappeared. The Pomeranian language became extinct after the war, and despite spending time there, no one recognizes a separate Pomeranian people or culture.

Genealogy / Are Sorbs Polish? Does anyone know about Sorbish enthnicity? [62]

No, I believe that I was referring to the Slovincian language which is now quite extinct. Together with Kashubian, it made up one of the two branches of the Pomeranian languages. Ethnically, Slovincians had become Protestants, unlike the Kashubians who remained Catholic. So, only half of the Pomeranian languages survived the war:



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovincian_language
It has been a few years since I read about this. I seem to remember reading that the language was further to the West near Szcecin, but that was about ten years ago and can't find anything presently on the Internet about that.


Considering that Poland's post war Western border is exactly that which the Russians had proposed at the start of WWI, (as noted by Norman Davies) it is not surprising that Stalin rejected something different. The point exploited for justification is that the "Recovered Territories" had been very Slavic before Germanization. Thus, Polonization was the rejection of Germanization.

History / Should Poland organize March of the Living in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland? [64]

Before WWII, "Ukrainian" was a political party and movement among many Ruthenians, but it was not quite an ethnicity. After the war, the Ukrainian identity was forced on the remainder who survived or weren't deported.

History / Should Poland organize March of the Living in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland? [64]

Nope. The Catholic Ruthenians remained Ruthenians until Stalin and the Ukrainian fascists invaded and began their crimes against humanity contrary to the Ukrainian neo-nationalism you are promoting here.

History / Should Poland organize March of the Living in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland? [64]

There could be no "revival" for something that was novel, and not accepted by many of the people others insisted were members of that new ethnonym. The term Ruthenian was used by the Great Powers at Versailles to distinguish the Catholics from the Orthodox. (See Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, "It was not clear were the Ruthenians belonged...The Ruthenian delegates who managed to get to Paris by the spring of 1919 could not say what they wanted." [at pg. 225] ) That distinction is maintained by modern Russian social scientists. Historians Christopher Hann and Paul Robert Magosci, among others, also disagree with your Ukrainian neo-nationalist point of view and opinion.


Truly, the revisionism came when millions of people were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan, murdered for asserting that they were not Ukrainians as the local fascists insisted, or refusing to participate in their pogroms, (which put even the Nazis to shame by attacking their close relatives), denied the ability of self-determination as to their national government, and in which army they might fight and serve, and also deprived of their right to practice their Catholic religion by Stalin's communists who forced their church to renounce the pope, or exiled in the West, etc.