News / If Poland were in the Eurozone... [39]


I guess you don't know that the Euro was a French invention of the early 1990s. Mitterand urged Kohl to accept a common European currency as prize of the French support for German reunification! The Germans always wanted to keep their D-Mark! The only sign of patriotism Germans could show without doubt after the war was to take pride in their strong currency. So it surely was no plot from the German side. Germany's was not less successful when we still had the Deutschmark!

History / PRE-WAR BONDS and CURRENCY issued in Poland -- ANY VALUE? [9]

try this: lmgtfy.com/?q=austrian-hungarian+krone

Language / New Dialects in Western and Northern Poland [24]

Dear Anreas,

Mogilno never had a sizable genuine German Population before it became Prussian after the Polish divisions. The Prussians didn't even bother to give the city a German Name. Therefore I would say there was no local German dialect spoken there.

Mogilno though was only 30 Kilometers away from the German-Polish language "border" at that time. I put the word border in quotation marks because at that time there was no clear border to draw, because German and Polish speaking villages were scattered all over "West Prussia" (todays Kujawsko-Pomorskie and Pomorskie proper). Therefore maybe the local German language there might have been influenced by the German dialect of Low Prussian:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Prussian_dialect

History / Slovakia - Poland's neglected neighbour? [13]

I once read the Slovakian language can function as lingua franca for travelers throughout the Slavic speaking world.

Being a West Slavic language itself (like Polish, Czech, Kashubian and Sorbian) it shares some similarities with South Slavic languages, especially Slovenian, and its clear pronounciation makes it easier for speakers of East Slavic languages (Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians) to understand than Polish and Czech, which both have a lot of peculiarities that result in many difficulties regarding their intelligibility for speakers of other Slavic languages.

History / Slovakia - Poland's neglected neighbour? [13]


As in all online forums worldwide here at PF, too there is a certain amount of trolls as well as an over-representation of extremists. I kept that in mind.


Hey Pawian, hope you are doing fine,

You know Slovaks didn't really had a chance. In Summer 1939 Hitler threatened them he would allow Hungary to annex all of Slovakia and restore "Upper Hungary" if they did not fully co-operate with Nazi Germany.

The Slovak national identity misses the bravery and stubbornness the Polish one has, because Poles always could take strength and morale from their great past. Slovaks for all of their existence were a part of Hungary, fighting against several Magyarisation attempts in order to keep their national identity. After the Austro-Hungarian settlement of 1867 that restored Hungarian statehood and allowed Magyars to shape Hungary after their will, they suppressed Slovaks in almost every aspect of life.

The fear of becoming a part of fascist Hungary and losing their new independence that they gained six months earlier, lead them to the false assumption it would serve their national interests best to become a satellite state of Nazi Germany.

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]


Hey, you are reverting back to the old Soviet ways of laying all WWII crimes on Germany's doorstep!

I know old habits die hard, but you should have the gratidute to acknowledge that Soviet Russia and Ukrainian nationalists, too, were responsible for many crimes against humanity.

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]


Please, even Germans, like my grandparents, listened to BBC on a regular basis, although Nazi authorites had draconic punishments for doing that, because they knew from Nazi German news they would only receive propaganda. So my grandfather knew the Americans were very close to the village were they lived and not at the Rhine front how Nazi radio propaganda tried to tell them.

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]


True. But what do you think? How many of them were common opportunists and how many were really convinced about Nazi ideology? In fact many of those "helpers" were the first ones to attack innocent German civilians when the fortunes of war left Nazi Germany because they needed to prove to their countrymen they always have been on the "right side". Even in "purely Germanic" countries like Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Flanders and Luxembourg the Nazis never were capable to attract the considerable parts of the population.


Of course you are right here, too.
I justed wanted to stress that in dictatorships like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany the head of state (Stalin and Hitler) alone could decide to wage an aggressive war with atom bombs while in democratic states the head of government needs to ask other institutions before making such a decision.

In all history of mankind you will never find two democratic states that went to war with one another!


Because a state that is at war with almost the rest of the world needs clear structures, like a functioning state and a loyal population that can live their daily routines in order to stay operative. How this would have been possible if you move several hundred millions of people from their homes to foreign and probably hostile environments? And think about the logistics. How would you bring food to all those people? How many soldiers you would need in order to "protect" German civilians and keep in check the "others"? Who would construct all the weapons for the Nazis?

Don't you think every Pole, Frenchman, Czech, Dutch or Skandinavian wouldn't have known that Nazi Germany would have reached the end of the line when they had to evacuate all of their cities in order to hide in foreign cities. They were in the majority and there would have been many chances for an uprising.

Besides that Nazi Germany was a deeply centralized state. You only needed to destroy a couple of hubs like Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and the information transfer inside Nazi Germany would have been severly inhibited.

Think about your plan again. It cannot work in reality.

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]


Again: watch Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. You will like it!

Because Roosevelt and Truman were stupid enough to trust Stalin after Germany was defeated in 1945.

The Americans would have had the chance to destroy the Soviet Empire in the years from 1945 to 1949. Why didn't they do it? I think the reason is they did not do it because America was a democracy and there was no majority in the American public opinion to kill millions of innocent Russians.

WWII was a war in progress and the longer a war is fought the more brutalized people get. The Americans knew that probably hundred of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Japanese people would have to die if the American army had tried to invade the Japanese islands the conventional way. So Roosevelt hoped the destruction of two medium sized Japanese cities would "convince" the Japanese government to end this war that was lost to Japan anyway. And it worked! The same would have been true for Nazi Germany.

But, we all agree it is extremely inhumane to destroy cities full with hundred thousands of civilians with atom bombs. In my opinion a decision like this can only be made when a war is going on already. Which American president would have taken the moral implications of being responsible for the murdering so many of Russian civilians in let's say: Leningrad, Moscow, Gorki (Nizhny Novgorod) or Smolensk in order to drive Soviet troups out of Central and Eastern Europe?

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]


If my uncle had no penis it would have been my aunt. I confess I like those "what would have happened if..." scenarios a lot, but it is fruitless to spend too much time on that.

I highly doubt that the Nazis would have been able to suppress the European continent for longer than a couple of years because Germany is too small and there are not enough Germans to forcefully subdue all of Europe!

More imporant is the fact that the Nazis had nothing to offer to Non-Germans except the life of a servant for the "Nordic master race". Do you really think such a system could prevail for a long period of time?

The war was already lost for Germany from that moment on when the Schleswig-Holstein started to shoot at the Polish army on the Westerplatte!
The only reason why it took six years to fight Germany down was that nobody of Nazi Germany's opponents thought the Nazis would fight the war with such extreme brutality and ruthlessness. Secondly Nazi Germany leadership was willing to sacrifice Germany itself for their war aims. The Nazis only had one goal: complete victory or complete annihilation.

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]


Just imagine if every German - soldier or civilian - would have had to fear that out of blue, without forewarning, complete cities would be destroyed in just a second. The moral impact would have been devastating! So I guess after the third atom bomb the war in Europe would have been over.


From 1945 to 1947? Enough to end the war once and forever!


Scattering every German around the territories of occupied Europe? German armies that are stationed in nuclear fall-out shelter bunkers waiting for the nuclear radiation to disappear and then continue fighting? Sorry, but this is completely absurd. You should watch Stanley Kubrick's motion picture "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" that ridicules this kind of thinking.

Let alone the fact that every nation that was enslaved by Nazi Germany would have regained one's strength rapidly, after the news had reached them that the Americans developed a new weapon that could transform Nazi Germany's cities into dust in just an instant, and this news would have spreaded even to the remoted outposts of occupied Europe very fast and would have sparked resistance against Nazi oppressors.

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]


Please! The atom bomb was ready in August 1945 and the Americans would have used it against Germany if necessary. I agree it was the Soviets that did most of the fighting, but even if the Nazis had made it to Moscow and even if the Allies hadn't landed in Normandy the Americans would have had the technology to bomb Germany into obilivion in August 1945!

Again, if the fate of the world had been at stake it was technically possible for the Americans to construct a plane with extra fuel tanks to fly to Germany and back. An atom bomb is easy to transport.

History / Polish relation about Russians, Ukrainians? [281]

If the Americans really had needed to, they would have built a long distance airplane that would have been able to fly from Iceland - which was under American control - to Germany and back. They had everything that was necessary to construct such a plane.

It was the Americans that won WWII because they had the atom bomb, as delphiandomine pointed out correctly!

History / Lusatia allied with Poland? [19]

Crow, even the most patriotic Lusatian Sorb does not question the affiliation of Lusatia to Germany.
Did you know that Stanislaw Tillich, the prime minister of Saxony, is a Lusatian Sorb? He even took his oath of office in the Lower Sorbian language, and he takes every chance he can to promote the Sorbian language: Some conservative Germans even say he has a real chance to become the next German chancellor after Angela Merkel.

News / Prediction: Poland to be World Superpower in XXI century [147]


nicely put! ;-)

History / Lusatia allied with Poland? [19]

If you guys want to watch news in Sorbian language go ahead by clicking on this link: mdr.de/mediathek/fernsehen/a-z/wuhladko102_letter-W_zc-59d7 b54a_zs-dea15b49.html

History / Poland-Lithuania would we be better off together? [16]


Didn't Poland and Lithuania join the European Union in 2004? Why not intensifing Polish-Lithuanian co-operation under the umbrella of the EU?
From an outside German point of view this path seems to be the most promising one.

Due to the fact that there are 38 million Polish citizens and only 3 mio Lithuanians, which is less than ten percent of Poland's population, Lithuanians would get lost in the shuffle of the ethnic mix-up a new Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Genealogy / What does Germanised mean? [29]


You probably know about the Nueces massacre (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueces_massacre). More then 30 first generation German Texans that opposed slavery and remained loyal to the Union were massacred by Confederate soldiers in 1862.

Genealogy / What does Germanised mean? [29]


This is sometimes very hard to tell.

When the All-Bohemian Social Democratic Party broke into a German and a Czech fraction in the early 1900s, due to massive differences caused by the rising ethnic tensions between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, there was the funny coincidence that the family name of the leader of the new German party was "Czech" while his Czech oponent bore the family name "Nemec".

In my school I had a (decendant of Sudeten Germans) school friend whose father's name was Eduard Benesch while in 1945 the Czech communist leader's name was Klement Gottwald.


I really did not know there is a settlement of Upper Silesians in Texas. I have close relatives in Austin so I traveled a lot around in Texas. I know there is a Sorbian village called "Serbin" not too far from Austin but an Upper Silesian settlement is news to me. Did they stay in contact with other immigrant settlements from Germany or, due to their Polish vernacular, did they stay among themselves before they got Americanized?


You need to check the Viennese telephone book. On some pages it looks like you looking for a person in Prague or Brno.

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]


I wanted to menion that too, the thing about alcohol. Thanks!

Do you know a single country where strict laws on drugs have improved anything? Look at countries like the US and Russia that have draconic punishments for the use of drugs. The percentage of drug consuments there is increasing steadily. The only people that suffer, that are put to jail are consuments. Most of the dealers make their money and walk away freely. Things are much better in countries like Holland, Switzerland, Czechia and the liberal German Bundesländer where consuments are not criminalized. In fact the rate of Marihuana smokers in the Netherlands is constant since the 1970s.

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]


You like to write about things you don't have a clue of! I can't take your comments for serious! All you are stating here is propaganda from hardliners.

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]


I read about this study. I don't want to say everything stated in this study is complete rubbish but these studies all have one big problem: They were made on Cannabis consumers that all have become conspicuous to authorities because either the police caught them or they called for help from psychologists.

This would be just like if you analyse the security of airplanes but the only data you get is from airplanes that crashed. All results you would get from such data would be completely distorted and your result probably would be: Never enter an airplane because death from crashing is certain!

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]


Did you ever try pot yourself? I did! So I can't take it too serious if you write about things you don't know. In my opinion you will do a great disservice on young people if you over-dramatize the negative side-effects of Marihuana because then some of them will believe really dangerous drugs like Heroin, Cocaine, Crack and Meth are not too dangerous also.

The majority of studies analyzing the long-term effects of cannabis products on consumers prove that it is not more dangerous than alcohol.

I live in Frankfurt/Germany, a city that is liberal towards the use of re-creational drugs and decriminalized it pretty much. People in Frankfurt have the right to possess 5 grams of Marihuana or Hash and the Police will let you walk away with it. I know clubs and bars where it is tolerated that people consume marihuana, almost everybody I know has experiences with smoking pot, and our society is still functioning pretty well. It's not considered a big deal.

Of course Cannabis is a drug and like every drug it can be dangerous and harmful. I don't want to downplay this. Drugs are nothing for children, adolescents and for people who are mentally fragile! This must be clear! Now you will probably say who knows who is mentally fragile and who will be able to cope with it. I don't know myself but drugs in Frankfurt are so ubiquitious the mentally fragile will get their drugs anyway. By partially legalizing soft drugs the state at least regained a little bit of control over the illegal market back.

If you write all drugs, including alcohol and nicotine are dangerous and should be prohibited than I can comprehend that, but a society without the right for rush would be a pretty boring one. This is my point of view. ;-)

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]

I know dozens of people who smoke Marihuana or Hash on a regular basis for years or even decades. They all have jobs, a family and still are law abiding citizens and valuable members of society. I don't think their intelligence has decreased. Good, it may be harmful for your lungs but so is Nicotine too.

Some people can cope with it some people can't, just like it is the case with the use of Alcohol. No matter how you look at it: Cannabis products are not more dangerous than Alcohol! And I know what I am talking about because I did it myself for quite a while on a daily basis, and personally I still prefer a good joint over a beer or a glass of liqueur.

And the "Cannabis is a starter drug" argument does not convince me either. The problem is since Marihuana is illegal in most countries you have to buy it from dealers and they are the ones that bring Cannabis users in contact with hard drugs.

Look at countries like Holland where Weed is legal and free to pruchase for decades. Has the rate of drug addicts increased there? No, it is stable for years.

History / Czech and Polish character in World War two [81]


Poles where in in the quiet uncomfortable situation that they had to fight against each other, since they were drafted into the German, Austrian and Russian armies.

The German army tried to put all "German" soldiers of Polish ethnicity to the Western front because they feared a loyality conflict when "German" Poles had to fight "Russian" Poles on the Eastern Front, but this fact was not taken into account always.

History / Czech and Polish character in World War two [81]

First of all, according to Wikipedia the Olsa Territory was populated by Poles, Czechs and some Germans -- and Poles were not the majority! Since Polish and Czech are West Slavic languages and there is a dialect continuum between Poland and Czechia I guess people there could change nationality easily if necessary. Is Wikipedia wrong about that? Then what are your sources that you claim Poles were the majority in Olsa territory?

The only reason for Great Britain to negotiate with Germany in Munich was not to be forced to go to war. It was not their heartfelt wish to maul the last democartic state in Central Europe (besides Switzerland). And Polands flat-footed behaviour towards Czechoslowakia indeed alienated British politicians and the public opion in a way that they thought "The Poles are not better than the Germans so why should we fight for them!". When WW2 broke out there was a huge anti-war movement in France and their slogan was "Faut-il mourir pour Dantzig? (Do we have to die for Gdansk/Danzig?)". They all claimed for the fact that the Polish state itself relentlessly tried to gain as much territory as possible from her neighbours.

Of course I wasn't alive in 1938 so all I know about the Munich Agreement is from various sources like books, the internet and television documentaries, which all might be biased.

But there are several sources that prove that Hitler shouted with joy when he learned that Poland would support Germany and Hungary in their territorital claims and would make claims herself agains Czechoslowakia, because it was his opinion it would isolate Poland from its Western Allies.

History / Czech and Polish character in World War two [81]


Please do not put every word I wrote on the gold scale. I am at work and along the way I have to please my boss, otherwise he fires me, so sometimes I am bit distracted because I also have other things to do besides writing about Central European history! ;-)

History / Czech and Polish character in World War two [81]


Practically all of them found themselves without any possessions in what is now Germany and Austria. But humans do not live on practical things only, otherwise we would be like animals. There also is a symbolic sphere that is important for humans.

So for some it makes a big difference if some people kick you out of your country take all of your possessions and say "This is because you are a traitor!" or if people come kick you out of your country, take all your possessions and say "We are doing this because according to the Potsdam agreement all your belongings will be confiscated and you will be transferred west of the rivers Oder and Neisse".

Chamberlain just didn't want to go to war when it was pretty obvious that war is inevitable. Poland made a mistake by making the impression it would ally Germany and Hungary. The Brits and French made the mistake because they gave Hitler anything he wanted. They should have stopped Hitler in 1935 when he breached the Treaty of Versailles by letting German army marching into the Rhineland.

This also brought the fatal message to the German people that democrats are just weak people who talk the talk but do not walk the walk. The allies denied the German democratic governments from 1919 to 1933 anything that they willingly gave the Nazis after 1933 because they feared to go to war with them.

History / Czech and Polish character in World War two [81]


Sorry, but this is exactly what happened, in this point Harry is right!

In 1938 Poland allied Nazi-Germany and fascist Hungary in order to destroy a democratic state. At least this is how it looked to the outside world. And this is one of the reasons why Poland was out of allies in September 1939 and Nazi-Germany and the USSR could infest Poland and scarf it.

I know many of you will hate me now but this is my opinion!