Poland and Germany

Poland beoog om skadevergoeding van Duitsland te eis – dit kan nou sekerlik nie ‘n te aangename eis wees nie, maar ‘n welkome eis aan die nasate sowel die land self wat hulle tydens die oorlog verloor het.   Is interessant hoeveel Duitsland vandag vir invloei van immigrante doen in al die EU lande doen, maar daarteen skop om skadevergoeding te betaal aan die wat hul skade aangerig het tydens oorloë.   Of heropbou wat verwoes is.
WAT MOET ONS IN SUID-AFRIKA OOR DIE VERNIETIGINGSWERK HIER, PLUS DIE MOORDE SE!  DIS SUIWER KOMMUNISME WAT ALLES WIL BEHEER.

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HISTORY

On September 1, 1939, the German army under Adolf Hitler launched an invasion of Poland that triggered the start of World War II (though by 1939 Japan and China were already at war). The battle for Poland only lasted about a month before a Nazi victory. But the invasion plunged the world into a war that would continue for almost six years and claim the lives of tens of millions of people.

Today, 75 years later, Hitler is regarded as one of history’s great villains. So it’s easy to forget how slowly and reluctantly the worlds most powerful democracies mobilized to stop him. France and Britain did declare war on Germany two days after the invasion of Poland, but it would take them another eight months before they engaged in full-scale war with the Nazis. The United States wouldn’t join the war against Hitler until December 1941, a full two years after the war began.

In the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, portions of of Czechoslovakia with ethnic-German majorities (Czechoslovakia itself was excluded from the negotiations). Chamberlain claimed that the deal had averted another massive European war, but it only delayed the conflict while making Hitler more powerful when the war finally came.

Chamberlain’s accommodating stance in the 1938 negotiations convinced Hitler that the British and French wouldn’t seriously resist further annexations to his east. And in any event, Hitler calculated — correctly as it turned out — that he could conquer Poland before the Allies could do anything to stop him.

You might have expected a German invasion of Poland to set off alarm bells in Moscow. Germany and Russia were historic enemies, having fought each other during World War I. Moreover, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were theoretically at opposite ends of the political spectrum — the Communists and Nazis had viewed each other warily throughout the 1930s.

But the Allies’ handling of the Sudetenland crisis spooked Stalin. He feared that Hitler would seek to annex portions of the Soviet Union next. He thought that the Western Powers — who had no love for either Hitler or Stalin — would be happy to leave the Communists to face the Nazis alone.

So in August 1939, these historic enemies signed a non-aggression pact. The deal shocked the Allies, who had counted on the Soviet threat checking Hitler’s territorial ambitious. What London and Paris didn’t know was that the deal included secret provisions outlining how the two powers would divide up the smaller nations that lay between them — including Poland.

So when German troops crossed the border into Poland, Stalin not only didn’t object, he began making plans for his own invasion of Poland from the East.

According to historian Max Hastings, “Poland became the only nation occupied by Hitler in which there was no collaboration between the conquerors and the conquered.” Historians estimate that about 5.5 million Polish people died under the Nazi occupation of their country, half of whom were Polish Jews. Another 150,000 died under Soviet rule.

Unfortunately, the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 did not bring about Polish freedom. Poland was “liberated” by the Soviet Union, which installed a repressive communist regime there. Poland would be trapped behind the Iron Curtain until the Polish people finally threw off Communist rule in the 1980s.

Invasions

In Poland, German forces advanced at a dizzying rate. Employing a military strategy known as the blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” armored divisions smashed through enemy lines and isolated segments of the enemy, which were encircled and captured by motorized German infantry while the panzer tanks rushed forward to repeat the pattern. Meanwhile, the sophisticated German air force–the Luftwaffe–destroyed Polish air capability, provided air support for the blitzkrieg, and indiscriminately bombed Polish cities in an effort to further terrorize the enemy.

The Polish army was able to mobilize one million men but was hopelessly outmatched in every respect. Rather than take a strong defensive position, troops were rushed to the front to confront the Germans and were systematically captured or annihilated. In a famously ill-fated strategy, Polish commanders even sent horsed cavalry into battle against the heavy German armor. By September 8, German forces had reached the outskirts of Warsaw, having advanced 140 miles in the first week of the invasion.

The Polish armed forces hoped to hold out long enough so that an offensive could be mounted against Germany in the west, but on September 17 Soviet forces invaded from the east and all hope was lost. The next day, Poland’s government and military leaders fled the country. On September 28, the Warsaw garrison finally surrendered to a relentless German siege. That day, Germany and the USSR concluded an agreement outlining their zones of occupation. For the fourth time in its history, Poland was partitioned by its more powerful neighbors.

Despite their declaration of war against Germany, Britain and France did little militarily to aid Poland. Britain bombed German warships on September 4, but Chamberlain resisted bombing Germany itself. Though Germans kept only 23 divisions in the west during their campaign in Poland, France did not launch a full-scale attack even though it had mobilized over four times that number. There were modest assaults by France on its border with Germany but these actions ceased with the defeat of Poland. During the subsequent seven months, some observers accused Britain and France of waging a “phony war,” because, with the exception of a few dramatic British-German clashes at sea, no major military action was taken. However, hostilities escalated exponentially in 1940 with Germany’s April invasion of Norway and May invasion of the Low Countries and France.