A World at Arms (15 page)

As interested in avoiding war on two fronts as the Germans–though more careful and successful at this than Hitler–Stalin wanted to make certain that the situation in East Asia was under control before launching military operations in Europe. This aim was assisted not only by the victory of Soviet troops in late August but by a combination of two additional factors. First, the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact–which had opened up the possibility of invading Poland in concert with Germany in the first place–had quite literally collapsed the government in Tokyo. Imagining themselves engaged in negotiations with Germany for an alliance
against
the Soviet Union, the leaders of Japan learned to their consternation that their prospective European ally had signed a non-aggression pact with the very power against which they were fighting a losing battle and had hoped to secure German pressure. The government in Tokyo resigned and the new Prime Minister there had difficulty even finding a suitable Foreign Minister for some time and had to hold
on to both positions for a month. That under these circumstances the Japanese ambassador in Moscow was instructed to negotiate an armistice on terms which in effect accepted the Soviet claims in the border dispute should not be surprising, and that the Germans in their eagerness for a quick Soviet move in Europe should do their best to facilitate an agreement between their pre-war and their new–found friend should also be easy to understand.

A second element facilitating a Soviet-Japanese agreement was that, just as the Tokyo government was eager to end the disastrous fighting at Nomonhan (Khalkhin-gol), Stalin’s own sense of urgency about the European situation as the speed of the German advance became obvious led him to refrain from further possible offensive operations in the border fighting and instead agree to a settlement which the Japanese government could accept without extreme humiliation.
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The Soviet–Japanese armistice agreement of September 15 provided for a cease-fire on the following day; but well before the agreement was reached, at least by September 9, it must have been obvious to the Moscow authorities that the conflict in East Asia was about to end and all attention could be concentrated on her western border.
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It was in this context that the Soviet government withdrew its ambassador to Poland as well as most of the embassy personnel on September 11, the same day that the Soviet press reported on the collapse of Polish resistance.
²⁰
Although in fact some Polish resistance was to continue for another three weeks, it must have looked to Stalin that any substantial further delay entailed two equally great risks: there might be a German–Polish armistice which would leave the Soviet Union entering a war already concluded, on the one hand, or German advances into the depths–not just the fringes–of the part of Poland allocated to Russia, which might in turn encourage the Germans to demand a shift of the partition line in their favor, on the other.
²¹
Moving up the timetable as much as possible, the Soviet leader notified the Germans that the Red Army would attack on September 17, excusing the violation of the Soviet Union’s treaties with Poland by declaring that state to have ceased to exist. The day before, on September 16, the Soviet government had recognized the puppet state of Slovakia, thus giving public notice of its belief–unique outside the Axis–that Czechoslovakia had also ended its legal existence.
²²

The political implications of these Soviet actions, and simultaneous ones in the Baltic and Balkan areas, will be examined later; here it is important to record the immediate meaning of the Soviet invasion for Poland. The advancing Red Army eliminated any prospect of Polish forces taking advantage of the temporary check of German forces before
Warsaw to organize continued resistance in the communications–poor forests and swamps of eastern Poland; it also quickly forced the Polish government and remaining soldiers to cross the border into Romania and Lithuania (and to a lesser extent Hungary) before Soviet occupation closed off the last escape routes. Several hundred thousand Polish soldiers came to be Russian prisoners of war-a subject we will have sad occasion to return to–and would be followed into exile in the interior of the U.S.S.R. by hundreds of thousands of other Poles deported from their homes once the Soviet-occupied territories had been annexed to the Soviet Union.
²³

Under these circumstances, the Soviet intervention had the military effect hopefully anticipated by the Germans. They could coordinate the last stages of the campaign with the Red Army in a process that involved some technical problems but none that proved insurmountable.
²⁴
The failure to inform the advancing German units of the terms of the planned eventual partition lines caused some confusion, but in a few days in the period September 20–26 the German troops pulled back to the line agreed upon on August 23. They left all Polish forces east of that line to the tender mercies of the Red Army while themselves concentrating on crushing the remaining centers of Polish resistance. By the end of the month, this process was essentially completed. At this time in the war the Germans were enthusiastic advocates of unconditional surrender, which was required of the Warsaw garrison. Other remaining isolated centers of Polish resistance were also beaten down in the last days of September and the first days of October.
²⁵
The fighting in Poland had ended. A million Polish soldiers had been captured by the Germans and Russians; over 100,000 had died; something over 200,000 had fled across the borders. The whole country was once again occupied by foreign troops who would install new systems of terror–one animated by racial and the other by class ideology.

The victors’ losses were far smaller.
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The German casualties of about 45,000 would affect her subsequent campaigns and military buildup only minimally,
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while the Soviet casualties of 2,600 barely justified Stalin’s proud assertion of December 1939 that the friendship of Germany and the Soviet Union had been “cemented with blood.”
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More important was the question whether they could turn their joint victory over Poland into wider and more lasting gains either in the immediately affected territories of Eastern Europe or in the broader realm of international affairs.

The German government had left open the possibility of some minimal rump-Poland from the beginning, but as will be seen, dropped this idea as soon as the Soviet Union indicated that it would be happier
without such a contraption.
^a
Given the relative insignificance of Polish territory in the framework of Hitler’s broader ambitions and aims, it is easy to understand why the attack on Poland was not preceded by the kind of extensive and detailed planning for administrative and economic measures, running parallel with the precise preparations for military operations that were to characterize the preliminaries for the invasion of the Soviet Union during 1940–41.
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Big pieces of Poland were annexed to Germany; and in line with Hitler’s insistent denunciation of any and all attempts to regain the German borders of the pre-Versailles Treaty era, the new lines had nothing in common with Germany’s borders of 1914.
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The Poles living in these areas would be driven out. Here would be demonstrated the alternative procedure for relating people to boundaries which the Germans were determined to substitute for that followed at the end of World War I. At that time, an effort had been made to adjust state boundaries to population with plebiscites in areas of uncertainty and the possibility of “option,” or transfer to the other state with one’s property, a last resort meant for those who did not wish to live within the state into which new boundaries placed them. All this was now to be reversed. Under the new system, the victor would set the boundary wherever he thought appropriate at the moment and any people he did not want on one side of the border would be shoved, preferably without their property, to the other. Instead of fitting boundaries to people, the victor would fit the people to new boundaries–a procedure heralded in the German–Italian agreements for the transfer of Germans from the South Tyrol,
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but first applied radically to Poles in the territories newly annexed to Germany. Like so many German innovations, this one too ended up being applied to them; but its first desperate victims were those Poles driven out of their homes to wander in the winter of 1939–40 in search of new homes.

But where could they go? While the vast stretches of Poland directly annexed to Germany were to be emptied of Poles to be replaced by German settlers, all preferably without any of the Catholic religious institutions once so strong in the area,
³²
a substantial portion of central Poland was placed into a special category of exploited territory called the “General Government” under the direction of the National Socialist Hans Frank. By a redrawing of the August 23 partition line which will
be examined in the context of German–Soviet relations, this structure came to include, after September 28, 1939, an additional portion of central Poland previously allocated to the Soviet Union. After July 17, 1941, still more of southeast Poland, under Soviet control from 1939–41 but seized by the German army in the first stage of the invasion of Russia, would also be added to it.
³³
In this whole area the Germans, beginning in September 1939, experimented with the most extreme of their concepts for ruling occupied territories and subject peoples: forced deliveries of food, mass executions of the political, cultural and religious elite, random slaughter of civilians, massive levies of forced labor, new settlement and resettlement projects according to the latest brain waves of various officials, and, beginning in the winter of 1941–42, the wholesale murder of Polish and Central and Western European Jews. Before setting out on this whole program, Hitler had described his intentions in broad and candid terms and had tried to reassure any doubters among his military commanders by reminding them that the uproar caused by the massacres of the Armenians earlier in the century had quietened down with time.
³⁴

What would have happened subsequently had Germany won the war is too awful to envisage; her loss of it meant that the application of such policies was halted, and, in addition, the role Germans had played in Eastern Europe in preceding centuries came to an abrupt end. In an earlier age, German settlement and expansion had meant conflict accompanied by some economic development and some cultural advances; now it meant conflict leading only to economic exploitation, the elimination of cultural life, and death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. Hans Frank, the man Hitler put in charge of this area, never appreciated the irony in his design to have the Government General settled by Germans and then called the Gau (or district) of the Vandals, named thus for that fine group of Germanic people which he believed maligned by anti-German propaganda, and who in his imagination had first brought the blessings of Germanic culture to this portion of the globe.
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More will be said about Poland in
Chapters 9
and
13
, but here we must return to the events of September 1939 as German and Soviet forces completed the occupation of the country. The original partition plans of the two governments had cut the major area of Polish settlement at the Vistula river and had left open the question of some form of a rump-Polish state. From the German point of view, which looked toward an attack in the West as the necessary prerequisite for a subsequent invasion of Russia, the Polish question was always of a subordinate tactical nature. From the perspective of the Soviet Union, however, the question looked very different. While hating the Poles about as much
as the Germans, the Soviet leaders as devout adherents of what they generally called Marxism–Leninism considered what they labelled the Second Imperialist War a struggle over markets and investments between nations of monopoly capitalism. There was no room in their thinking then or later for the idea that Hitler’s agrarian expansionist concepts of a racial Social Darwinism might be the well-spring of German policy, not merely a propaganda device to delude the German masses. A new settlement in Eastern Europe, once it had been worked out with the German government, might therefore be lasting, not temporary, and could establish the framework from within which the Soviet Union would observe the capitalist world for decades to come.

From this perspective, the events of mid-September 1939 suggested to Stalin that some rearrangements in the deal with Germany might be in order. The Western Powers had not only declared war on Germany but gave every sign of continuing to fight. If they did make peace with Germany after all, then it would be best to collect all that the secret agreement with Germany promised her and to do so quickly lest peace break out before the booty had been collected. But if the war indeed continued, there would be great advantage to the Soviet Union in leaving the major nominal cause of that continuance–the Polish question–to the Germans. The fact that even after the initial German victories the Polish forces in central Poland continued to fight bravely, and that this caused the German army to have to continue for a while fighting Poles within the portion of the country assigned to the Soviet Union, can only have reminded Stalin of the extent to which national sentiments animated a large part of the Polish population. Both considerations pointed in the same direction from Soviet perspective: no Polish rump state and fewer Poles on the Soviet side of the new border. Stalin informed the Germans on September 19 that he had now concluded that it would be better not to allow any kind of Polish state
³⁶
–a proposal the Germans promptly accepted–and on September 25 personally suggested a highly significant alteration in the boundary between the Soviet and the German lines of influence as agreed on August 23.
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