Politicians from across the world are getting ready to gather in Poland to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. Presidents, Prime Ministers and even our own David Milliband will be at Westerplatte on September 1st to remember where the first shots were fired on 1st September 1939, 70 years on.
Wait a minute, you might ask, didn’t the war start two days later on 3rd September ? If you are British then you would be right, in a sense, because that was the day the UK declared war on Germany. But it doesn’t alter the fact that fighting began two days earlier.
And as Poland gears up to host the centrepiece of events looking at the beginning of the war, it becomes evident that not only do we have a different starting point, Poland and Britain feel the greatest event in the 20th century also ended at different times.
We were taught at school that hostilities ended on 8th May 1945. The conventional histories say so, although the Russians celebrate Victory Day on 9th August because the ceasefire came after midnight Moscow time.
But consider this from Poland’s Culture Minister, Bogdan Zdrojewski. “In this year there are three important commemorations, two taking place in Poland,” he said. “The 1st September 1939, the Polish elections of 4th June 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ultimate end of World War Two was the June elections and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.”
So, for Poles, he says, the War did not end with the shooting in 1945. It continued right the way through the period of the People’s Republic of Poland and came to a conclusion only with the election of a Solidarity government and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
To many Poles this matters. It went to war in September 1939 to protect itself from foreign invasion. The Germans were eventually repulsed six years later but that only brought the arrival of Soviet forces, who stayed for more than forty years.
They argue, therefore, that Poland was only returned to its pre-1939 conditions of a free, independent, liberal parliamentary democracy at the point at which the Soviet influence over the country ended. Only then, they say, were their war aims of 1939 truly satisfied.
And this view seems to mean a lot to lots of Poles, even today. A nationwide survey was carried out to mark the 70th anniversary investigating the feelings of ordinary Poles about the war. The greatest pride was taken in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, organised by members of the London government and left to flounder by Stalin.
The greatest shame was bestowed on those who collaborated with the enemy. And that doesn’t mean just those few Poles who were forced to work for the Germans.
“Only 17 per cent of those questioned said there were events that brought shame on Poland,” historian Paul Machcewicz told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “But so few Poles collaborated (with the Germans) that people can’t identify individuals by name who were involved. Interestingly, the first name that appears on the black list is Boleslaw Beirut (the first leader of Communist Poland). So, collaboration and treason in wartime is today primarily associated with those Poles involved in Polish subordination to the USSR.”
This public perception is very important because it shows just how effective politicians have been in using history for their own ends. If the history taught to young Poles since 1989 paints the Soviet Union as the bad guys of World War Two, it’s much easier to present Putin and Medvedev as people to be generally wary of. And, therefore, to see Poland’s current EU and NATO role as a natural continuation of a long historical process of positive engagement with the west and hostility to the east.
But is the picture it paints an abuse of history itself ? To ask that question leads us back to the debate that has, and still, causes rancour among historians; who was worse Hitler or Stalin ?
Revisionist academics claim that one was just as bad as the other and, therefore, the crimes of each can be roughly equated. Taken over the course of each of their reigns, and in all their actions at home and abroad, you could argue the toss. But what about Poland specifically ?
Hitler’s division of the country with Stalin unleashed different terrors on different places; the westernmost parts of the country were incorporated into Germany and the locals either Germanised or expelled. If they were thrown out they ended up in the General Government, a dumping ground for the racially inferior where you ran the risk of arbitrary execution or death through starvation. In the east you either were Sovietised or deported to the Gulag.
But that changed with Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. All of Poland became a German domain and almost all of Poland’s Jews were murdered. And had the Soviet Union been defeated and German hegemony established permanently across Europe ?
It’s a ‘what if ?’ scenario perhaps but there is enough written evidence, and you don’t have to go far to find it, to suggest we know what would have happened. Poland would have become virgin land for the Germans, the Poles simply uneducated slaves doing their masters’ bidding. They would have been expendable and, given the Nazi’s predilection for extermination, probably wiped out as a nation before long.
But that didn’t happen. The Soviet Union fought back and used its might to rid Poland of the German menace. Geopolitical demands, Stalin’s paranoia over an attack from the west, and the Allies’ grateful recognition of his contribution meant he had all the cards and could do as he liked with the parts of Europe where is troops remained when the Nazi’s surrendered. No other option was possible without another war, which the big powers did not want.
And he chose to make Poland communist. That’s not what the majority of Poles wanted, but what they got was a series of Governments subservient to Moscow, implementing ideas that felt alien to their way of life. Oppositionists were locked up, people’s lives were dictated to by authorities they hated. However,everyone had a job, some food to eat, somewhere small and inadequate to live. But unless you did something serious you did not live in fear of your life. Millions of others chose a long and painful exile abroad where they left a lasting, and positive, legacy.
This was a tragedy. But it was not catastrophic for the Polish nation. Had Germany been able to carry out its murderous plans then there may not have been a Poland left. Maybe those who say the Communists were the country’s greatest shame of the Second World War should use the 70th anniversary of its start mulling that thought over in their minds.
Wait a minute, you might ask, didn’t the war start two days later on 3rd September ? If you are British then you would be right, in a sense, because that was the day the UK declared war on Germany. But it doesn’t alter the fact that fighting began two days earlier.
And as Poland gears up to host the centrepiece of events looking at the beginning of the war, it becomes evident that not only do we have a different starting point, Poland and Britain feel the greatest event in the 20th century also ended at different times.
We were taught at school that hostilities ended on 8th May 1945. The conventional histories say so, although the Russians celebrate Victory Day on 9th August because the ceasefire came after midnight Moscow time.
But consider this from Poland’s Culture Minister, Bogdan Zdrojewski. “In this year there are three important commemorations, two taking place in Poland,” he said. “The 1st September 1939, the Polish elections of 4th June 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ultimate end of World War Two was the June elections and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.”
So, for Poles, he says, the War did not end with the shooting in 1945. It continued right the way through the period of the People’s Republic of Poland and came to a conclusion only with the election of a Solidarity government and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
To many Poles this matters. It went to war in September 1939 to protect itself from foreign invasion. The Germans were eventually repulsed six years later but that only brought the arrival of Soviet forces, who stayed for more than forty years.
They argue, therefore, that Poland was only returned to its pre-1939 conditions of a free, independent, liberal parliamentary democracy at the point at which the Soviet influence over the country ended. Only then, they say, were their war aims of 1939 truly satisfied.
And this view seems to mean a lot to lots of Poles, even today. A nationwide survey was carried out to mark the 70th anniversary investigating the feelings of ordinary Poles about the war. The greatest pride was taken in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, organised by members of the London government and left to flounder by Stalin.
The greatest shame was bestowed on those who collaborated with the enemy. And that doesn’t mean just those few Poles who were forced to work for the Germans.
“Only 17 per cent of those questioned said there were events that brought shame on Poland,” historian Paul Machcewicz told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “But so few Poles collaborated (with the Germans) that people can’t identify individuals by name who were involved. Interestingly, the first name that appears on the black list is Boleslaw Beirut (the first leader of Communist Poland). So, collaboration and treason in wartime is today primarily associated with those Poles involved in Polish subordination to the USSR.”
This public perception is very important because it shows just how effective politicians have been in using history for their own ends. If the history taught to young Poles since 1989 paints the Soviet Union as the bad guys of World War Two, it’s much easier to present Putin and Medvedev as people to be generally wary of. And, therefore, to see Poland’s current EU and NATO role as a natural continuation of a long historical process of positive engagement with the west and hostility to the east.
But is the picture it paints an abuse of history itself ? To ask that question leads us back to the debate that has, and still, causes rancour among historians; who was worse Hitler or Stalin ?
Revisionist academics claim that one was just as bad as the other and, therefore, the crimes of each can be roughly equated. Taken over the course of each of their reigns, and in all their actions at home and abroad, you could argue the toss. But what about Poland specifically ?
Hitler’s division of the country with Stalin unleashed different terrors on different places; the westernmost parts of the country were incorporated into Germany and the locals either Germanised or expelled. If they were thrown out they ended up in the General Government, a dumping ground for the racially inferior where you ran the risk of arbitrary execution or death through starvation. In the east you either were Sovietised or deported to the Gulag.
But that changed with Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. All of Poland became a German domain and almost all of Poland’s Jews were murdered. And had the Soviet Union been defeated and German hegemony established permanently across Europe ?
It’s a ‘what if ?’ scenario perhaps but there is enough written evidence, and you don’t have to go far to find it, to suggest we know what would have happened. Poland would have become virgin land for the Germans, the Poles simply uneducated slaves doing their masters’ bidding. They would have been expendable and, given the Nazi’s predilection for extermination, probably wiped out as a nation before long.
But that didn’t happen. The Soviet Union fought back and used its might to rid Poland of the German menace. Geopolitical demands, Stalin’s paranoia over an attack from the west, and the Allies’ grateful recognition of his contribution meant he had all the cards and could do as he liked with the parts of Europe where is troops remained when the Nazi’s surrendered. No other option was possible without another war, which the big powers did not want.
And he chose to make Poland communist. That’s not what the majority of Poles wanted, but what they got was a series of Governments subservient to Moscow, implementing ideas that felt alien to their way of life. Oppositionists were locked up, people’s lives were dictated to by authorities they hated. However,everyone had a job, some food to eat, somewhere small and inadequate to live. But unless you did something serious you did not live in fear of your life. Millions of others chose a long and painful exile abroad where they left a lasting, and positive, legacy.
This was a tragedy. But it was not catastrophic for the Polish nation. Had Germany been able to carry out its murderous plans then there may not have been a Poland left. Maybe those who say the Communists were the country’s greatest shame of the Second World War should use the 70th anniversary of its start mulling that thought over in their minds.
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