b> In August 1941, huge sheets were placed in Warsaw, depicting Wehrmacht soldiers on their way to fight the Soviets. - On the Eastern Front, at the side of the German soldier, there are Italians, Spaniards, Belgians, Norwegians, Dutch, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians. And where are you, Pole? The inscriptions below them read. The subtitles disappeared fairly quickly. But the idea itself was not forgotten
Historians, especially in recent years, have no problem imagining the Polish-German alliance before the outbreak of World War II. But what then? Without thinking, we assume that any pact with the Nazis after the September Campaign was ruled out. Meanwhile, the Nazis seriously considered the scenarios of cooperation with the Poles. And Poles did not exclude them at all.
Searching for a Polish Quisling. There were plenty of candidates!
As early as in the fall of 1939, the idea of creating a puppet Polish government emerged among the German tops. The Nazis made a proposal to run the cabinet to Wincenty Witos, who was arrested during the war.
Remember that Hitler is your protector! German propaganda in occupied Poland.
The materials reached by the German researcher Michael Foedrowitz indicate that Witos did not immediately refuse the offer - in the end, however, the former three-time prime minister did not want to become a "Polish Quisling". In turn, agents of the Abwehr proposed Józef Beck to return to the country and take care of Polish affairs under German supervision.
The context of the whole situation cannot be forgotten. In the fall of 1939, Poland was also attacked by the Soviet Union, that is, it found itself between the plague and cholera. However, even then it was hoped that Hitler and Stalin would sooner or later get their heads together.
The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union was foreseen by Władysław Studnicki (1867-1953), a politician and journalist. - You don't have the human material to populate this territory and secure your lines of communication - he explained to Karl von Neumann-Neurode, the German commander of Warsaw. He made him formulate his proposals in writing.
And so, on November 20, 1939, Studnicki submitted a copied brochure entitled Memorial on the reconstruction of the Polish Army and on the coming German-Soviet war - he planned that the Poles would occupy the areas as far as the Dnieper, and the Germans would cover the Don and the Caucasus .
Wincenty Witos. The would-be Prime Minister of "Polish Vichy"?
The Nazis, however, were not interested in the proposals of Studnicki, otherwise one of the greatest Polish political thinkers. A year later he was interned in Neubabelsberg (when he went to Berlin with a memorial in the case of German crimes), later he was in the Pawiak prison.
Flowers, processions, masses. Poland welcomes the Nazis
In 1940, rumors appeared that the Nazis were forming anti-Bolshevik legions made up of Poles but these were just rumors. The situation changed in 1941 when Hitler finally attacked the Soviet Union. In the first place, the territories of the former Second Polish Republic, which had been occupied by the Soviets for two years, fell into the hands of the Nazis. As Zbigniew Koźliński (born 1922), a soldier of the ZWZ and the Home Army recalls:
Germans were greeted with enthusiasm. It happened that the hosts voluntarily escorted their cows out of gratitude and ordered masses for them , put them gates of triumph.
When the Spanish Blue Division arrived in our direction, they were hosted greatly and the soldiers were drunk. In the first days of the offensive, the Germans liberated many Poles from Soviet prisons and that was also the reason for praying for them in churches (quoted after Kochanowski, 309-310).
As the months passed, the Nazis began to see the need to change their policy towards Poles and use them in the fight against the Bolsheviks.
Poles. Priceless war material
As early as August 1941, films with commentaries encouraging Poles to fight against the Soviet Union were shown in Warsaw, but they were quickly abandoned. On April 20, 1943, Eberhard Schöngarth, chief of the security police in the General Government (GG), lamented that:
some factors still do not want to understand that the current attitude towards the Polish nation was wrong in many respects . Finally, we must have the courage to change the German course.
The Polish nation is a priceless war material if you want to win, you have to put him into service for Germany (quoted after Kochanowski, 312).
Two months later, on June 19, 1943, Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank, Governor General of the General Government, proposed to incorporate Poles into the Wehrmacht. However, when Hitler did not support the idea, Frank, fearing that he might pay for this position, intensified the repression against Poles.
A buck for Hitler? Would Poles really be ready to support the Nazis?
The concept was revisited, but still met with resistance from Hitler. In February 1944, he stated that he did not want a new Piłsudski army. It was only on October 24, 1944 that he agreed to allow Poles to join the voluntary auxiliary armed forces. By the end of the year, 471 volunteers were recruited in the General Government , even a propaganda film was made, in which a unit of 30 men and 15 women in German uniforms marching through Krakow singing Polish war songs.
As late as the spring of 1944, expert opinions prepared at the Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw suggested the creation of a Polish government and a Polish army of 50,000 soldiers, armed and trained by German officers.
An allied idea:let the Poles get along with the Swabian people!
When in the spring of the following year military operations in Europe were entering their final phase, the vision of Poles and Germans fighting side by side was embraced by the British. This is all the more surprising as they had previously torpedoed any attempts by the Nazis to establish contact with the Polish government in exile - they feared that the Poles might help the Germans in their fight against the Soviet Union.
Hello our saviors! A banner in honor of the Wehrmacht somewhere in the Eastern Borderlands. The exact place and time of execution are unknown. Perhaps this is just a Nazi propaganda ploy…
Meanwhile, from the point of view of Great Britain, one criminal (Stalin) was good, and the other (Hitler) was - for a time. As Jonathan Walker explains in his book, World War III. The secret plan to free Poland from Stalin's hands ”, Prime Minister Winston Churchill:
[O] d when he returned from Yalta, he considered all the possibilities of wresting Stalin's looted territories, but in mid-April [1945] his desperation and guilt towards Poland reached the highest degree. It was then that he asked the Chiefs of Staff Committee to prepare a plan to harness Stalin using military force (quoted from Walker, p. 57).
Evil spirits over your home! Another example of inept Nazi propaganda in Poland.
The prepared plan of operation "Unthinkable" provided that the attack on the territories occupied by the Soviet Union would begin on July 1, 1945. British, American, Polish and… German forces were to take part in it.
Poles will not agree to it. Or maybe?
Jonathan Walker points out that [n] even if the Allies lacked people, it is difficult to imagine that British, American or Polish soldiers would tolerate members of the Waffen SS or, in fact, any Wehrmacht units involved in crimes on the Eastern Front (Walker, p. 96).
Join Hitler, or the red mob will rape your wife. And a daughter. And my mother. And a neighbor. You REALLY better join Hitler!
This is not the end of the problems. After all, the joint British-American-Polish-German forces had to move eastward. As Walker writes:
Since the use of German troops would be a stone of offense to British public opinion, what would Poles say if Germany would re-enter their lands? It is hard to imagine that they would agree to the return of German soldiers, and with the approval of the Allies. Such a move could derail the entire enterprise.
British planners either deliberately diminished the effects of using German troops or did not realize the scale of the suffering of Poles under Nazi occupation.
The fact is that they predicted that the Germans would not support the Allies until the fall of 1945, when one scenario was that the Red Army was about to be defeated.
In such a variant, Wehrmacht troops would not be needed in Poland and would probably be useful to the Allies in the territory of eastern Germany taken away from the Soviets (quoted from Walker, pp. 98-99).
Eventually, the Unthinkable plan was abandoned. Poland, on the other hand, found itself in the exclusive zone of Soviet influence.
Was there a second way?
The phrase "Polish-Nazi alliance" sounds terrifying at first glance. It is associated with texts that somehow try to make Poles complicit in some German crimes.
Meanwhile, in this part of Europe, no one except Poles was able to oppose Nazi Germany so strongly. In addition, communist propaganda made generous accusations of collaboration with the Nazis in relation to the soldiers of the independence underground.
Would these boys be ready to fight in alliance with the Nazis? Probably not. The photo shows the participants of the Warsaw Uprising.
One could contrast the phrase "Polish-Nazi alliance" with another:"Polish-Soviet alliance", which would ultimately be more favorable (or less unfavorable) to us. The truth is, however, that Poland had no choice.
The criminals who attacked it in 1939 decided the fate of the state. The solutions suggested to Hitler, i.e. the gradual limitation of repression, the use of Poles to fight the second aggressor and the imposition of a puppet government, were picked up by the second dictator.
This was how Stalin took power over Poland and this is how the People's Republic of Poland came into being.