85 years ago this month, on 1 September, 1939, the forces of Nazi Germany invaded Poland. This event would trigger the most destructive conflict in human history, the Second World War, when two days later the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.
However, the events of that fateful September would be the beginning of a nightmare of subjugation for the Poles which would last much longer than the conflict itself.
Poles fighting courageously
After the invasion by Hitler’s Germany from the West, Stalin’s Soviet Union attacked Poland from the East on 17 September . By 6 October it was over. The valiant Poles had been crushed, and the two despots divided their spoils. Hitler would later attack the Soviet Union as well, but though his armies would reach the gates of Moscow and the banks of the Volga, Operation Barbarossa, as his ill-fated campaign was titled, would end in the shattered streets of Berlin in the Spring of 1945, finally ending his dream of a thousand-year Reich.
No people suffered more under the tyranny of Nazi occupation than the Poles, who were regarded by the Nazis as untermenschen, (sub-humans). In exile, many Poles fought courageously with the Allies to free their own nation and save many others. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, two Polish squadrons flew with the RAF and one of them, 303 Squadron, was the top scoring of the Hurricane units during the battle, having the highest ratio of enemy aircraft destroyed against their own losses.
A new tyranny for Poland
By the summer of 1944 Hitler’s campaign in the east was collapsing, and with the western Allies having landed in Normandy there seemed little doubt that Nazi Germany would be defeated. However, as the Soviet Red Army advanced on Warsaw, Stalin betrayed the Poles by holding his forces back during the uprising by the Polish underground, allowing the Germans to crush them and destroy the city, before advancing his own forces to push the Germans back. The Soviets did not enter a ruined Warsaw until 17 January, 1945. This move ensured that the Poles, having been subjugated by Nazism for almost six years, would be enslaved by a new tyranny, communism, for another 44 years. In the aftermath of the Second World War the European map was redrawn, and the dark age which began for Poland on1 September 1939, would not see the light return until the days of Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity Movement in 1989, as the Soviet communist system imploded.
Freedom is priceless
In the final episode of the documentary, The Nazis: A Warning from History, the commentator says: “Hitler had said that when he died he would leave a great and strong Germany behind him. Instead, he gave the world a very different legacy – new knowledge of what human beings are capable of.”
Few nations are more versed in that knowledge than the Poles, whose courage and contribution to the Allied cause and the ongoing struggle for freedom and democracy in the years since, is worthy of the utmost gratitude and respect from those nations with whom she stood shoulder to shoulder in their finest hours, and still resonates in the first words of her national anthem: ‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost’.
“We hold our heads high, despite the price we have paid, because freedom is priceless.” (Lech Wałęsa).
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