Poland had once been a great country, and the largest in Europe. In 966 King Mieszko I accepted Christianity for himself and for his country, not from the Orthodox Church which would have linked Poland closely with Russia, nor from the German missionaries which might have made Poland a part of Germania, but Christianity was accepted directly from papal envoys. This was an important step for Poland: it meant that her religion tied her closely to western Europe, while by remaining outside the Holy Roman Empire she asserted her independence. Poland played a major role in the geopolitics of eastern Europe. The Polish and Lithuanian victory at the battle of Grunwald in 1410 put a halt to the advance of the Teutonic Knights into eastern Europe, and in 1683 the Polish king, Jan Sobieski, commanded the armies before the gates of Vienna in a battle that saved Christian Europe from the infidel Turks.
In 1385 Poland united herself with Lithuania as two countries sharing the same monarch, a commonwealth of two nations, which at its height stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was multi-ethnic: Polish, Lithuanian, Belorussian, German, Armenian, Kashub, Jewish, Tartar, and many other minorities. It was also multi-religious: Roman Catholic, Protestant, Uniate Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim. Indeed, three-quarters of world Jewry lived in Poland, welcomed there by Poland’s kings at a time when they were persecuted elsewhere. Education and learning were valued: in 1364 one of the oldest universities in Europe, the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, was opened. Poland’s constitution in the eighteenth century was the most liberal in Europe. Under it the monarch, often a foreigner, was elected. Beneath him there was a democracy of nobles (szclachta), any one of whom could exercise the Liberum Veto and end a session of the Sejm, Poland’s parliament, though this was rarely done.1
Poland was surrounded by the increasingly centralised and expansionist states of Russia, Austria and Prussia, and towards the end of the eighteenth century these powers partitioned Poland three times. The First Partition took place in 1772 and Poland lost 30 per cent of her territory and 35 per cent of her population to the three countries. The remainder of the Polish state remained nominally independent and in 1791 produced the first written constitution in Europe, whose clauses included the abolition of the Liberum Veto. The date of its proclamation, 3 May, would remain a day of celebration in Poland. This modern constitution was insufficient to save Poland from the attention of her rapacious neighbours: indeed, it may have even provoked them, because a year later the Second Partition saw Prussia making gains in Silesia and Pomerania, and Russia advancing further west into Poland. Finally, in 1795, the Third Partition wiped Poland from the map. European statesmen were preoccupied by the events in Revolutionary France and barely noticed the demise of Poland. Only some enlightened commentators voiced their opinions: for example, Edmund Burke described the partitions as a ‘very great breach in the modern political system in Europe’. A decade later it was unsurprising that many Poles should look with favour upon the one man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who appeared to be capable of rearranging the states of Europe. In 1812, about 98,000 Poles marched with the Grande Armée into Russia hoping to regain independence for their country. After Napoleon’s defeat, the statesmen of Europe met in Vienna to reconstruct Europe. Poland was discussed, but the restoration of her independence was a minor consideration. Instead of reconstituting Poland as an independent state, the Congress of Vienna created ‘Congress Poland’, a tiny state covering less than 50,000 square miles and with a population of 3,300,000. This had a considerable degree of autonomy but was considered to be under the suzerainty of Russia, with the tsar as king of Poland. To the south, the former capital, Kraków, was turned into a republic.2 The rest of Poland remained under Austrian, Russian and Prussian control.
The Poles did not accept their fate without a fight. In 1794 there had been a national uprising under Tadeusz Kościuszko, which was ended after defeat by the Russian Army at the battle of Maciejowice. In 1830 a group of minor nobles staged another revolt and attempted to assassinate the Russian Grand Duke Constantine in Warsaw. In February 1831, the Russian Army invaded Congress Poland and by the end of the year had suppressed the uprising. In 1848–9 there were widespread revolutions across Europe and the Poles staged their own in the Austrian and Prussian partitions, again without success. In January 1863, a more widespread uprising began and the brutality of its suppression by Russian forces drew gasps of horror from western politicians. Their attention, however, was focused on the Civil War engulfing the United States, and so they did nothing. This uprising was the last. Many members of the nobility who had taken part were exiled to Siberia and had their estates confiscated by the Russian authorities. The majority of the Polish population reached a measure of accommodation with their occupiers.
Throughout the nineteenth century the Poles still saw themselves as Poles: a nation deprived of a country, an experience that would be repeated during the Second World War. To outsiders the Poles were seen as helpless and hopeless romantics:
To the average inhabitant of Western Europe, the history of Poland is a yawning chasm whose edges are obscured by the overhang of accepted commonplaces – that the Poles are a romantic people, good at fighting, riding, dancing and drinking, pathologically incapable of organisation or stable self-government, condemned by geography and their own ineptitude to be the victims of history.3
The Poles themselves subscribed to similar notions with a deep yearning for the glories of the past as expressed in Adam Mickiewicz’s poem Pan Tadeusz (1834) and in the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916). More pertinent to the history of Poland in the Second World War were the central position the concept of a national uprising came to occupy in Polish military strategy and the ingrained western view of Poles as a nation incapable of governing themselves.
In August 1914, the Poles found themselves thrust into an incongruous position when two of the partitioning powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, were at war with the third, Russia, with Poles fighting in all three armies. To begin with, Polish representatives in the three parliaments all continued their policy of accommodation and made declarations of loyalty to their overlords. All three partitioning countries acknowledged the fact that the Poles wanted the restoration of their independence, and each held out the prospect as an inducement to secure Polish cooperation in their war efforts. The Russians, ruling over the largest portion of Polish territory, made the first bid when, on 14 August 1914, their commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nikolai, issued a proclamation to the Poles referring to the ‘resurrection of the Polish nation and its fraternal union with all Russia’. This suggested a return to something akin to Congress Poland, a measure of autonomy under Russian suzerainty, rather than to full independence. Russian opinions, however, became irrelevant during the course of 1915 as the armies of the Central Powers mounted successful offensives and by the end of the year were in control of all of the lands of Congress Poland. The Central Powers needed more manpower after the offensives of 1916, and so in November 1916 Austria and Germany issued a declaration in Warsaw promising a restoration of Poland’s independence. A leading Polish politician Roman Dmowski believed that this bid for the loyalty of the Poles, ‘did more than anything else to indicate to European statesmen the international importance of the Polish question … It was a powerful incentive to occupy themselves seriously with the question.’ After the February 1917 revolution in Russia and the abdication of the tsar, the Russian Provisional Government made a counter-bid for Polish support with a promise to create an independent Polish state ‘comprising all the lands where the Polish people constitute the majority of the population [which would be] united with Russia by a free military alliance’.4
From the beginning, the Poles were divided over which side offered the best prospects for the independence of Poland, and what steps should be taken to achieve it. One view was expounded by the socialist politician Józef Piłsudski, who saw Russia as Poland’s principal enemy but also believed that the Poles themselves should take steps to win their own independence rather than merely wait to be helped by a cynical Great Power sponsor. Accordingly, on 6 August 1914, he led an armed unit from Kraków and marched across the Austrian-Russian border towards Kielce aiming to reach Warsaw. His attempt to foment a national revolution in Poland failed, through apathy and confusion, and his forces were defeated by the Russian Army near Kielce. Piłsudski then turned to the Austrians, who welcomed his support. They allowed him to raise his own troops, which would operate under Austrian command. Ultimately he formed an army of around 20,000 men: the legend of the Piłsudski Legions was born and would grow during the interwar years.
An alternative view to Piłsudski’s was expounded by Roman Dmowski, the founder of the National Democratic Party, who saw Germany as Poland’s principal enemy. In 1914 he formed the Polish National Committee (Komitet Narodowy Polski), which advocated cooperation with Russia. In 1916 the committee moved to Switzerland and thence to Paris, where it hoped to win the hearts and minds of the Entente statesmen for the cause of Polish independence. Working alongside him was the internationally renowned Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski. In late 1915 Paderewski travelled to the still neutral United States to champion the cause of Polish independence. The friendship he formed with President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy adviser, Colonel Edward House, was instrumental in the fruition of this aim. In January 1917, Wilson made his ‘Peace Without Victory’ speech in which he announced that: ‘Statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent and autonomous Poland.’
Like Piłsudski, Paderewski wanted Poles to be seen to have contributed towards the restoration of their own independence. In March 1917, a month before the United States entered the war, he approached Colonel House with a proposal for the formation of a Polish army to be recruited from immigrant Poles which, after training in Canada, would be despatched to fight on the Western Front. The Russian Provisional Government was hostile to the idea, fearing that the Germans and Austrians would retaliate by mobilising the around 800,000 Poles available to them into their armies. This could then turn the tide of fortune against Russia on the Eastern Front. But, in October 1917, the United States War Department announced that Poles in America who were not naturalised Americans could enlist in the new Polish Army, the so-called Blue Army (Błękitna Armia), named for their blue French Army uniforms. Eventually 24,000 Polish-Americans were despatched to France where they fought in the final campaigns on the Western Front in the Champagne region under the command of General Józef Haller.
Events now began to move in Poland’s favour: in April 1917, the United States had declared war on Germany and in November 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Russia. The Bolsheviks too promised Poland full independence after the war. The response of the Central Powers was to ensure the loyalty of the Polish troops operating in their armies. The German and Austrian military authorities demanded that the Legionnaires take an oath of allegiance to the German and Austrian emperors, but Piłsudski himself refused and was imprisoned in the fortress of Magdeburg until 10 November 1918. Those Legionnaires who were not disarmed joined the illegal Polish military organisation Polska Organizacja Wojskowa (POW), run by a former member of Piłsudski’s staff and the future commander-in-chief of the Polish Army, Edward Rydz-Śmigły. It engaged in sabotage in the rear of the German and Austrian armies.
The Entente Powers responded differently. The British and French governments now recognised the Polish National Committee ‘as unofficial representatives of the Polish nation’. The committee was chaired by Dmowski, and on it Paderewski represented the United States, Ladislas Sobański, Britain, and Count Constantine Skirmunt, Italy. Of greatest importance was Wilson’s Fourteen Points, issued on 8 January 1918, in which Point Thirteen read: ‘An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.’5
The First World War ended suddenly on 11 November 1918 when an armistice was signed between the Entente Powers and Germany. It brought immediate peace to western Europe but, in contrast, the unexpected end to the war found eastern Europe in turmoil and the Poles caught unprepared. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, which had taken Russia out of the war, had left the Central Powers in control of all Polish territories, but now the terms of the armistice required the Germans and Austrians to vacate the region. The Polish National Committee made a successful request to the victorious powers that the Germans and Austrians be permitted to remain in place until a new Polish government was ready to take control. This step was deemed necessary because another treaty, also signed at Brest-Litovsk (Brześć), of 9 February 1918 had signed over control of the eastern half of the Austrian province of Galicia to the newly formed Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Poles claimed East Galicia for themselves. The Bolsheviks were in Wilno (Vilnius), the city Piłsudski wanted to be in the new Poland. Poland actually did not have a government at all at the time of the armistice. Although Dmowski’s National Committee in Paris was recognised as the official representative body of Poland by the Entente Powers, events in Poland posed a challenge to its authority. A socialist government under Ignacy Daszyński had been formed in Lublin and had declared the existence of the Polish republic, and a separate Polish committee in Kraków claimed to rule western Galicia. Then on 10 November, Piłsudski arrived in Warsaw and entered into negotiations with Daszyński. The two men agreed that Piłsudski would be the head of the new independent Polish state and Daszyński would be its first prime minister. The latter was soon replaced by Jędrzej Moraczewski. On 16 November, Piłsudski announced the independence of Poland to the world. The Entente was uncertain on how to treat the two challengers – Piłsudski and Dmowski – for the leadership of Poland and left them alone to settle matters between themselves. At the end of 1918, Paderewski returned to Poland and acted as an arbiter.6
Piłsudski and Dmowski had very different opinions on the future shape of Poland. Piłsudski looked back to the period of the multinational Polish Commonwealth and had a vision of a future federation of nationalities within the new Polish state. This would include the Ukrainians, Belorussians and Lithuanians in Kresy, the eastern borderlands of Poland. These national minorities would not be forced to become Poles but would be welcomed into the Polish fold while retaining their own national identities. The result would be a powerful Polish state capable of defending itself against its mortal enemy, Russia. But Dmowski had a very different vision. As a National Democrat, he advocated the supremacy of the Poles. He wanted the frontiers of Poland drawn to include as few of the national minorities as possible, and those who remained within Poland to be assimilated and educated to become true Poles. Dmowski’s programme was to be used by the Polish delegation to the peace conference that opened at Versailles in January 1919. Piłsudski, however, was not prepared to wait upon decisions made in Paris and resorted to the use of arms to settle Poland’s future in the east. Even before the peace conference opened he had seized Lwów (L’viv) on 21 November 1918 from the Ukrainian armed bands (Sitchovi Striltsi), using a hastily constituted force of Poles. The Poles then endured a siege by the Ukrainians, and the defence of Lwów by poorly armed forces, mainly of youths (some of them as young as nine) and women, entered into Polish folklore. The battle for Lwów is a controversial issue between Ukraine and Poland which still resonates today. After the Second World War, when Lwów was allocated to the Ukraine, the graves of the Polish soldiers in the Lychakivskiy cemetery were destroyed.* Since independence, Ukraine has begun restoring these graves but has omitted the inscription for the medal awarded ‘for the defence of Lwów’ from them.7
The statesmen who gathered at Versailles had met to decide the terms of peace with Germany but their discussion ranged over many subjects. The shape of a reconstructed Poland preoccupied the four men responsible for the main decisions for some considerable time and each – Woodrow Wilson for the United States, David Lloyd George for Britain, Georges Clemenceau for France and Vittorio Orlando for Italy – approached the question from a different standpoint. Their decisions had to be taken in the absence of Russia, then embroiled in a vicious civil war. Two overriding principles operated in consideration of the future of Poland: the right of self-determination for national groups and the need for the new state to be economically and strategically viable in the long term. It would soon become apparent that the two principles were difficult to reconcile. The decisions reached would have profound implications throughout the Second World War.
In the first place, Poland had few easily defined borders. The south at least was simple because the Carpathian mountains suggested a natural frontier. The Baltic sea in the north suggested another natural one, but the whole of the coastline was occupied by East and West Prussia. East Prussia was a region indisputably German, while West Prussia had a mixed population of German and Polish ethnicity. Wilson had promised the Poles free access to the sea, a measure deemed essential to Poland’s economic independence. For this to become a reality, difficult decisions would have to be taken regarding the size of a Polish Corridor through German territory. In the period of the partitions the German population had spilled southwards from East Prussia and eastwards from Silesia, which had not been Polish since the fourteenth century. The result was a mixed Polish and German population in Silesia and in West Prussia and Poznania. It was soon apparent that wherever the Polish-German frontier was drawn, substantial numbers of Poles and Germans would be left outside their native countries. The situation was even worse in the east. Wilno and its surrounding countryside was inhabited mainly by Poles and Jews, and so the Poles claimed it for themselves. Yet the newly independent state of Lithuania coveted the city as its capital. To the south, Lwów was a Polish intellectual and social island in an ocean of Ukrainian peasants. The Ukrainians had never possessed an independent state. Their land had been split along the Dnieper river between the Russian Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the end of the eighteenth century when, after the partition of Poland, the whole territory became part of the Russian Empire. During the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a Ukrainian intelligentsia had emerged with a sense of nationalism and these people hoped that the statesmen at Versailles would allow them too to take advantage of the collapse of Russia and establish an independent Ukraine that would include eastern Galicia and its principal city, Lwów.
The French delegation was most popular with the Poles. France feared that German militarism would arise again and with the collapse of Russia, her ally since 1892, wanted to see a powerful Poland to act as a guardian against German expansionism. Therefore the French foreign ministry produced a memorandum outlining a large Poland, a country which would include Upper Silesia, Poznania, the lower Vistula area of West Prussia and parts of Pomerania and East Prussia. French policy on Poland’s eastern frontier was less clearly defined: if the Bolsheviks should gain the upper hand, then the further east Poland’s frontier lay, the further away the danger of Bolshevism stayed from the rest of Europe. If, however, the Bolsheviks were defeated, then France wanted to renew her alliance with Russia and did not want to have caused ill feeling by having supported Poland’s aims in the east.8
Lloyd George’s position was the most complex of the four. As a Protestant he was alarmed by the prospect that Protestant Germans might be ruled by Roman Catholic Poles; as a Welshman, for whom Welsh was his mother tongue, he was in favour of self-determination for national minorities, but as the prime minister of Britain he was alarmed by what a broad application of self-determination could mean for the future of the British Empire, especially at the time when Ireland was agitating for independence; and finally, as a statesman, he feared that a large Poland would be the cause of future conflicts. His opinions were influenced by Lewis Namier, a naturalised and assimilated Polish Jew, who had been born Ludwik Niemirowski and had emigrated to Britain in 1906. Namier bore no love for the country of his birth and was out of sympathy with its claims to be a Great Power in the east. The Poles saw Lloyd George as the principal opponent of their attempts to rebuild a great country. It appeared to them that he was doing everything he could to thwart their nationalist ambitions. Lloyd George responded sharply: ‘[Poland] has won her freedom, not by her own exertions, but by the blood of others; and not only has she no gratitude, but she says she loses faith in the people who won her freedom.’9 The British Government was determined that Poland should be created as the Entente Powers thought fit and that the Poles should have no say in the matter. Just before the armistice was announced, the Foreign Office sent a note to the Polish National Committee stating that the British Government ‘would view with serious displeasure any military or other action of the Polish Government in East Galicia or elsewhere, of a nature to prejudice or forestall the decisions of the Peace Conference’. Orlando for Italy had no strong feelings on Poland and swayed between Clemenceau’s position and that held by Lloyd George. Wilson was the most idealistic of the four men and often took on the role of arbiter.10
The drawing of Poland’s frontier with Germany was devolved to the Polish Commission, chaired by Jules Cambon, a former French ambassador in Berlin. Its other members were General Lerond, Baron Degrand, Sir William Tyrell, the Marquis della Torretta and R. H. Lord, a professor from Harvard with a deep knowledge of partitioned Poland. The challenge facing them was to decide between two options on how Poland was to have free access to the sea. The first, which Lloyd George favoured, was the internationalisation of the Vistula, which flowed through Warsaw and central Poland before reaching the Baltic at the Bay of Danzig. This solution would leave Poland permanently at Germany’s mercy regarding her access to the sea since the banks of the Vistula would remain in German hands. The second option was to ensure Poland’s economic independence through the creation of a Polish Corridor through German territory. The disadvantage of this solution was that the Corridor would cut off the 1,600,000 Germans in East Prussia from the rest of Germany and another 2,000,000 Germans would be left in Poland.
The Polish Commission presented its first report on 12 March 1919, and it granted the Poles everything they could have hoped for. Its recommendations were that a Polish Corridor should be created that would adopt a rather strange shape so as to include the whole of the Vistula and the main railway to the coast within Polish territory; the city at the mouth of the Vistula, Danzig (Gdańsk), would be given to Poland; Upper Silesia with its rich industrial resources was also allocated to Poland.11
The report was discussed by the Council of Ten at Versailles a week later. Lloyd George felt that the Poles were gaining far too much at the expense of Germany and demanded that the commission reconsider its report. After the commissioners returned it to the council unchanged, Lloyd George issued his famous Fontainebleau memorandum on 25 March in which he said:
The proposal of the Polish Commission that we should place 2,100,000 Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history must, in my judgement, lead sooner or later to a new war in the East of Europe.
In particular Lloyd George opposed the designation of Danzig, a city almost entirely populated by Germans, to Poland. He was also appalled by the assignment of Upper Silesia to Poland. His last argument was given strong support when the Germans, having seen the draft treaty, complained that the loss of Upper Silesia would reduce their ability to meet reparation payments, more so since they were also losing control of the mines in the Saar region to France. Lloyd George proposed instead to make Danzig a Free City under the control of the League of Nations with guarantees of free access to the port facilities for the Poles. He also suggested the use of a new tool, the plebiscite or referendum, in areas where the population was mixed, such as Marienwerder and Allenstein on the edges of the Corridor and Upper Silesia, so that the population could decide to which country they wanted to belong.12 Clemenceau objected to the idea of plebiscites but Wilson, the eternal arbiter, ruled in favour.
The western frontier of Poland was finally settled over the following two years. Article 104 of the Treaty of Versailles charged the allies with the negotiation of a treaty concerning the governance of Danzig, which would include the Free City within the customs frontier of Poland and would guarantee the Poles free use of the transport, port and communications facilities in the city. After long and difficult negotiations, the Free City of Danzig was finally born on 15 November 1920 and a High Commissioner of the League of Nations appointed. The plebiscites in Marienwerder and Allenstein were held in July 1920 and resulted in a vast majority vote in favour of inclusion within the borders of East Prussia.
The future of Upper Silesia proved to be far more problematic and led to a split between Britain and France. Both countries favoured considering the destiny of the province as a whole, but the challenge facing them was that the ownership of the mines and most of the urban population of the industrial cities were German, whereas the Poles had a clear majority in the rural districts. Indeed, much of the population viewed itself as Silesian rather than Polish or German. The French drew a frontier that would include the entire industrial triangle of Tarnowitz–Gleiwitz–Kattowitz in Poland; the British argued equally strongly that the entire triangle should go to Germany. The Poles themselves staged uprisings in Upper Silesia in August 1919 and August 1920, aiming at overthrowing the German administration in the region. Both were suppressed with the help of Entente troops, although the French were noticeably sympathetic towards the Polish insurrectionists. These troops were in Upper Silesia to ensure a fair vote in the plebiscite scheduled for March 1921. Article 88 of the Treaty of Versailles had laid out its terms but had been poorly worded, leading to a lengthy dispute over who had voting rights: the Poles claimed that the vote should go only to those living in Upper Silesia at the time of the plebiscite, but the Germans demanded the inclusion of all those who had been born there, a measure designed to swing the vote in their favour. The Entente Powers agreed with the German argument but the plebiscite settled nothing. The Germans had a 60 per cent majority overall, almost entirely concentrated in the industrial areas. The Poles then staged a third uprising in May 1921, which was again suppressed by Entente troops. Finally, the League of Nations resolved the issue in the way that it had been determined to avoid: it split the province. The Poles gained some of the industrial region centred around Kattowitz (Katowice) but most of the industrial areas went to Germany, including Gleiwitz (Gliwice). Then the frontier turned again giving Poland the industrial towns of Tarnowitz (Tarnowskie Góry) and Lublinitz (Lubliniec) to the north of the industrial triangle. The Wirth government in Germany resigned in disgust, and the Poles accepted the League of Nations’ decision in October 1921 with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.13
A by-product of the Versailles conference was the Minorities Treaty. All the countries in eastern Europe were required to sign it, an acknowledgement by the statesmen at Versailles that however the frontiers were drawn a significant number of national minorities would remain outside their native countries. In the Polish case the news from the east of attacks on Jews caught in the crossfire of clashes between Poles and Ukrainians horrified those at the conference. The Jewish lobby at Versailles had begun by requesting the creation of an autonomous Jewish state within Poland but, when that was rejected, demanded safeguards against what they claimed to be rampant Polish anti-semitism. Dmowski unwittingly fuelled the argument for a Minorities Treaty through his own ardent nationalism and no less strident anti-semitism, which won him few friends in Paris. He made no secret of the fact that he regarded the national minorities as aliens.
The treaty compelled its signatories to ensure ‘full and complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants … without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion’. The members of these minorities would have the right to appeal directly to the League of Nations for the redress of any grievances. The treaty was seen as an insult by the Poles, as an unwarranted interference in their own national affairs. It was also viewed as unfair since there were more Poles left in Germany than Germans left in Poland, but the former had no legal redress. In 1934, when the Soviet Union was about to be admitted to the League of Nations, the Polish Government realised that the Minorities Treaty would give the Soviets a great opportunity for using allegations of breaches to foment Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalism against Polish interests. It therefore declared that Poland would no longer be bound by the treaty.14
It was in the east that the differences between Polish ambitions and Entente policy would diverge most sharply. The Poles were extremely emotional when it came to considering the borderlands, Kresy. As soon as it became clear in 1918 that Poland would indeed be an independent country again, they viewed their possession of the region as a reassertion of the greatness of their nationhood, a throwback to the time of the great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Few Poles believed that Poland could, or indeed should, regain her 1772 frontier, but in his memorandum to the Great Powers of 26 March 1917, Dmowski spelt out the case for the inclusion of East Galicia and the western parts of the Ukraine and Belorussia. There was a sound economic reason for the possession of East Galicia, which had been part of the Austrian partition: the province contained important oil deposits around Drohobycz (Drohobych) and many other mineral resources. The Entente Powers were, however, reluctant to allocate Kresy to Poland, because of the principle of self-determination: the Poles there were outnumbered by the Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belorussians. Lithuania was already an independent country, and the Entente Powers had no remit at the Versailles Conference to settle its frontier with Poland. The problem lay with the Ukrainians and Belorussians. Neither had any history of independence, but Ukrainian nationalism was well advanced and had been supported by Austria on the eve of her defeat. Belorussian nationalism was less advanced and given scant consideration by the Great Powers since the region was viewed as too poor economically to sustain an independent existence.
The Commission on Polish Affairs despatched a mission to Kresy to attempt to determine the ethnic make-up of the population and where its loyalties lay. It found the task more complex than expected: for example, when one peasant was asked what his nationality was he replied simply, ‘I am a Catholic of these parts.’ Various solutions for East Galicia were considered: a division of the territory between Poland and the Ukraine, a plebiscite or a 25-year mandate for Poland. The commission traced two possible frontiers in its report of 17 June 1919: the line ran from the Dvina river on the Russian-Latvian border down the Zbrucz river. The problem came when the frontier hit East Galicia, and two options were suggested. Line A assigned Lwów, Drohobycz and the oilfields to the Ukraine, while Line B left them in Poland. This was the origin of what would become known as the Curzon Line.15
Fear of Bolshevism ultimately helped to settle the fate of Kresy. In 1918 and 1919 the Entente Powers had armies in Russia safeguarding their national interests while the civil war between the White Russian armies and the Bolshevik-Soviet Red Army continued. Poland began to be seen as an important bulwark against the union of Bolshevism in Russia with the communist revolutionaries in Europe. This was a very real concern: in January 1919 the Spartacist uprising began in Berlin; in March Béla Kun, a communist, seized power in Hungary; and in June a Slovak Soviet Republic was declared. Consequently on 25 June 1919, it was announced:
With a view to protecting the persons and property of the peaceful population of Eastern Galicia against the dangers to which they are exposed by the Bolsheviks, the Supreme Council of the Allied and Associated Powers decided to authorise the forces of the Polish Republic to pursue their operations as far as the river Zbruch (which separates Galicia from East Ukraine).
This authorisation does not, in any way, affect the decisions to be taken later by the Supreme Council for the settlement of the political status of Galicia.16
Indeed, the Supreme Council refused to assign East Galicia to Poland permanently until the Russian Government had been consulted. This vacillation was demonstrated by the Treaty of St Germain, signed on 10 September 1919 and ending the First World War with Austria, which made no mention of the future of East Galicia. The Poles were furious, as Adrian Carton de Wiart, a member of the British mission in Poland, noted. At a ball held at the residence of the British representative in Warsaw, Sir Horace Rumbold, the Poles enjoyed the dinner but then deliberately snubbed their host by refusing to dance. The evening ended with a pro-British Pole challenging an anti-British Pole to a duel.17
The Poles were now in a position to decide events in the east for themselves without reference to the statesmen of the rest of Europe. In the spring of 1919, Haller’s army had been transported from France to Poland and together with the Piłsudski Legions made up the new Polish Army. This meant that the size of the Polish Army increased dramatically from 6,000 men in November 1918 to 900,000 by July 1920. The Poles received mixed messages from Britain and France over the question of whether Polish intervention in the Russian civil war would be welcomed or not. In January 1920, the Polish foreign minister, Stanisław Patek, visited Entente capitals to gather their opinions. France appeared prepared to grant Poland a free hand to decide her destiny in the east. The messages received in London were more confusing. Winston Churchill, the minister for war and the main instigator of Entente intervention in Russia, gave the impression that Britain would welcome Polish intervention against the Soviets, but Lloyd George explicitly warned Patek:
If Poland insisted on retaining within Poland areas which were indisputably Russian according to the principles generally applied by the Peace Conference and if the Bolshevik Government refused peace on this ground and attacked Poland in order to recover Russian districts for Russia it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the British Government to get public opinion to support military and financial outlay in these circumstances.18
Piłsudski saw Russia’s descent into civil war as an opportunity for Poland. He knew that it was not in Poland’s interests to see a victory for the Whites since the Provisional Government had only offered limited independence to Poland. Nevertheless, he formed an alliance with the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petlura by which Poland, in return for the Ukrainian recognition of Polish sovereignty over East Galicia, would recognise Ukrainian sovereignty over territory that had belonged to the former Polish Commonwealth in 1772. Then both forces attacked the Soviets, and on 8 May 1920, the Polish forces under General Rydz-Śmigły entered Kiev.
In January 1920, the Soviet Government had offered peace terms to the Poles which would have given Poland a frontier well to the east of what was to be the Curzon Line, but this had been rejected by Poland on French advice. This offer had been made because the Soviets feared that the Polish forces might join those of General Anton Denikin and mount a joint attack on the Red Army. Now in the spring of 1920, the Soviets felt stronger and in May they launched an offensive against Poland. To the north, the army under General Mikhail Tukhachevsky attacked the northern flank and the Poles were forced to retreat, abandoning Wilno and the province of Białystok. To the south, the Soviet Army under General Yegorov Budienny forced the Poles to retreat to Lwów. Poland appealed to the Entente Powers for help but their appeal was both ignored by governments and refused by organised labour. The Comintern called on the workers of all countries to oppose aid for Poland; Belgium banned the sale of arms and food to Poland; Germany declared neutrality and forbade the transit of armaments across its territory; and the German dock workers in the Free City of Danzig refused to unload shipments for Poland. In Britain Ernest Bevin and other left-wingers organised a ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign. Czechoslovakia not only refused to allow the passage of armaments but also took the opportunity to seize the disputed region of Austrian Silesia around Teschen for itself. A group of American pilots, however, decided to assist the Poles and offered their services to Paderewski, and seventeen American pilots led by Major Cedric Fauntleroy joined the 3rd Fighter Squadron in Lwów, which was renamed the Kościuszko Squadron. Three Americans died in combat and a plaque celebrating their exploits was erected in the Lychakivskiy cemetery in Lwów.
In July 1920, the Entente Powers met at Spa to discuss German coal shipments. The Polish foreign minister, Władysław Grabski, came to ask them for help. Lloyd George castigated the Poles for provoking the war, and demanded that they withdraw 150 miles westwards and renounce claims to Wilno and East Galicia. If the Poles agreed, then if the Soviets advanced further, ‘the British Government and their Allies would be bound to help Poland with all the means at their disposal’. Grabski turned in vain to the French: Clemenceau had been clearly in favour of a strong Poland but his successor as prime minister, Alexandre Millerand, was content to let Lloyd George take the lead in negotiations. The United States had by this time retreated into neutrality after the Senate had rejected the Treaty of Versailles and membership of the League of Nations. On 10 July, the beleaguered Grabski agreed to Lloyd George’s terms. The Poles were to withdraw to the line laid out by the Polish Commission in June 1919 and the Soviets were to halt 50 miles east of it. The future of East Galicia would be decided by the next allied conference, scheduled to take place in London. Then a step was taken which would have enormous repercussions during the Second World War. According to the instructions sent from Spa to the Foreign Office in London, Grabski had agreed to a demarcation line based on Line B, whereby Lwów would remain in Poland. The telegram sent from the Foreign Office to Moscow, however, used Line A. It had been redrafted by someone in the Foreign Office, almost certainly Lewis Namier. (Because Lord Curzon was the foreign secretary at the time the line stipulated became known as the Curzon Line although he actually had no role in drafting it.)
The Poles felt that the allies had held them to ransom at Spa and were deeply unhappy about the poor terms that Grabski had obtained for them. The Soviets saved the situation by rejecting Lloyd George’s plan. On 20 July they made a counter-proposal offering Poland a boundary ‘to the east of the frontier marked out by the imperialists of London and Paris’. The offer was made while the Soviets were preparing for a renewed offensive, which opened on 1 August when the five Soviet armies under Tukhachevsky captured Brest-Litovsk (Brześć), advanced to the north of Warsaw and cut the railway communications between Warsaw and Danzig. The allies did little: the British mission headed by Lord Edgar D’Abernon only left London on 21 July, preceded by a French mission led by Jules Jusserand but, most importantly, including General Maxime Weygand. Negotiations for an armistice opened between the Soviets and the Poles but the terms offered by the Soviets were draconian, amounting to the reduction of Poland to little more than a satellite. On 10 August, Lloyd George informed Parliament that in his opinion the Poles had provoked the Soviets and that the ‘Soviets were entitled to demand from Poland guarantees that would render impossible any similar attack in the future.’ Lord D’Abernon, in contrast, felt that: ‘These terms were so extravagant that I cannot conceive any Polish government taking them into consideration.’ The French Government urged the Poles to stand fast.
Then came the so-called ‘Miracle of the Vistula’. The Soviets had arrived at the gates of Warsaw in early August and the entire Polish population was mobilised to meet them. Weygand was on hand to offer advice to Piłsudski. A gap had appeared between Tukhachevsky’s army and the army led by Budienny, and this was where the Poles attacked on 16 August. Later there would be a dispute over who was responsible for the successful plan. The National Democrats wished to downplay Piłsudski’s role for political reasons and attributed the victory to Weygand.* The French general himself wrote: ‘this victory is a Polish victory, carried out by Polish generals in accordance with the Polish operational plan’. Two generals who would feature during the Second World War, Kazimierz Sosnkowski and Władysław Sikorski, played important roles in the fighting. The future commander of the Polish II Corps, Władysław Anders, was wounded fighting the Soviets. With the pressure on Warsaw relieved, the Poles continued on the offensive, defeating the Soviet armies at Komarów-Zamość and Lwów and at the Niemen river. Lord D’Abernon doubted, ‘if in the whole course of history an invading army was involved in a more complete catastrophe’. The Soviets withdrew from Wilno and left the Lithuanians in control. On 9 October, General Lucjan Żeligowski with 15,000 locally recruited troops seized the city for Poland.
The Poles and Soviets met at Riga in neutral Latvia to negotiate a peace settlement, and on 8 March 1921, the Treaty of Riga was signed. The so-called Riga Line became the new frontier of Poland. Poland abandoned her claim to about half the territory of the former Polish Commonwealth, but her sovereignty over the former Russian provinces of Wilno, Wołyń and part of Polesie and over East Galicia was confirmed.* The Polish representative in London, Prince Eustace Sapieha, asked Curzon whether the British Government would guarantee the Riga Line and received the ominous reply: ‘If the Bolsheviks at any future date crossed the frontier now about to be laid down, would it be regarded by the Great Powers as an act of hostility against them? I thought it most unlikely that they would accept any such obligation.’ On 15 March 1923, the Conference of the Ambassadors recognised the Riga Line as Poland’s eastern frontier. It is significant that at this time Lloyd George, who had done so much to hinder the settlement of Poland’s frontiers, was no longer in power.19
Lord D’Abernon described the battle for Warsaw as ‘the eighteenth decisive battle in the world’, and its international significance should not be forgotten. In October 1920, Vladimir Lenin spoke in Moscow of the war: ‘If Poland had become Soviet, if the Warsaw workers had received from Russia the help they expected and welcomed, the Versailles Treaty would have been shattered, and the entire international system built up by the victors would have been destroyed.’ Leon Trotsky went further in 1923, when he acknowledged that had Poland become a Russian satellite, then the world revolution he so desired could have extended into Germany in the wake of the crisis caused by the occupation of the Ruhr by French troops and the catastrophic collapse of the economy. Indeed, the Soviets had built up their military strength during the Ruhr crisis with the intention of overrunning Poland should a general war break out. Finally, in 1924, a resolution was passed at the congress of the Comintern which called for the incorporation of the territories Russia had lost to Poland after the Polish-Soviet War into the new Soviet Union. Now, however, the Soviet Union abandoned the cause of world revolution, temporarily at least, and adopted the New Economic Plan and pressed for rapid industrialisation. Stalin never forgave the Poles for the defeat they had inflicted. Indeed for him, as the political commissar who had accompanied Budienny’s armies, revenge became a personal issue.20
The Polish-Soviet War had an enormous effect within Poland. It reminded the Poles that the Russians, whether tsarist or Soviet, brought repression and subjugation, with the result that the Polish Communist Party (Komunistyczna Partia Polski, KPP) found few supporters except in the ethnic minorities. The Riga Line had abandoned 1,000,000 Poles in the Soviet Union but it also meant that about one-third of the population of Poland was not ethnically Polish. The war glorified the position of the army within Polish society but had in some ways a detrimental effect on the future development of the armed forces. The cavalry had proved the most valuable arm and its success then contributed to the failure of the Polish armed forces during the interwar years to recognise fully the enormous impact that mechanisation would have on the conduct of future wars. The successful outcome of this war led the Poles to believe that Poland had fulfilled ‘her traditionally self-perceived role as Europe’s last bastion of civilised, Christian values against the barbaric, Asiatic east – meaning Russia’.21 Furthermore she had achieved this victory alone, abandoned by Britain and France, and this led the Poles to believe that Poland was a great country that could stand alone against the might of her neighbours.
Poland had suffered a fiery rebirth. In the early years of the Second Republic, Poland had fought six wars to secure her frontiers: against Germany for Poznania in 1918 and in Upper Silesia in 1919–21; against the Ukrainian nationalists for Lwów and East Galicia in 1918–19; against the Czechs for Teschen in 1919–20; against the Lithuanians for Wilno in 1918 and 1920; and the major war against Soviet Russia in 1919–21. Now, in 1921, the Poles were finally left alone to settle their own future. The history of the Second Republic was to prove to be one of mixed fortunes. As one historian has described it:
The Promised Land is always something of a disappointment to those who have viewed it from afar. The Poles had dreamed of it so long that it was inevitable they would find the new condition wanting. They had associated every problem and evil with the unnatural state of captivity. The sudden removal of this only revealed that the problems and blemishes were within themselves. And all the pent-up aspirations released from this captivity rapidly came into collision with one another. The Poles had dreamed of their Arcadia individually, and had to live in it collectively.22
The Poles had to rebuild their country after over a century of partitions and after their territory had been one of the main battlegrounds of the Eastern Front in the First World War. Victory over Soviet Russia had ostensibly united the country but, as will be seen, the inclusion within her frontiers of such a high proportion of members of national minorities was to prove a fundamental weakness.
The First World War and its aftermath had caused immense damage within Poland, and about 450,000 Poles had been killed and 900,000 wounded, fighting in four different armies. In the opinion of one American visitor, R. T. Buell, ‘except for Belgium, Poland had suffered greater devastation than any other European nation’. Nearly 2,000,000 buildings had been destroyed and 11,000,000 acres of agricultural land ruined. As the Russians retreated they had stripped Poland of industrial equipment and plant. The German occupation led to the confiscation of all resources of use to the German war effort and the imposition of high delivery quotas. The Germans had also deliberately wrecked the textile and steel industries so that they would no longer be able to compete with German industries. Yet at Versailles it was decided that neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia was entitled to any reparations from Germany, on the grounds: ‘Poland had nominally been at war against us even though it had been against the will of the Polish people.’ Consequently the ability of Poland to rise from the ashes would depend largely on its ability to attract foreign investment.23
The effects of the partitions also had to be undone. At the end of the war there were at least six different major currencies circulating in Poland, and the situation was only rectified in 1924 with the issue of the new Polish złoty. The railway system had been developed to facilitate communications between the partitioning powers and their respective capitals. Consequently, there was no direct railway link between Warsaw, formerly in the Russian partition, and Poznań, only 170 miles away but formerly in the German partition; nor, more crucially, between the centre of the country and the sea. There were also four different legal codes in use: those of the three partitioning powers in addition to the Napoleonic Code in the area of old Congress Poland. Each country had imposed its own taxation system on Poland, with differing degrees of direct and indirect taxation. Polish industry and trade had also been operating to the benefit of the partitioning powers, and now that the German and Russian economies lay in ruins Poland needed to find new outlets for her trade. Seventy per cent of the population worked in agriculture and most of them lived on the poverty line. Indeed, it was estimated that there was a surplus agricultural population of over 4,000,000 peasants. There had been a period of rapid industrialisation at the end of the nineteenth century with the growth of the textile industry in Łódź and a metallurgical industry in the Dąbrowa Basin, but the oil and mineral resources in Kresy had not yet been fully exploited.24
In March 1921, Poland adopted a new constitution based on that of the French Third Republic. The Polish parliament was divided into two houses: the Sejm, elected by proportional representation by all citizens aged over 21, and the Senate, elected by citizens aged over 30. The president was elected for seven years and had no power of veto over legislation. He could issue decrees but only with the counter-signature of the prime minister and the minister in whose sphere of responsibility the subject of the decree lay. The country was divided into seventeen provinces or voivodeships (wojewódstwa), which were then subdivided into districts. The judiciary was independent and the constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, conscience, belief, assembly and of the press.
Both the Polish constitution and that of the French Third Republic contained a fundamental flaw: the system of proportional representation led to a large number of small parties, which meant that every government had to rule through a coalition. For example, in 1925 there were 92 registered political parties, 32 of which had elected representatives in the Sejm. In 1920 the leader of the Peasant Party, Wincenty Witos, formed an all-party coalition to govern Poland at the height of the crisis caused by the war with Soviet Russia, but it collapsed in September 1921 after the crisis was over, and thereafter it proved impossible to form a stable government. There were fourteen different governments in the period up to May 1926. A similar situation prevailed in the French Third Republic, where between 1920 and 1930 there were fifteen different governments and ten prime ministers.
French government, however, remained stable because France had a strong civil service, which continued to run the country while the politicians squabbled. As a result of the partitions, Poland had few experienced politicians or civil servants. In the German partition, Poles were able to be elected to the Reichsrat and had their own parliamentary club. They were not, however, permitted a role in the civil service, and the central administration had remained in German hands. The Russians had not trusted the Poles with any function within local administration after the 1863 uprising and had embarked on a policy of intense russification. Only after the 1905 revolution in Russia were Polish deputies elected to the Duma and Poles allowed to form social associations used to train Polish administrators. The Austrians had been much kinder to the Poles. After the Ausgleich, the union between Austria and Hungary in 1867, a Polish Land Parliament and Land Government had been established in Lwów. Poles were able to join the Austro-Hungarian civil service and most local administrators in Galicia were Polish. Poles were also able to enter the Austrian parliament and even become ministers. The twin pressures on Poland, of the necessity to create a governing class and to industrialise, led to a rapid growth in education. In 1918 it was estimated that nearly 40 per cent of the population was illiterate, mainly in Kresy. Compulsory primary education for seven years was introduced and a great expansion of secondary education began. The numbers attending universities also increased, and many of the universities, including those in Kraków, Warsaw, Lwów, Poznań and Wilno, were highly regarded at home and abroad.25
The Polish economy was weak from the start and inflation was rampant. Poland was unable to attract a significant amount of foreign investment, and any loans granted were normally on a short-term basis with their renewal dependent on the state of the world economy. Agrarian reform was begun in 1919 with the ambition of breaking up the large estates and distributing the land to the peasants, but the process met with limited success. The fact was that no amount of agrarian reform could solve the problem of the excess agricultural population and the only immediate practical solution lay in emigration. Between 1920 and 1929 nearly 1,250,000 people emigrated, mostly to the United States or to France and Belgium. Polish industry had a reputation for strikes and inefficiency which weakened its ability to attract foreign loans. Germany launched a tariff war against Poland in 1925, which damaged the Polish economy since half of her trade was with Germany. Poland was extremely badly affected when the Depression hit Europe at the start of the 1930s. The Polish Government was as helpless in the face of the collapse of the international economy as other governments worldwide. Unemployment soared and government expenditure was drastically cut. Only Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in Europe suffered a higher degree of industrial decline than Poland. In the mid-1930s the world economy began to improve and with it the Polish economy. Unemployment began to fall and living standards rose, but Poland still lagged behind her competitors in terms of output. Steps towards greater industrialisation were taken with the creation of the government-sponsored Central Industrial Region between Kielce and Kraków. In order to ensure that Germany could never strangle Polish sea-borne trade, in 1924 the Poles began dredging a new port at Gdynia, adjacent to Danzig, and by 1938 it was the busiest port in the Baltic.26
The Polish economy needed the encouragement of a strong government, but Poland failed to produce one. No one party was strong enough to form a stable government, and the coalitions that were formed proved argumentative rather than constructive. In May 1926 there was a crisis when the Polish National Bank refused to grant the government a further loan. Piłsudski then staged a coup d’état by marching into Warsaw at the head of a few battalions of troops and demanding the resignation of the government. The president, Stanisław Wojciechowski, ordered the army to crush the coup, but few regiments moved to support him and the railwaymen refused to move the trains containing the troops loyal to the government. After three days of street fighting and the death of 379 people, the president resigned. The Sejm offered Piłsudski the presidency but he declined because his motive for the coup had not been power for himself but the creation of a strong government. Ignacy Mościcki became the new, and indeed the final, president of the Second Republic. The new regime became known as the Sanacja (Cleansing or Health) and was a political bloc representing a broad range of political interests, united only in the desire for strong government and a stable economy. The Sanacja also stood for ending the corruption endemic in Polish institutions, and the civil service and army were purged. The freedom of the press was gradually curtailed, and politicians and soldiers who opposed the regime suffered for their beliefs. Sikorski, for example, fell out with Piłsudski, was placed on the reserve list in 1928 and then spent the next four years abroad. On the eve of the 1930 elections, Piłsudski had the leaders of the main opposition socialist and peasant parties, such as Witos, arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Brześć. Dmowski’s National Alliance party, Stronnictwo Narodowe (SN), won the majority of votes in the 1930 elections, but Dmowski himself had no love for the Sanacja regime, and mounted an anti-semitic campaign to discredit Jewish advisers to the president, before retiring from politics in 1937.27
In May 1935 Piłsudski died and was buried in the crypt of Wawel Cathedral in Kraków in the company of Polish kings. His heart was taken to Wilno and buried with the body of his mother. From the time of his coup to his death Piłsudski had exercised an enormous influence over Polish politics and, despite its authoritarian undertones, the Sanacja Government had been more stable than those preceding the coup and had overseen an improvement in the economy. After his death, though, Polish politics became even more authoritarian as power became concentrated in the hands of three men: the president, Mościcki, the head of the armed forces, Rydz-Śmigły, and the foreign minister, Józef Beck. These three men would be collectively responsible for the near-disastrous situation Poland found itself in when war broke out in 1939. Their powers were confirmed by the new constitution, promulgated in 1935, which gave far more power to the number of president, further reduced the role of the Sejm and increased the number of issues that could be dealt with by presidential decree. The 1935 elections were boycotted by a number of parties but the government formed a Camp of National Unity (Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego, OZN), which included the National Democrats. Their ruling principles were centralism, the importance of the army, the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church and a rejection of separateness of the national minorities.
Many prominent opposition leaders fled abroad, and in 1936 some, including Witos and Sikorski, met at Paderewski’s house in Morges, Switzerland, and founded the Morges Front as a centre-right opposition. The weak Polish Communist Party (KPP) was crushed by the government. Some leaders were imprisoned. Others fled to the Soviet Union, where they were killed during the Great Terror: the KPP itself was disbanded on Stalin’s orders in 1938. Those communists, such as Edward Ochab, Marceli Nowotko, Paweł Finder and Alfred Lampe, who would emerge during the Second World War, survived Stalin’s purges solely because the Polish Government had imprisoned them. When the war broke out, the 1935 constitution was still in operation, and it is ironic that the Polish Government-in-Exile, which contained many opposition leaders who despised that constitution, was forced to continue its use in order to maintain continuity between the pre-war and wartime Polish governments.28
A chronic problem for the Second Republic was the status of the national minorities, which often undermined the domestic stability of Poland and also alienated potential allies. The first point to note about them is their sheer numbers. The 1931 census figures reveal that out of the total population of Poland of 31,915,900, there were: 22,102,723 Poles, 4,441,000 Ukrainians, 2,822,501 Jews, 989,900 Belorussians, 741,000 Germans and 707,100 ‘locals’.* Of these the Poles, Jews and Germans were spread out among all the Polish voivodeships. The Ukrainians were dominant in Kresy, particularly in the Wołyń, Stanisławów and Lwów voivodeships; the Belorussians were concentrated in Nowogródek; and the ‘locals’ in Polesie. The national minorities had their own religions, which encouraged them to feel separate from strongly Roman Catholic Poland. The Germans were predominantly Protestant; the Ukrainians were split between the Uniate Church, which used the Eastern Catholic rite, and the Russian Orthodox Church, to which most Belorussians also belonged. Then of course there were the Jews, whose Judaism ranged from the ultra-orthodox Hasidic rite, which promoted the separateness of Jews, to more moderate forms that allowed for a degree of assimilation.
It is also important to note the economic distribution of the minorities. The Germans in the west dominated the industry and factory ownership of the region and therefore much of its wealth. In the east the Ukrainians and Belorussians were primarily employed in agriculture. The Jews were a largely urban population, and the 1921 census recorded that three-quarters of the Jews lived in towns and cities whereas only 22 per cent of ethnic Poles did so. The economic distribution of the Jews was extremely wide, ranging from extreme poverty in the shtetls of Kresy to dominance in artisanship and the crafts, with a high representation in trade and the professions such as law and medicine. The ethnic Poles were also engaged in a wide range of economic activities, but a broad generalisation can be made that they suffered from an anti-industrial and anti-urban outlook. This was encouraged by conservative groups and by the Roman Catholic Church and was extremely damaging. Modern Poland needed to industrialise, and leaving this in the hands of the Germans and Jews was both short-sighted and created anger during the years of the Depression. The Polish concentration on agriculture, an activity which engaged 70 per cent of the Poles, condemned many of them to a life of poverty and caused them to resent the success of the tradesmen, industrialists and professionals, activities open to them but which they had allowed to become dominated by others. Attempts by Catholic Poles to improve their economic standing through professional education led to clashes with those Polish Jews who were also working their way up from the poverty of the shtetls and would lead to hostility between the two groups.29
During the 1920s the Polish Government pursued policies in Kresy that were contradictory. In accordance with the terms of the Minorities Treaty, the minorities were allowed to be taught in their own language in primary schools and had their own press and social and welfare associations. Although the Ukrainians boycotted the 1921 census and the November 1922 elections, later in the 1920s there were Ukrainian representatives in the Sejm. The Uniate Church was for the most part allowed to operate freely, but in contrast the Orthodox Church was subject to some restrictions. Many Ukrainians still harboured resentment against the Polish state for having wrecked their chances of independence. These feelings were fostered by the Soviets, who, in the early 1920s, encouraged Ukrainian nationalism.
The Polish Government also pursued a policy designed to polonise Kresy. Between 1919 and 1926 about 9,000 former privates and NCOs in Piłsudski’s Legions were given grants of land, especially in the Nowogródek and Wołyń voivodeships. During this period about 143,000 hectares were distributed to these so-called military colonists (osadnicy), who were often armed by the government. One historian has described the reaction of the Ukrainians and Belorussians: ‘For the most part, these colonists were regarded by the local population, who had expected to receive the land, as squatters, thieves and enemies of the people.’30 The national minorities also resented the fact that only about two-thirds of the colonists actually farmed their own land, while the remainder rented it out to the local peasants. Furthermore, the large Russian estates were passed largely intact to their new Polish owners. Given the nature of rural poverty in the region, where over two-thirds of the buildings lacked sewers, water pipes, electricity and gas, the resentment of the Ukrainians and Belorussians is understandable.31
The Ukrainians were radicalised by the intrusion of Poles into what they considered their land. In January 1929, a congress was held in Vienna where the Ukrainian Military Organisation, led by Evgeni Konovalets, combined with smaller Ukrainian groups and took the name Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv, OUN). The OUN resolved that: ‘Only the complete removal of all occupiers from Ukrainian lands will allow for the general development of the Ukrainian Nation within its own state.’ The Soviets, who were now suppressing Ukrainian nationalism on their side of the border, provided no support, but the Germans stepped in with encouragement, money and training for the Ukrainians.
The OUN embarked on a terror campaign in Kresy, attacking symbols of the Polish state and communication facilities, such as telegraph lines and railways. They also were responsible for the assassination of opponents of Ukrainian nationalism, regardless of nationality. The list of those murdered in the OUN campaign of 1929–30 include 35 Ukrainians, 25 Poles, 1 Jew and 1 Russian, and even those working towards Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation, such as the Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki, and Tadeusz Hołówko, were murdered. The Polish Government reacted sharply. Piłsudski held the villages near places where sabotage had occurred collectively responsible, Polish cavalry units were billeted on them, fines levied, beatings handed out to opponents and nearly 2,000 Ukrainians were arrested. In 1933 and 1934, violence surged again and in response the Poles established a prison camp at Bereza near Brześć which became notorious for its brutal regime. The legacy of bitterness between the Ukrainians and Poles exploded during the Second World War. The history of that time is still very much alive in Ukraine to this day: Poles are now made welcome in western Ukraine, formerly East Galicia, but in the town library in Tłumacz where the author was conducting interviews in 2009, there was a prominent display of books on the Polish terror campaign of the 1930s. In contrast, Belorussian nationalism was far less developed than that of the Ukrainians and, although the Belorussians undoubtedly resented the influx of military colonists on to their land, no violent clashes occurred between the two sides.32
In the years immediately after the rebirth of independent Poland, around 575,000 Germans emigrated from the provinces of Poznań and West Prussia, which had formed the Prussian and then German sections of the partition. In this partition the policy pursued, most notably by Otto von Bismarck, had been to ensure that much of the agricultural land was consolidated into large estates owned by Germans. Polish efforts at land reform deliberately targeted these German estates, breaking up 68 per cent of these in contrast to only 11 per cent of the large Polish estates. The German industrial workers in Upper Silesia were discriminated against and suffered a high level of unemployment. The Germans were in general quietly hostile to the Polish state, forming their own associations sponsored by Weimar Germany, which engaged in anti-Polish propaganda and agitation. The situation changed after 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany. The German minority now became enthusiastic Nazis but, unlike the Sudeten Germans, did not form a political party to further their aims. Instead they received funds from Germany and carefully began to develop what would become an effective fifth column in 1939, armed and ready to assist the German armed forces and to point out to the invading Germans those Poles who should be targeted.33
The Polish state in the interwar period included nearly 3,000,000 Jews, over 1,000,000 in Kresy, much of which had been part of the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement.* Eighty per cent of Polish Jewry were unassimilated and so looked different from the Poles: ‘the dark, motley crowd, Jews in their traditional garb, with beards and side-locks, in “kaftans”, in skull-caps, in black hats’. These Jews spoke Yiddish, and a prominent Jew, the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, later wrote: ‘Rarely did a Jew think it necessary to learn Polish, rarely was a Jew interested in Polish history or politics.’34 Their orthodoxy with the tzaddikum, yeshivoth and Torah institutions emphasised their ‘otherness’ from the Poles. During the nineteenth century there had been a movement towards Jewish assimilation, the abandonment of the traditional Jewish garb and even, in some cases, conversion to Christianity. Yet in interwar Poland the assimilationist movement began to decline because: ‘The stronger Polish nationalism grew, the more the Jewish community stressed its Jewish nationality, and the higher rose the wall separating both nationalist feelings.’35 The Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1937: ‘We formed the ghettos ourselves, voluntarily, for the same reason for which the Europeans in Shanghai establish their separate quarter, to be able to live together in their own way.’36 The result was that Poles and Jews each considered non-Poles and non-Jews as ‘the other’, and both ‘distrusted those of their own kind who tried to strike up a relationship with “the others”, and there was always that underlying fear of losing substance’.37 Nevertheless, a rich Jewish culture developed in Polish cities and flourished during the Second Republic, especially in Warsaw. The Poles also viewed the Jews as disloyal to the Polish state. During Poland’s difficult rebirth, the Jews in western Poland had voted in the plebiscites for incorporation into Germany and many continued to speak German at home. In the east some Jews had fought with the Lithuanians against the Poles over the possession of Wilno and with the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet War. This led to the birth of the tragic spectre that would haunt Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War and beyond – żydo-komuna – the communist Jew. Added to this was the growth of Zionism, encouraged by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionism tended to deter the Jews from loyalty to and involvement in the new Polish state.
The National Democrats who dominated Polish governments until Piłsudski’s coup were anti-semitic in that they wanted ‘Poland for the Poles’. To this end Jewish emigration was encouraged, and between 1921 and 1931 around 400,000 Jews left Poland, mostly for the United States and Palestine. Anti-semitism became overt and more vociferous during the 1930s as the Depression hit Poland. Economic rivalry between the Poles and Jews grew as Poles resented Jewish domination of trade and industry and called for a boycott of Jewish shops. The emerging Polish middle class resented the predominance of Jews in the professions and called for the imposition of a numerus clausus to restrict the number of Jews attending Polish universities, some of which notoriously created so-called ‘ghetto benches’ to separate the Jews from the Poles in lecture halls. Opportunities for emigration began to dry up as the British and Americans imposed quotas for immigration to Palestine and the United States, giving priority to German and Austrian Jews. The Polish delegate at the League of Nations urged the British to accept more Polish Jews, and the Polish Government encouraged the Zionist movement. It even provided training facilities for the Irgun and Hagana, the two organisations in Palestine preparing for armed rebellion against the British authorities. The Polish foreign minister, Beck, approached the French Popular Front government to explore the possibility of Jewish emigration to the French colony of Madagascar: a special delegation which included Jews was despatched there to investigate conditions.
Jewish emigration was a policy supported by a broad range of parties for motives that could be placed anywhere on the spectrum from antisemitism to Zionism. Only the insignificant far right advocated the actual expulsion of Jews. A consensus that Poland contained too many Jews resulted in the passing of a new law on state citizenship in March 1938. It withdrew Polish citizenship from Poles who had resided outside the country for over five years and was deliberately aimed at preventing the 20,000 Polish Jews who lived in Austria from returning to Poland after the Anschluss. Similarly in October 1938, when around 17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany were rounded up and expelled into Poland without their possessions, the Polish Government refused to admit the 5,000 who had been outside Poland for over five years. These stateless Jews were forced to live in a special camp near Zbąszyń on the border and were cared for by Jewish agencies. Germany only stopped the expulsion of Jews at the end of October when the Polish Government threatened to deport German citizens from Poland. Polish anti-semitism, however, was not a prelude to the policy of extermination pursued by the Germans during the war. Indeed, some of the most prominent anti-semites of the interwar period were among the first to condemn the Holocaust and to call for action to save Jewish lives.38
It cannot be claimed that the Polish Second Republic was a great success. It had, after all, been born suddenly after the collapse of the three partitioning powers, and its frontiers drawn by the statesmen at Versailles and by the sword. On the positive side the Second Republic did succeed in undoing much of the damage caused by the partitions and by 1939 had rationalised the currency and legal system and built up a Polish civil service. Great strides had been taken in education and limited progress made towards industrialisation and agrarian reform. Interwar Europe was a very unsettled place and the Polish Second Republic needs to be seen in this context. Parliamentary democracy may have failed after only eight years but even the excesses of the Sanacja regime in the mid- to late-1930s never approached those being committed in the Soviet Union where the Great Famine and Great Terror victimised millions, nor did Polish anti-semitism ever move towards aping the Nuremberg Laws and other anti-Jewish actions being undertaken within Germany. There were, however, also many failures. Of these the most important, when considering the impact that policies followed during the Second Republic would have on Poland during the Second World War, was the failure to bring about a reconciliation between the national minorities and the Polish state and between the Poles and the Jews. Poland’s frontiers followed the vision laid out by Piłsudski, including within them the national minorities, but the policies that alienated these minorities from the Polish republic followed the vision of the highly nationalistic Dmowski. One is forced to agree with the comment: ‘If the Second Republic had not been foully murdered in 1939 by external agents, there is little doubt that it would soon have sickened from internal causes.’39 Then, when the foreign policy of Poland is added to the equation, it is possible to see how and why the western powers became disillusioned with the country they had created at Versailles and as the structure of the whole Versailles settlement began to unravel they began to pursue a policy of appeasement.