WW2 | Sept. 1 – Hitler Invades Poland

September 1, 2017 – This day in 1939 Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. He had been aggressive before without provoking a response from the rest of Europe.

Hitler began his plan with a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934.

This pact was contravened five and a half years later – Hitler had just been buying time.  The pact was unpopular with his supporters, who resented the Versailles Treaty's giving former German provinces to Poland. Hitler, however, saw the nonaggression pact as a way to prevent a French-Polish military alliance against Germany before the Wehrmacht had rearmed.

In the second half of the 1930s, France and Britain pursued a policy of appeasement toward Germany. Public opinion (especially in Britain) was sympathetic to revising some territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty, and neither Britain nor France in 1938 was militarily prepared to fight the Nazis.  So Britain and France acquiesced to:

• German rearmament (1935-1937). 
• Remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936).
• Annexation of Austria (the Anschluss, March 1938). 
• Invasion of the Sudetenland and breakup of the Czechoslovak state (March 1939) in violation of Anglo-French guarantees of the integrity of rump Czechoslovakia in what is called the Munich agreement.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was the last straw. France and Germany responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler's shocking answer to that was   a nonaggression pact with Premier Josef Stalin in August 1939, partitioning Poland between the two powers, giving Germany the western third and enabling Hitler to attack Poland without fear of its defense by the Soviet Union.

One week after the surprise pact with Stalin, at 5:11 a.m., Hitler issued an order for the Wehrmacht to invade Poland, claiming that the Poles were preparing to invade Germany. In fact, the Wehrmacht was massing on the German side of Poland's western border and the Poles were simply moving their army to defend this border.

Britain and France declared war within two days, but it was too late. The German army launched its Blitzkrieg, its "lightning war."  From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, more than 2,000 German tanks,covered by  more than 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border. Within six days they took Krakow and within ten they were outside Warsaw. By early October, Poland had fallen. World War II was on.

Video of 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

The ironic welcome at the Auschwitz main camp. "Work
makes (you) free." This and neighboring camps murdered
1.5 million people. It was liberated January 27, 1945. 

Watch this one-minute BBC video of 70th Anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland yesterday.

An estimated 1.5 million people were killed here, mostly European Jews.

The commemoration included 3,000 guests, including nearly 300 survivors. Ten years ago there were 1,500 survivors attending. Most of the survivors are now in their 90s, with a few over 100 years old.

The BBC video clip includes at the end some of the statement of Roman Kent, chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, who was a teenager when incarcerated at Auschwitz. He is described as struggling through tears to speak these words (as I have transcribed from the BBC video):

The heartbreak and weeping of the children torn from their mothers' arms by the brutal action of their torturers will ring in my ears until I am laid to rest.

WW2 | Sept. 1–Hitler Invades Poland

By prior agreement, Hitler let Stalin take the eastern two-thirds of Poland.

At 5:11 a.m. today in 1939, Hitler issued the order for his army to invade Poland.

Hitler said he was responding to Polish provocation, but Polish troops were reacting to a German troop buildup on their western border.

The German invasion began one week after Stalin and Hitler put aside their animosities temporarily and agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing up Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.

In his "Soldier's Creed", Willem van Stockum cited the

motivation of a soldier as defending "one Polish urchin" 

rather than a dream of a postwar Utopia

Britain and France entered the war after two days on behalf of Poland.

But the German army unleashed its Blitzkrieg, or "lightning war". In six days they had taken Krakow, in ten they were outside Warsaw.

The Soviet invasion commenced 16 days later, on Sept. 17, 1939.

The campaign ended on Oct. 6, 1939 with the total division and annexations of Poland.