Tuesday, February 3, 2015
On Poland's Role in WW2
The traditional narrative of course states that Poland was this weak, innocent, and vulnerable country that was basically minding its own business until the big, bad Nazis came along and conquered it for no apparent reason other than they wanted to (and, yes, it was something that I believed as well in that I, too, was indoctrinated). Well, guess what, folks, it's a lot more complicated than that.............a) Poland was never satisfied with the amount of land that the Treaty of Versailles had afforded them and there was even quite a lot of talk from higher-ups about a Greater Poland (one prospective map had the borders of Poland stretching all the way to Berlin).............b) Poland was seriously mistreating the ethnic Germans from both Danzig and the Polish corridor (both of which had been German land prior to the Treaty of Versailles and both of which were predominantly German speaking) and it had actually gotten to the point where there were tens of thousands of German refugees fleeing the repression.............c) Germany had tried on numerous occasions to reach a diplomatic solution to the problems in Poland (making what were substantive and generous proposals) but because of the French and English war guarantees and the pressure from Washington (recently uncovered papers have shown that FDR did NOT want the Poles to negotiate with Germany and that he would have been more than willing to provide Poland with material support in case of war) the Poles basically said, fuck you............................................................................................................Now, is this to say that Germans were fully blameless? No, of course not - it always takes two side. But just as it is stupid for the neo-Nazis to try and blame the Jews for everything, so, too, is it equally stupid for the "court historians" to try and blame Germany completely for the war. Life isn't 1970s wrestling, people, and it should never shrink from investigation.
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