Stalin Doesn’t Get Enough Blame - The Polish Decision Was Incredibly Stupid
August 1939 - Stalin Helps Hitler —> June 1941 Hitler Attacks Stalin
(Nazi German controlled territory in August 1939 - West Point Atlas of American Wars)
Stalin, the dictator of the USSR from 1926 till his death in 1953 made some critical mistakes during his nearly 30 years in power but his biggest mistake was the decision in 1939 to stab Poland in the back and sign a deal with Hitler whereby Germany would take control over 1/3 of Poland and the USSR would take the rest.
To be sure, people criticized this decision at the time and in later years it was a black mark on both Stalin and the USSR but I believe this decision doesn’t get enough criticism and Stalin still has more reputation than he deserves.
Poland - 1920 to 1939
Poland was re-created at the end of World War I. It was carved out of territory of old Czarist Russia, with some land taken from the relatively recently created nation of Germany. The Communist Red Army, under Lenin’s orders, tried to conquer Poland in 1920 but the Poles - remarkably - defeated the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw and so Poland survived.
In the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi party and dictator of Germany, set about redrawing the borders of Germany by taking control over territories which had some German-speaking people living in them. In addition to Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, this included the city of Danzig (now Gdansk) which was ostensibly a free city under League of Nations protection but was largely controlled by the Polish government. To be clear: Hitler’s polices were evil and he was not motivated by good intentions, his claim to be the champion of German people was a pack of lies.
Poland in 1939 had effectively two states on its border: Nazi Germany and the USSR (in addition to Lithuania to the north, and the newly created pseduo-state of Slovakia to the south). In 1939 the USSR had the world’s largest army and military experts at the time thought it was a fairly well equipped, with 2,000 tanks and more than 3,000 warplanes. Germany in 1930 had no tanks and almost no aircraft but the Nazis had been building up the German army since taking power in 1934. In 1939 the Nazi German army had more than 2,500 tanks and 2,000 aircraft - though the majority of the German tanks - in the form of the PzKw Mark I - were armed only with machine guns and carried almost no armor.
Poland’s army was about the same size as Germany’s army though it was much weaker in terms of training, officers, and equipment - with less than 300 tanks and very few modern airplanes. Still, Poland could be expected to delay the Germans till help arrived. Poland had a defense treaty with France since 1921, aimed at Germany. Then, in early 1939, the UK announced it would defend Poland if it was attacked. In theory, Poland could hold out long enough so that French and British forces could fight their way into Germany and force Germany to stop its invasion.
Stalin’s Idiotic Decision to Help Hitler
In the summer of 1939, Japanese forces in Manchuria attacked Soviet forces along the border of Mongolia (the Khalkhin Gol battles). Three years earlier in 1935, Japan and Germany had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed against the Soviet Union. Japan correctly view the USSR as the main threat to it’s planned take-over of China and so Japan hoped to use an alliance with Germany as a means to counter the possible use of Soviet forces against Japanese troops operating in Manchuria and - soon - China. Italy also joined the Anti-Comintern Pact and in 1939 signed a treaty of alliance with Germany.
Thus, in the summer of 1939 it was clear to everyone that Germany, Japan, and Italy were against the USSR.
When the Germans wargamed a possible invasion of Poland in the summer of 1939, the core problem was: what would Stalin do? If the USSR supported Poland, then Germany would quickly lose the war. There was no way Germany in 1939 could defeat Poland, France, the UK, and the USSR at the same time. Further, there was a real chance that Poland plus France & the UK could defeat Germany even if the the USSR did nothing. If the Polish army held out for several months, France & the UK would mobilize and invade, while German forces on the French border were quite weak. Defeating Poland rapidly would require using the vast majority of Germany’s army.
The most favorable scenario seemed to be: convince the Soviets to stay neutral while Germany devoted all effort to conquering Poland before France could do anything. The problem was: what could Germany possibly offer Stalin to get him to not help Poland? Because defeating Poland clearly would result in a much stronger Germany and given Nazi Germany’s long-stated anti-Communist policies, why would Stalin be willing to allow a stronger Germany?
The situation for Stalin was as follows
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