Poland Was Early Victim in Bloodiest War Ever

The most destructive war in history began with a clumsy ruse that fooled no one.

At 8 o’clock on the evening of Aug. 31, 1939, a group of Nazi SS men, dressed in Polish army uniforms, took over the radio station in Gleiwitz, a German town near the border with Poland. In a brief broadcast in Polish they called on all Poles to join in attacking Germany. Firing their weapons before the open microphone, they then fled, leaving behind the body of a young concentration camp inmate, also dressed as a Polish soldier. Eight hours later, claiming it was responding to aggression, Germany sent its army smashing into Poland. World War II had begun.

The invasion should have come as no surprise. Days earlier, Adolf Hitler had abrogated Germany’s 1934 non-aggression pact with Poland. Years earlier, Nazi ideology had virtually promised war against Germany’s eastern neighbors. Pledging to restore the national pride lost with Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Nazis promulgated racial doctrines based on hatred of Jews and Slavs and demanded the recovery of territory stripped from Germany by the Versailles settlement in 1919--much of which had gone to Poland.

Poland would not be Germany’s first conquest. As early as 1935 Hitler began testing the West’s resolve by ordering the revival of military conscription. Though this was a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles, the victors of World War I did nothing. Soon after, with the acquiescence of a weak British government, Hitler launched a program of naval rearmament. The next year, in his boldest challenge yet, he sent three battalions into the demilitarized Rhineland. Again, this flagrant violation of Germany’s treaty obligations went unopposed. Emboldened, Hitler prepared for new conquests.

In March 1938, his army was welcomed into neighboring Austria, which was then annexed to Germany. Hitler next set his sights on Czechoslovakia, home to a large and highly nationalistic German minority. Czechoslovakia was prepared to defend its territorial integrity. But Britain and France were not ready to intervene in what British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain called “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”

At the infamous Munich conference, in a shameless betrayal of a fellow democracy, France and Britain gave Hitler a free hand to seize the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Six months later, while the West again stood by, all of Czechoslovakia passed under Nazi domination. Finally, France and Britain stirred themselves. Seeing the direction of Hitler’s swelling ambitions, they issued a joint guarantee of Poland’s independence. It was too little, too late.

Nearly two years earlier, Hitler had predicted to his military chiefs that the Western allies would not fight to oppose his drive to the East. He was proved right. For though France and Britain did declare war on Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, neither sent troops to oppose the invasion. Pitifully deficient in aircraft and armor and badly outnumbered, the Poles had no chance. A few weeks later came a second devastating attack, this time from the Soviet Union, whose recent non-aggression pact with Germany secretly provided for their division of Poland.

Hitler’s war machine rolled on. In April 1940, Germany invaded Norway. The next month it was the turn of the Low Countries and France. April 1941 saw Yugoslavia and Greece fall victim to the Nazi juggernaut. In June came the culmination of Hitler’s ambitions, the invasion of the Soviet Union. It was a campaign that would produce history’s most ferocious land battles and lead to the greatest loss of civilian life in any war.

Throughout Hitler’s march of conquest, America was little more than a spectator, sympathetic to his victims but politically paralyzed by its post-World War I isolationism, taking no steps to rearm until 1940. Only when Hitler committed the colossal blunder of declaring war on the United States on Dec. 11, 1941, did it become certain that the tide of war would eventually turn, as American industrial might and human resources were thrown into the battle.

Could the horrors committed in the name of Nazi Germany’s perverted racial ideology have been prevented? Hindsight is acute, and unforgiving. Had Hitler’s march into the Rhineland in 1936 been resisted, had the democracies responded with determination to Germany’s dreams of conquest, war might have been avoided and Hitler might even have been overthrown.

But for many reasons, not least memories of the frightful carnage of the Great War 20 years earlier, the West failed to act. Between the invasion of Poland and Germany’s surrender nearly six years later, tens of millions would die. Hitler wanted, indeed insisted on, war. A failure of political resoluteness and moral courage helped grant his wish.