Bratwurst Boy: (there were free french for example too).
Free French with British helping.
Bratwurst Boy: I posted before what Germany wanted from Poland (no reaction from you about that)
I thought I had. Well if not, if you think anything would have stopped Hitler, think again. If it was just your list, why did he con't after Poland?
[/quote] Hitler also raged against Poland on the basis of reports that atrocities were being perpetrated by the Poles against the large German minority in the country. This was a tactical maneuver on Hitler's part. Similar claims against the Czechs concerning the German minority in the Sudetenland had won Hitler a significant diplomatic victory at Munich the year before. Although Hitler claimed only to want the status of Danzig settled satisfactorily and the good treatment of Germans in Poland guaranteed, his motives were actually farther reaching. As Hitler made clear on August 11, 1939, during a discussion with Carl Burckhardt at Berchtesgaden (see Carl J. Burckhardt's Meeting with Hitler), his actions were ultimately directed against Soviet Russia and not Poland. Since the Poles had repeatedly rebuffed German invitations to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, Hitler needed a route by which to reliably transport troops and material to East Prussia, in order to carry out his offensive designs against the USSR. The extraterritorial highway and rail line would have provided this route. Polish refusal to grant Germany this concession thus made war inevitable considering Hitler's broader plans for German expansion to the east (see General Plan East: The Nazi Revolution in German Foreign Policy). URLAs far as Britain saying they came to war for Poland, [quote] "What stuck in my throat, and indeed the throat of my fellow watcher, was the scene in 1943 in which Winston Churchill flew to North Africa to meet General Anders of the Polish home army, who had fought like a lion for the Allies but who now was worried that if he didn’t get his troops back to Europe, the Russians might be in a position to take over Poland after the war and turn it into a communist satellite. “Don’t worry”, Churchill assured the general, affably. “We came into the war because of Poland. We will not abandon you and Poland will be happy.”[quote][quote]
Happy? Well, not exactly. In fact, Poland settled down to several decades of sometimes brutal, always dreary, Russian misrule, after the British did indeed abandon, ie betray, Poland to Stalin. Or, at any rate, did no more than squeak when the brutal German occupation was replaced by an almost-as-brutal Soviet one.
Quite what this betrayal meant in practice was then shown on the TV, which carried footage of the German destruction of Warsaw in the autumn of 1944, following the failed Warsaw Uprising. House by house, church by church, the Nazis burned and bombed their way through the ancient city, an act of cultural genocide if ever there was.
Throughout my journalistic career, I’ve met a lot of people who claimed the British betrayed them, from Northern Irish Protestants, complaining of being betrayed to the Republic, to Croats, betrayed to Tito in 1945, Serbs, betrayed to NATO bombs in 1999 (“after we fought with you in two world wars”, etc, etc), and various others. But many of those “betrayals” rely on a tendentious interpretation of the word, suggesting promises were broken that, in fact, were never given in the first place. But Poland really was a betrayal, and that ought to stick in all our throats. And it shows what a big-hearted nation the Poles are, that they don’t make more of it.
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