A hundred and twenty-three years were to pass before a sovereign Polish state reappeared. Poland had 'descended into the grave', as the Romantic poets were to put it, but it was an unquiet grave. Poland was not dead, and it was not only the Poles who tried to resurrect her.

France, at war with all Europe, did not abandon the Polish cause, though ruthless calculation was as important as fraternal emotion in French actions. Napoleon allowed General Jan Henryk Dabrowski to raise two legions of Polish exiles in Italy (their 'March, march, Dabrowski' song became Poland's national anthem) and another legion was organised in Germany. They served France loyally, in part by helping to combat the national insurrection in Spain, and in 1807 Napoleon established the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a satellite state carved out of the Polish territories annexed by Prussia which soon included not only Warsaw but Kraków and a part of the Austrian zone.

But with Napoleon's defeat, Poland again left the map. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 changed the Partition boundaries: the Prussians fell back some way to the west, Kraków became a 'free city' in practice subject to the partitioning powers, and most of the old Grand Duchy of Warsaw, including the capital, became a semi-autonomous region of the Russian Empire, the so-called 'Kingdom of Poland'.

Abroad, all those who opposed the Holy Alliance, the block of three reactionary powers which not only suppressed Poland but seemed to threaten liberty throughout Europe, gave at least sentimental support to the Polish cause. It was the sense of belonging to a 'liberal international' that encouraged a series of Polish national conspiracies, especially in the Congress Kingdom.

Matters came to a crisis in 1830; the July Revolution in France spread waves of democratic unrest and turbulence across the Continent, while the Tsar prepared to send Russian troops (with Polish regiments) to suppress the new and liberal state of Belgium.

The November Rising began on the night of 29 November 1830 when a small party of officer-cadets attacked the Belvedere Palace, residence of the Russian viceroy, and another group captured the Arsenal with the assistance of the Warsaw population. The rising rapidly developed into a national insurrection, and the armies of the Congress Kingdom fought Russian troops in open warfare for almost a year before going down to defeat. But the leadership of the rising, ill-prepared, proved divided and confused; the liberal nations of the West, Britain and France, did not come to Poland's aid, although thousands of Poles secretly crossed frontiers to join the insurrection; and the strategy of the generals did not match the courage and professionalism of their soldiers. Warsaw was recaptured by the Russians in September 1831, and by late October organised resistance was over.

The consequences of the November Rising were grim and long-lasting. General Paskievitch in the Kingdom and General Muraviev in lithuania carried out their own versions of 'pacification': hundreds were executed, and some 180,000 Poles were deported, many in irons to Siberia. The civil service was purged, and the Kingdom lost its relative autonomy, to be ruled by decree. Polish institutions like the Bank, the army, the Sejm and the Commission for National Education were systematically abolished.

Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki wrote verse and drama, mystical and moral and yet intensely political, that still suffuse and inform the Polish imagination; Joachim lelewel wrote Poland's history; Frederic Chopin composed; Cyprian Kamil Norwid developed a new poetry whose innovation and genius was only recognised in the following century.

This was a Romantic culture. Neither the old Age of Reason nor the optimistic, liberal mood of the contemporary West could answer the questions the Poles now put to themselves: why had Heaven allowed the martyrdom of their country when it sought only justice, and how - when - could it be resurrected from the tomb? Against the background of intense Catholic faith, there developed the haunted idea of Messianism which - in its extreme form presented Poland as the collective Christ, crucified to redeem the nations, one day to be resurrected by a new embodiment of the Holy Spirit.

At home, the earth continued to heave over the buried nation. Another national rising was planned for 1846, but ended in multiple disaster. In Prussian Poland, the leaders were arrested; Krakow rose, but the rebellion was rapidly crushed by Austrian and Russian troops. In Galicia, the portion of southern Poland held by Austria which stretched from Krakow eastwards to the fortress city of Lwow and on into the Ukraine, 1846 did not just fail but turned into a slaughter of Poles by Poles. In this overcrowded province, nearly five million Polish and Ukrainian peasants worked the lands of a tiny class of great landowning magnates. As the rising began, the Austrians were able to provoke a peasant rebellion against the landlords which turned into a massacre; some two thousand estate owners and their families were murdered, and their manors burned down.

The fiasco of 1846 was a turning-point in the history of the Partitions. From Kosciuszko's rising onwards, Polish leaders had been able to rely on peasant support, promising an end to rural servitude in return for military service. Now, after Galicia, the Powers saw that they could cut off this source of strength by exploiting social divisions in Polish society. In 1848, Count Franz von Stadion, the Austrian governor of Galicia, offered the peasants possession of their own land and the abolition of feudal labour services. The Russians took a similar course in 1864.

As a result of the failure two years before, the Polish national leaders were too demoralised and disorganised to take a major part in the liberal revolutions which blazed across Europe in 1848. Minor rebellions in Kraków and Lwów were bombarded into surrender by the Austrians. In Prussian Poland, a National Committee sprang up in Poznań seeking autonomy within Prussia, but the movement was suppressed a few months later as the Hohenzollern monarchy regained control in Berlin. But Polish exiles fought 'for your freedom and ours' in almost every other nation in Europe during 1848-9. The poet Mickiewicz raised a legion in Italy, General Ludwik Mierosławski (who had led the ill-fated 1846 rising in Poznań) fought in Sicily and in southern Germany, General Henryk Dembiński and the legendary General Józef Bem commanded armies in the Hungarian national revolution. In the 1848 'springtime of nations', European sympathy with the Polish cause - rising all through the idealistic and revolutionary movements of the first half of the century - reached a peak, from which it then declined. Europe now entered a period of huge wars between empires and of internal class struggle, in which the fate of a 'failed' nation-state seemed steadily less relevant.

O Lithuania, my country, thou
Art like good health; I never knew till now
How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see
The beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.

 O Holy Maid, who Czestochowa's shrine
Dost guard and on the Pointed Gateway shine
And watchest Nowogrodek's pinnacle!
As Thou didst heal me by a miracle
(For when my weeping mother sought Thy power,
I raised my dying eyes, and in that hour
My strength returned, and to Thy shrine I trod
For life restored to offer thanks to God),
So by a miracle Thou 'lt bring us home.
Meanwhile, bear off my yearning soul to roam
Those little wooded hills, those fields beside
The azure Niemen, spreading green and wide,
The vari-painted cornfields like a quilt,
The silver of the rye, the whetfields' gilt;
Where amber trefoil, buck-wheat white as snow,
And clover with her maiden blushes grow,
And all is girdled with a grassy band
Of green, whereon the silent peear trees stand.

 Such were the fields where once beside a rill
Among the birch trees beside a hill
There stood a manor house, wood-built on stone;
From far away the walls with whitewash shoe,
The whiter as relieved by the dark green
Of poplars, that the autumn winds would screen.
It was not large, but neat in every way,
And had a mighty barn; three stacks of hay
Stood near it, that the thatch could not contain;
The neighbourhood was clearly rich in grain;
And from the stooks that every cornfield filled
As thick as stars, and from the ploughs that tilled
The black earthed fields of fallow, broad and long,
Which surely to the manor must belong,
Like well-kept flower beds -- everyone could tell
That plenty in that house and order dwell.
The gate wide open to the world declared
A hospitable house to all who fared.

English translation by Kenneth R. Mackenzie
Based on the bilingual (Polish-English) edition 
of Pan Tadeusz by The Polish Cultural Foundation, London, 1986.

The Austrian Partition - Galicia and Austrian Silesia - was the most lenient. Here the ever-changing efforts of a multinational empire to reach a stable relationship with its subjects - Germans, Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Poles and Ukrainians, to name only the larger population groups - allowed the Poles to acquire considerable autonomy in Galicia where they numbered about three million, almost half the population of the province. They - or rather the highly conservative Polish landowners - ran their own internal affairs, fostered Polish culture without much hindrance, and for much of the period used Polish as an official language. As the Empire was itself Catholic, Polish religion raised no problems. Galicia was economically backward and rural, and the Polish nobility, nervous both about peasant radicalism and the rise of the Ukrainian minority (about forty-one per cent of the province's population in 1880), relied on the Austrians to protect them and became thoroughly nervous about ideas of national resurrection.

In Prussia, by contrast, the Poles - just under three million of them - were a minority. Up to the 1848 crisis, they had been handled with tolerance. But in the second half of the century, as the policy of Germanisation set in, they were treated increasingly as a threat.

Their position became far more exposed in 1871, when Germany united into an empire under Prussian leadership. Bismarck, who had been the chief minister to the Prussian King, now became the first Chancellor of the Hohenzollern Empire. Within a few years, the Prussian Poles were embroiled in the Kulturkampf - Bismarck's attempt to break the influence of the Vatican and bring the Catholic Church throughout the German dominions under the control of the state. Bismarck did not launch the Kulturkampfsimply to break the national spirit of the Catholic Poles - though he certainly hoped for such a result. Neither did he attack the Church simply because he, like the rest of the Prussian ruling class, was a Lutheran Protestant. His central purpose was to destroy or at least disable any institution which challenged the absolute authority of the German state. But the effect of Bismarck's onslaught against their church, coupled with his violent contempt for the very idea of Poland, faced the Poles in Prussia with the most serious danger to their cultural survival that they had yet encountered.

They became the target of campaigns not only against their faith but against their education and finally against their land. Government-financed waves of German farmer-colonists were sent east to buy out the Poles and settle. On all three fronts the Poles of the Poznań region and West Prussia successfully defended themselves through a generally defiant Catholic leadership (Cardinal Ledóchowski was imprisoned for two years ), and through a network of self-help organisations which not only blocked the German colonisation plans but in some areas bought back farms that had been purchased from Poles.

Bismarck regarded Poland as a 'seasonal state', a sort of sandbank which appeared in times of international crisis but which had no title to be considered a nation. The keystone of his European strategy was the maintenance of peace between the German and Russian Empires through their common interest in the partition of Poland. After his fall in 1890, when he was succeeded by Chancellor Caprivi, German policy changed towards a hostility to Russia that was to reach its climax in 1914, but this brought no relief to the Prussian Poles, now regarded as a security risk in a military frontier zone.

Of all three fragments of Poland, the Russian partition was easily the most oppressive. It contained the largest block of Poland's former population: there were over five million Polish subjects of the Tsar, of whom about 4.3 million lived in the 'Kingdom of Poland' and the remainder either in the old lithuanian territories or in the eastern Ukraine.

After 1831, the Kingdom was in effect under military occupation. Polish culture was treated as subversive, and the Catholic religion was regarded as a disqualification from official employment. The modest political liberty allowed in Prussia and still more in Galicia was unthinkable in Russian Poland. Polish politics, to the extent that there were any beyond an unfocused hatred of anything Russian, could only develop as conspiracies prepared to use violence to maintain themselves and armed revolution to achieve their ends. Between the Russian tradition of total, utterly centralised and despotic authority and Poland's history of free speech and limited power, no stable compromise was possible.

After the Russian setback in the Crimean War (1854-6), conspiracies were formed among the thousands of Polish students studying at Russian universities and there was a new restiveness in the Kingdom. The new Tsar Alexander II, who had come to the throne in 1855, warned the Poles that they would win no concessions, but in 1860 patriotic demonstrations took place in Warsaw, followed by more in the following year which were crushed by the gunfire of Russian troops. Plans were laid for another national insurrection, which exploded prematurely in January 1863.

The odds, however, were hopeless. Feeble attempts by France, Britain and Austria to mediate with the Tsar were ignored. As in 1830, thousands of Poles came from Austria and Prussia and from all the emigrations in the west to fight and die, but the Rising itself did not spread beyond the Russian partition. After fifteen months of desperate courage, the insurrection crumbled away, and its last leadership, headed by Romuald Traugutt, was hanged outside the w arsaw Citadel.

The January Rising failed mainly because, without the intervention of a foreign power , partisans could not defeat a Russian army which came to number nearly 350,000 men. But its collapse was hastened by a clever stroke of politics. The underground 'government' had - as usual - promised the peasants full ownership of their land and an end to labour duties for the landlord. But in March 1864, Alexander II proclaimed a version of these reforms as his own, on behalf of the Russian government, depriving the Rising of much of its appeal to the rural poor.

Under the Partitions, two broad strategies were open to patriotic Poles. One was the Romantic tradition of armed insurrection, a course which turned out to be hopeless in practical terms unless there was full-scale support from other European nations - which never materialised. The other was to preserve and build up the cultural and economic strength of the nation, which involved a degree of compromise and collaboration with the partitioning Powers.

This second strategy, known as 'Organic Work', dominated the decades after the failure of the 1863 Rising. In Galicia, the agrarian slum of Europe, there was little industrial development before the end of the century. In Prussian Poland, the self-help policies of the Poles, combined with the economic dynamism of Germany, gave them a prosperous farming interest and useful experience in finance and industry . But it was in Russian Poland, in spite of ferocious political and cultural suppression, that the most vigorous changes took place.

Polish society there had been shattered as much by the land reforms of 1864 as by the defeat of the Rising. The easy-going old life of the rural gentry came abruptly to an end, with the loss of unpaid labour. A part of the petty nobility left the land and moved to Warsaw where - barred from any responsible post they became the embryo of the turbulent, independent Warsaw intelligentsia that survives today. Others, however, went to Russia itself, to study, to work as managers and - often - to encounter the new Russian generation of revolutionary conspirators. Professor Leslie records that the Polish population of St Petersburg rose from 11,000 in 1864 to 70,000 by 1914.

In 1851, the tariff barrier between Russia and the Kingdom had been abolished; in the years after 1863, Russia's protectionist policies cut off the supply of industrial goods from the West. This was the opportunity for Russian Poland, still economically far more advanced than the rest of the Empire. There were few Polish capitalists, but German investment poured in to finance industrial development; large-scale industry appeared not only in the boom town of Lódź, whose textiles clothed all Russia, but in the coal and iron basin of the Dabrowa and in Warsaw in the form of heavy and light engineering.

By 1900, Poland accounted for an eighth of all Russian production. Organic Work, at a first glance, seemed to be paying off. But in fact it was already a discredited creed.

There were two reasons for this. One was social: the new Polish working class was underpaid and atrociously housed, and - in Russian Poland - almost totally deprived of trade union protection until 1906. Revolutionary socialist ideas spread rapidly , accelerated by the slump at the end of the century. On the land, the end of serfdom and land reform had only created further problems as a rural population with a soaring birth rate tried to fend off starvation on tiny plots of soil. Many gave up the struggle and emigrated, from Prussian Poland to the United States and to the Ruhr in western Germany, then from the old Kingdom, and finally in an enormous exodus from overcrowded Galicia which took over one million - Poles, Jews and Ukranians - abroad, mostly to the Americas, between l870 and 1914.

The second reason for the fading of the Organic Work strategy was political. If it was not to degenerate into mere opportunism, only making life easier for those with money and position, it had to show returns - an appreciative readiness of the partition Powers to allow the Poles to run their own affairs. But the opposite was true: in Russia and Germany, above all, imperialist russianising and germanising policies were growing rapidly more oppressive.

Józef Piłsudski was born in a country manor in Lithuania, to a family of the Polish squires who had dominated that country for centuries, only four years after the suppression of the last great Polish insurrection which began in January l863. He grew up in a land helplessly exposed to the Russian vengeance that followed the January Rising: executions, torturings, arrests, deportation to Siberia, the confiscation of estates, the suppression of Polish culture and language, and the persecution of the Catholic Church. At school, Piłudski's teachers were Russians who sneered at his Polishness and treated him as an alien in his own country. Józef Piłsudski acquired a hatred and fear of Russia which never left him. The Polish gentry in Lithuania were little affected by the doctrines of compromise, of a sort of patriotic adaptation to foreign rule, which became widespread in other parts of the divided nation in the years after l863. They remained true to the older tradition of romantic conspiracy, which looked to yet another armed insurrection to liberate Poland. (...)The situation at the turn of the century was a strange one. Poland had lost its independence just over a hundred years before, and remained partitioned between Russia, Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, which had inherited the conquests of Prussia. On the one hand, the profound discouragement which had fallen upon the Poles after the failure of the January Rising in 1863 was rapidly wearing off. The sober doctrines which gained support in the decades after the Rising, suggesting that the true patriotism was to avoid head-on conflict with the occupiers and build up the economic and cultural strength of the nation by hard work, agricultural improvemem and social organisation - this cautious approach was out of fashion. Political parties were being founded, some operating openly in the relatively tolerant conditions of the Austrian partition, others underground. Higher education, some of it clandestine, was reviving even under the Russians. In the Prussian partition, a vigorous and quite successful struggle was being waged on the land to resist German colonisation. The economic turn-down at the end of the century, which had reached the dimensions of a severe slump in Russia, was spreading bankruptcies and unemployment and undermining the case for patient, constructive work. The new generation, which had not experienced the devastating consequences of 1863, was disinclined to be patient.

1914, the novelist Joseph Conrad decided to take his family on a continental holiday. He wanted to show his English wife and children the city of Kraków, where he had grown up and where he had buried his father, the revolutionary Apollo Korzeniowski. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, successor to the imperial Austro-Hungarian throne, had been shot at Sarajevo a few weeks before. Like most ordinary Europeans, Conrad paid little attention to this. As a result, the outbreak of the First World War caught the Conrads in Krakow, in what was now the enemy territory of Austria-Hungary, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that they managed to escape internment and make their way back to Britain.

On the night of the general mobilisation, as army cars rushed hooting through the streets and crowds of unwilling young men slouched to the barracks to have their hair cut off and their uniforms fitted, Conrad and a group of Polish friends gathered in the smoking-room of his hotel and contemplated the future.

'The big room was lit up only by a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other's faces by. I saw in those faces the awful desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no will of its own, and not even the power to assert itself at the cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no future, whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral annihilation.' Conrad, recalling the scene a year later, wrote: 'I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: Ruin - and Extinction. (Joseph Conrad, Notes on Lifes and Letters, J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1921, p. 229, P.238)

Four years later, Poland regained her independence. The war which seemed to promise only ruin and extinction led to the collapse of all the three partitioning empires. But there are lessons in that memory of Conrad's which should never be forgotten. Only hindsight or the bravest contemporary guess could identify those baleful days of 19l4 with the beginning of Poland's resurrection. Only the most absurd nationalism could attribute that resurrection to the actions of the Poles themselves. There was nothing inevitable about Poland's revival in 1918, which was the result of an incredible stroke of fortune. In 1914, there was no lack of Polish politicians struggling for the independence of their country, openly or underground, at liberty or in prisons. But Conrad in that Kraków hotel, like most Poles, shared only their aspirations, not their optimism.

(...)

In the gap between the end of the war and the beginning of Versailles, the new Polish frontiers were already being set. Fighting had broken out between Poles and Ukrainians at Lwów in November 1918, ending with all Galicia under Polish control seven months later. In December 1918, there was a victorious Polish rising in the German province of Poznań. The Lithuanian capital of Wilno was taken first by the Bolsheviks and then by the Poles. Czechs and Poles fought each other in the Cieszyń region, the small industrial area which had been Austrian Silesia. That struggle ended in July 1920 when the Allied powers enforced a partition - a solution never accepted by the 140,000 Poles who found themselves on the Czechoslovak side of the frontier.

(...)

The toughest problem on the western borders was Upper Silesia. With its concentration of coal-mines, many producing high-grade coking coal, and its iron and steel mills, this was the most valuable industrial area in central Europe. Under German rule, its population had become a dense mixture of Catholic Poles and Catholic German Silesians under a crust of Prussian Lutheran administrators and industrial capitalists who were usually German or German-Jewish. Many 'Germans' were of Polish descent and had relations who considered themselves Polish. .
About the only problem modern Poland has been spared is regionalism. Minorities of other nationalities are a different matter; the Poles themselves share a remarkably uniform culture. The exception was - and to some extent still is - Upper Silesia, separated from the Polish state long before the Partitions and conscious of a distinct identity. The Polish mining villages had given their hearts to the charismatic Wojciech Korfanty, who had represented them in the German Reichstag and who was to be the only politician in independent Poland with a local support so strong that he could defy the influence of Warsaw. Korfanty belonged to the Christian Democrats, a Catholic party formed in 19°2 to block the advance of socialism in the working class.

Nobody was going to abandon Upper Silesia without a fight. The economy of central and eastern Germany depended on it; but without Upper Silesia, Poland would be a poor rural country lacking a primary industrial base. After two Polish insurrections in the region, the Allies intervened and held a plebiscite. This produced a German majority of votes, inflated but not decided by trainloads of Germans ferried in for the poll. The result, on 3 May 192 I, was a third Polish rising led by Korfanty and helped by the passive support of the French occupation troops, which ended after several months of savage fighting with the Poles in possession of most of Upper Silesia. The League of Nations drew a final partition line in October, giving the best part of the industrial districts to Poland.

These fights around the frontier were overshadowed by the Polish-Soviet war of 1920-21, an event which for a brief but terrifying moment seemed to threaten the whole of Europe and whose baleful consequences were to determine not only the nature of the Polish state but the fate of the next generation.

Here, Piłsudski was the moving spirit. It is still often said that he attacked Russia in order to suppress Bolshevism, that he acted as  mere tool of Britain and France who had already intervened on the White side in the Russian civil war. But this is a false account both of what happened and of Piłsudski' s motives. Paderewski in Paris had once suggested that Polish armies could be used to overthrow Lenin, but nothing had come of it. Piłsudski' s aim, in contrast, had always been to restore something akin to the old Common-wealth, by detaching the Ukraine from Russia and bringing it into a federation with Poland. He failed to reach any agreement with the Whites, who could see no point in helping Poland to demolish the empire they hoped to restore.

Ever since the Armistice, the Germany army stranded in the east had formed a buffer between Poland and Russia. In February 1919, it finally withdrew, and Polish and Bolshevik units began to collide. Slowly the old Commonwealth outlines began to reappear, as Polish troops took Wilno in April 1919 and Minsk, the main city of Byelorussia, in August. The Bolsheviks, preoccupied with the civil war, we re ready to be flexible over frontiers with the Poles, but talks between the two sides broke down in December. Meanwhile, the Allies were becoming alarmed by Piłsudski's march to the east. They had no love for Bolshevik Russia, but neither had they expected Poland to turn into the enormous revival of historical dominions, which was now taking shape.

Piłsudski turned his attention to the Ukraine, which had a precarious government of its own under the Hetman Petlura. He was able to force Petlura to agree that eastern Galicia - in spite of its Ukrainian majority in population- should be merged into Poland, in return for Polish protection for Petlura's authority in the rest of the Ukraine. But t e deal did not stick; most Ukrainian patriots rejected the surrender of Galicia as unpardonable treachery. However, Polish troops supported by Petlura's forces went ahead with their attack on the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, on 8 May 1920.

By now the Bolsheviks saw the Polish advance as a threat to the survival of the Revolution itself. A huge army was assembled, and in the summer of 1920 a double counter-offensive, led by Budyonny's cavalry army in Galicia and the talented young General Tukhachevsky in the north, burst through Piłsudski's defences and poured westwards towards Poland.

It seems to have been Lenin, normally the coolest of men, who decided -against the, opinions of his colleagues, including Trotsky and Stalin - that this offensive should go forward until it carried the Revolution into the heart of Europe. Tukhachevsky proclaimed: 'Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration.' By August, the offensive was nearing Warsaw; Cossack cavalry crossed the Vistula north of the capital, and the Bolsheviks we re approaching the German frontiers of East Prussia. If Poland fell, the way to Berlin would be open. ,

Confident of victory, the Soviet government had set :up a revolutionary committee, the nucleus of a Polish government, at Białystok under Julian Marchlewski, a Polish Communist who had been one of the SDKPiL leaders. 

(...)

Tukhachevsky's armies surging across northern Poland were leaving an undefended flank, and the Poles -outmanoeuvred but not defeated - took their chance. A strike force was hastily put together, and on 13 August it tore across Tukhachevsky's rear and cut him off. A hundred thousand prisoners were taken, and the Soviet armies fled out of Poland with Piłsudski's men at their heels.

Marian Żebrowski was a young cavalry officer; his regiment headed the Polish counter-offensive as it hit the left flank of Tukhachevsky's advance. 'Army people know what it means when one is attacked across the line of one' s advance. That means the complete destruction of an offensive - and that's just what happened. The third and fourth squadrons destroyed everything ahead of them. The second squadron rode round the right wing, crossed a bridge and covered our right. The first squadron was sent to deliver a cavalry charge on the left, where larger groups of the enemy had been seen. In the last phase of its attack, the squadron got into some marshland and in this marshy ground there we re small units of the enemy. Our men fired on them, but the horses began to sink into the soft ground and the charge came to a standstill. The enemy redoubled their fire, and the squadron took heavy casualties . . . My friend, an officer-cadet called Suchodolski - his horse was killed and he fell, and was stabbed seven times with a bayonet. I helped to carry him to the ambulance cart and he just said to me: "Marian, we won such glory today, though I won't see the results of it . . .'"

This was the battle of Warsaw, or the 'Miracle on the Vistula'. It was one of the most dazzling operations in European military history. It saved Poland' s independence, and it forced Soviet Russia to abandon for ever the idea that November 1917 had been only the prelude to world revolution; from now on, Lenin was to adopt a more defensive policy which was to end in Stalin's formulation of 'socialism in one country'. Many people, then and now, have concluded that in 1920 Poland saved Europe from Communism. It would be more prudent to say that the 'Miracle' probably saved Germany from Soviet invasion. The revolutionary tide in Germany was ebbing fast by the summer of 1920, and any Red Republic established there by Soviet troops would have been swept away by the combined armies of the West.

(...)

Germany occupied all Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. Simultaneously, the Germans issued an ultimatum to Poland over Danzig, and Poland responded by moving troops up to the frontier.

(...)

On 31 March the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that Britain would guarantee Polish independence in the event of attack. Beck flew to London, and the guarantee was made formal in April. Hitler retorted by renouncing his 1934 pact with Poland. 

On 23 August, to the stupefaction of the world, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression. A secret protocol to the pact provided for the partition of Poland and the Baltic States between Germany and the Soviet Dnion. Once again, the main dish at the feast of friendship between Poland' s historic enemies proved to be Poland's independence. A few days later, Britain signed a more specific alliance, making it clear that a German attack would lead to war with Britain as well as with Poland. 
On 1 September 1939, with no deelaration of war, German troops crossed the Polish frontier. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Precisely a fortnight later, on 17 September, the Red Army entered Poland from the east.

The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics desirous of strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the U.S.S.R and proceeding from the fundamental provisions of the Neutrality Agreement concluded in April 1926 between Germany and the U.S.S.R., have reached the following agreement: 
ARTICLE I
Both High Contracting Parties obligate, themselves to desist from any act of violence, any aggressive action, and any attack on each other, either individually or jointly with other powers.
ARTICLE II
Should one of the High Contracting Parties become the object of belligerent action by a third power, the other High Contracting Party shall in no manner lend its support to this third power. 
ARTICLE III
The Governments of the two High Contracting Parties shall in the future maintain continual contact with one another for the purpose of consultation in order to exchange information on problems affecting their common interests. 
ARTICLE IV
Neither of the two High Contracting Parties shall participate in any grouping of powers whatsoever that is directly or indirectly aimed at the other party. 
ARTICLE V
Should disputes or conflicts arise between the High Contracting Parties over problems of one kind or another, both parties shall settle these disputes or conflicts exclusively through friendly exchange of opinion or, if necessary, through the establishment of arbitration commissions. 
ARTICLE VI 
The present treaty is concluded for a period of ten years, with the provision that, in so far as one of the High Contracting Parties does not denounce it one year prior to the expiration of this period, the validity of this treaty shall automatically be extended for another five years.
ARTICLE VI
The present treaty shall be ratified within the shortest possible time. The ratifications shall be exchanged in Berlin. The agreement shall enter into force as soon as it is signed. 

Done in duplicate, in the German and Russian languages. 

MOSCOW, August 23, 1939.

For the Government of the German Reich: 

V. RIBBENTROP

With full power of the Government of the U.S.S.R.: 

V. MOLOTOV

On the occasion of the signature of the Nonaggression Pact between the German Reich and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics the undersigned plenipotentiaries of each of the two parties discussed in strictly confidential conversations the question of the boundary of their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. These conversations led to the following conclusions: 

1. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party. 

2. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San. 

The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments. 

In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement. 

3. With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares; its complete political disinterestedness in these areas. 

This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret. 

Moscow, August 23, 1939.

For the Government of the German Reich: 

V. RIBBENTROP

Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R.: 

V. MOLOTOV
 

Other countries put these ideas into practice. So it was with Blitzkrieg, the concept of waging offensive war with fast-moving columns of armour or motorised infantry, concentrating maximum force to punch through a minimum sector of enemy line. This theory came into the mind of a young French officer named, Charles de Gaulle as he witnessed the rapid thrusts of the Polish-Soviet War, utterly unlike the broad-front offensives which had gained so little at such hideous cost on the Western Front a few years before. What if those cavalry armies could be replaced by tanks built for speed?

But it was British and German military thinkers who developed the idea of mobile warfare, years before de Gaulle finally put his thoughts on paper. And itwas the Germans who first tested his theory, in the campaign against Poland in September 1939. Poland was attacked from three sides at once by Panzer divisions, and mobile units followed through the gaps they made. The German ranks outnumbered the Polish by at least ten to one, and with an airforce five rimes as large as that of Poland - the Germans immediately seized command of the air. 

It should have been an easy victory, but it was not. The Germans afterwards regarded it as a hard-fought campaign, and were disconcerted by the capacity of the Poles to keep fighting and regrouping in spite of such hopeless weriority in weapons. The casualties Germany took were heavier than in the longer campaign in France the following year.

(...)

The extraordinary thing about the Polish soldiers was the self-reliance: their capacity to reorganise into ever-smaller units, as all coherent command from above vanished, and to go on fighting. Part of the Polish navy had already escaped and reached British and French ports, ready to continue the war, and as resistance collapsed about a hundred Polish aircrat - all that remained - flew to Romania.

At 3.30 on the morning of 17 September 1939, the Polish ambassador m Moscow was summoned from his bed and handed a 'Note'. The Soviet Union announced that as the Polish state had ceased to exist (which was not true) steps had become necessary to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussiai minorities in the 'former' Polish territories. An hour later, Soviet troops crossed the frontier.
At first, the incredulous Poles imagined that the Red Army might be come to their assistance. There was little resistance to the invasion, the eastern border being almost unprotected, but the truth became rapidly plain as the Soviet forces moved across eastern Poland to a demarcation line along the rivers Bug and San. A Fourth Partition of Poland was taking place.

The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the U.S.S.R. consider it as exclusively their task, after the collapse of the former Polish state, to re-establish peace and order in these territories and to assure to the peoples living there a peaceful life in keeping with their national character. To this end, they have agreed upon the following:
ARTICLE I.
The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the U.S.S.R. determine as the boundary of their respective national interests in the territory of the former Polish state the line marked on the attached map, which shall be described in more detail in a supplementary protocol.
ARTICLE II.
Both parties recognize the boundary of the respective nation interests established in article I as definitive and shall reject any interference of third powers in this settlement.
ARTICLE III.
The necessary reorganization of public administration will be effected in the areas west of the line specified in article I by the Government of the German Reich, in the areas east of this line by the Government of the U.S.S.R.
ARTICLE IV.
The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the U.S.S.R. regard this settlement as a firm foundation for a progressive development of the friendly relations between their peoples.
ARTICLE V.
This treaty shall be ratified and the ratifications shall be exchanged in Berlin as soon as possible. The treaty becomes effective upon signature.

Done in duplicate, in the German and Russian languages.

Moscow, September 28,1939.

For the Government of the German Reich:
J. RIBBENTROP.

By authority of the Government of the U.S.S.R.:
W. MOLOTOV.

The Government of the U.S.S.R. shall place no obstacles in the way of Reich nationals and other persons of German descent residing in the territories under its jurisdiction, if they desire to migrate to Germany or to the territories under German jurisdiction. It agrees that such removals shall be carried out by agents of the Government of the Reich in cooperation with the competent local authorities and that the property rights of the emigrants shall be protected.

A corresponding obligation is assumed by the Government of the German Reich in respect to the persons of Ukrainian or White Russian descent residing in the territories under its jurisdiction.

Moscow, September 28,1939.

For the Government of the German Reich:
J. RIBBENTROP

By authority of the Government of the U.S.S.R.
W. MOLOTOV.

The undersigned plenipotentiaries, on concluding the German Russian Boundary and Friendship Treaty, have declared their agreement upon the following:

Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party. They will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation and inform each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose.

Moscow, September 28,1939.

For the Government of the German Retch:

J. RIBBENTROP

By authority of the Government of the U.S.S.R.:

W. MOLOTOV
 
 

MR. CHAIRMAN: I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your letter of today, wherein you communicate to me the following:

"Implementing my letter of today about the formulation of a common economic program, the Government of the U.S.S.R. will see to it that German transit traffic to and from Rumania by way of the Upper Silesia-Lemberg-Kolomea railroad line shall be facilitated in every respect. The two Governments will, in the framework of the proposed trade negotiations, make arrangements without delay for the operation of this transit traffic. The same will apply to the German transit traffic to and from Iran, to and from Afghanistan as well as to and from the countries of the Far East.

"Furthermore, the Government of the U.S.S.R. declares that it is willing. in addition to the quantity of oil previously agreed upon or to be agreed upon hereafter, to supply a further quantity of oil commensurate with the annual production of the oil district of Drohobycz and Boryslav, with the proviso that one half of this quantity shall be supplied to Germany from the oil fields of the aforesaid oil district and the other half from other oil districts of the U.S.S.R. As compensation for these supplies of oil, the U.S.S.R. would accept German supplies of hard coal and steel piping."

I take note of this communication with satisfaction and concur in it in the name of the Government of the German Reich.

Accept, Mr. Chairman, the renewed assurance of my highest consideration.

VON RIBBENTROP
 

Warsaw's 'President' (mayor), the much-loved Stefan Starzyński, finally agreed to surrender on 27 September. Incredibly, the small Polish garrison on the Hel peninsula near Danzig, now hundreds of miles behind the lines, held out until 2 October, and the last shots of the campaign were fired at Kock, in central Poland, on 5 October.

For all their faults and errors in the past, the men who had governed Poland never contemplated an armistice. Poland had not ceased to exist and would not cease to fight simply because its armies had been defeated and its territory was occupied by the enemy. The problem was how to carry on the struggle; Romania, under extreme pressure from both Germany and the Soviet Union, had interned the Polish military and political leadership. However, the Romanians did not detain General Władysław Sikorski. As an old critic of the Sanacja regime, he had not held command in the September campaign and was allowed to leave Romania for  France, where the Polish ambassador in Paris - on his own authority - charged him with raising a new Polish army out of refugees and Poles living in France. From Romania, President Mościcki managed to send to Paris a message announcing his resignation. The group of Polish leaders who had already reached France accepted it, but rejected his ideas for a successor. They chose instead Władysław Raczkiewicz, a respected provincial governor who had not been tainted by too close an association with the Sanacja. Under the guise of a 'correct' transfer of power, a discreet revolution was now overthrowing the Sanacja. President Raczkiewicz took the oath in the Paris embassy on 30 September, and at once appointed Sikorski as prime minister. Kazimierz Sosnkowski reached France a few days later, sank old animosities and joined the new government. Finally, the absent Śmigły-Rydz was induced to resign in November, and Sikorski became commander-in-chief as well as head of the government in exile. 
France and Britain at once recognised the new administration, followed by the still-neutral United States. In some ways, this had all happened before. After the 1830 Rising, the Great Emigration had transferred Poland' s cultural and political capital to Paris. In the 1914-18 war, Roman Dmowski's National Committee had become a recognised government in waiting, also in Paris. Now again, with a deftness and confidence that only a nation accustomed to disaster and occupation could achieve, Poland had ensured its international survival.
Physical survival, for the Polish people at home, seemed less certain. The war had already cost the lives of 60,000 members of the armed forces and of many more civilians. Nearly half a million prisoners were in German hands and another 200,000 in Soviet camps. Much of Warsaw had been ruined, ani bombing had scorched the heart out of towns and villages along the track of the armies. And yet, as the fighting ended, the sufferings of Poland in the Second World War had scarcely begun.
In the Soviet-occupied zone, the policy of the conquerors was at first erratic. Many Poles, then and now, see the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the 'stab in the back' of 17 September as the realisation of a coldly planned design, a natural expression of Russia's attitude to the existence of an independent Poland ever since the Russian state had been bom. But in 1939 Stalin was probably less concerned with Poland itself than with Germany. Through the pact with Hitler, he had bought time and space. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland at least kept the Germans 600 miles frorn Moscow; if Stalin had left all Poland to Hitler, the Nazi tanks would be only 400 miles from the Kremlin.
The new 'demarcation line' - which Stalin intended to make a permanent frontier - pushed 'the imperialist West' several hundred miles further away. This corrected Lenin's frontier compromise with Pilsudski at the Treaty of Riga eighteen years before, which the Soviet Union had always intended to revise when it was strong enough. No doubt Stalin in 1939 shared traditional Russian suspicion of Poland as a country dedicated to the break-up of Russian empires whether Tsarist or Soviet. But a stronger motive was his concern to end the partition of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian populations between the USSR and a foreign state. He wanted those unlucky peoples all to himself.
The Soviet authorities carried out an immediate round of arrests and deportations, principally of Polish local leaders.Then there was a pause while the institutions of 'Sovietisation' were put in place. Rigged elections in November produced dummy assemblies of Ukrainians and Byelorussians who voted unanimously for their incorporation into the Soviet Union. There was some land reform, some nationalisation. Poles were everywhere removed from official posts.
By Soviet standards-, this initial phase was deliberately mild. Stalin did not occupy all the Polish territory offered to him by the Nazi-Soviet Paces secret protocol, but accepted instead 'influence' over, Lithuania. Soviet troops entered Polish Lithuania and took Wilno on 18 September, but then restored the city and its region to the Lithuanian state. For a few months more, the Poles in Wilno were able to organise themselves and live in relative freedom. In Byelorussia and the Ukraine, religious education in schools was forbidden and monasteries commandeered, but religion itself - Uniate or Catholic - was not suppressed. However, the Soviet Union made it elear that the events of September implied not only the end of Polish rule in western Byelorussia and Ukraine but the final, irreversible abolition of Polish independence. Molotov announced that 'nothing is left of Poland, that hideous offspring of the Versailles Treaty'. On 28 September, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed a further 'Friendship and Frontier Agreement', whose secret clauses committed each power to suppress Polish agitation against the other, and to inform one another about 'suitable measures' for dealing with the Poles. .
In late November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland. Stalin intended a rapid campaign to push the Finnish frontier back from the approaches to Leningrad, but the 'Winter War' developed into a long, bloody struggle which disgusted the world and brought Britain and France to the verge of military intervention on the Finnish side. These setbacks may have prompted the Soviet Union to 'secure' its new western frontier.
In February 1940, there began the first of a series of huge and brutal deportations of Poles. Families in the occupied areas were driven from their homes and packed into unheated cattle-trucks, which headed slowly for Siberia and the Soviet far east while their occupants stifled, starved or froze to death. One survivor, Aleksandra Rymaszewska, recalls: 'We came to the long line of trains and the hordes and hordes of people being pushed into cattle trucks . . . there was nothing, just bunks from one wall to the other, a small barred window, the hole in the floor that was supposed to be our toilet. After a few days we were put in different trains which we re on wider tracks, and these tracks, we knew, were leading into the depths of Russia.'
The deportations lasted until July 1940, and were followed by another round-up in June 1941. Between one and a half and two million Poles were herded into the trains, to be employed as slaves or forced labourers in mines and lumber camps near the Arctic Cirele, or to be dumped in the steppes of Kazakhstan. No political distinctions were made, and Polish Communists from the abolished KPP (Communist Party of Poland) worked and perished alongside Catholic priests and university professors, farmers and railwaymen. Tens of thousands of Poles who had held official posts were 'tried' and consigned to long sentences in prisons or camps. No reliable figures exist on their fate, but it is estimated that anything between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead by the time of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. The 200,000 captured soldiers remained in Soviet custody, while.the officers we re segregated into separate camps. Some 10,000 of these Polish officers, held in camps in the Smolensk region, remained in intermittent touch with their families until about March 1940. Then all contact with them suddenly ceased.
After July 1940, another change came over Soviet policy towards the Poles under Soviet occupation. The three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were invaded in June and in July annexed to the Soviet Union. But in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the deportations were suspended, and cautious contact was made with some of the remaining Polish personalities in Lwów. The reason for this, fairly certainly, was Soviet alarm at the scale and ease of the Nazi victory over France and Britain in the west, beginning with the German offensive in May and end ing with the surrender of France and the evacuation of the defeated British in  June. Facing the possibility that Hitler would now tum his aggression eastward, the Soviet Union wavered between the existing policy of treating the Poles under Soviet control as a menace to security in a frontier region, and the need for allies where they could be found. A group of Polish officers, including Colonel Zygmunt Berling, was invited to discuss the possibility of raising a Polish division for the Red Army. Meanwhile Wanda Wasilewska, a Polish Communist who had survived in Lwów on her wits and through her connections with Stalin and his inner circle, was allowed to publish a magazine and to press for the restoration of a Polish Communist Party.
The treatment of the Poles by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 is still an unfamiliar story to foreigners. News of what was going on came only scantily to the West at the time, and later in the war, when Britain and the United States became the allies of the USSR, discussion of the episode was judged tactless and was discouraged. The true story emerged only in fragments during the post-war years, and was understandably overshadowed by the more spectacular and better-publicised savageries of the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rest of Europe. Yet in its brutality and the sheer scale of its cold-blooded attempt to obliterate the Polish nation physically and culturally, this 21-month Soviet occupation far outdid all, the crimes committed against Poland during the century-and-a-quarter of Russian occupation under the Tsars.
The recent memory of Soviet behaviour in Poland was the greatest single obstacle facing the new Communist authorities in Poland after the war. They had to conciliate a people for whom a Soviet-backed government seemed to threaten not only the abolition of private property and farms, and the suppression of the Catholic faith, but transportation to almost certain death in Siberian labour camps, probably to be followed by yet another cancellation of Polish independence.
The Germans controlled the heartland of Poland, with a population of nearly twenty-two million. They made no secret of their intentions. Hitler who took the salute at a victory parade in Warsaw on 5 October 1939, spoke on the 'artificial' and 'unviable' Polish state which was the 'foster-child of Western democracy and deserved its fate: 'to be swept off the face of the earth'. A few days later, the whole of northern and western Poland, including Poznań, Danzig and its hinterland, and Polish Silesia, was annexed to the Reich. The rest of the German-controlIed area became the so-called 'General Government': in reserve under martial law to be exploited for its resources and labour without consideration for the consequences. Its 'capital' was at Kraków, Warsaw being designated for eventual destruction and replacement by a small German colony. Hans Frank, a senior Nazi jurist with a princely lifestyle, became Governor-General and established his court at Kraków in the ancient Wawel Palace.
The Germans lost no time in showing the Poles what their occupation would mean. Behind the advancing front-line troops came the Einsatzgruppen, special execution squads drawn from the SS and the police, whose task was not only to crush resistance and opposition in the civilian population but to slaughter whole categories - the political and intellectual elite, the mentally sick, the leaders of Polish communities - as potential sources of racial or political infection.
Sometimes they shot, sometimes they merely arrested and terrorised. The first great atrocity of the occupation ceńtred on the town of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg in German), where - the facts are still not established - a group of fanatical German civilians appear to have opened fire on retreating Polish troops during the September Campaign, leading to an outbreak of violence against Germans in which many lost their lives. An official German report in November 1939 wrote of some 5 400 German residents in Poland killed or missing in this and similar incidents elsewhere. In February 1940, the German press was instructed to revise this figure to 58,000. The Einsatzgruppen had already undertaken a reprisal for the Bromberg Massacre and had shot nearly 20,000 Poles.
In the regions annexed to the Reich, the Nazi intention was to carry through once and for all the colonisation policy which Prussian and German governments had failed to complete. The Polish inhabitants, numbering between eight and nine million, were to be removed and replaced by Germans. While this was being organised, these regions were subjected to a 'Germanisation' process: the Polish language were forbidden in public, special limited shopping hours were imposed on Poles, and all education over primary level and cultural activity were forbidden. In September 1940, a decree confiscated all Polish property in land or commerce. The Catholic Church was closely persecuted, and in October 1941 several hundred priests were arrested and sent to concentration camps, while only a handful of churches were permitted to remain open.
The colonisation programme began in December 1939 with a round-up of  90 000 Poles and Jews, mostly from the 'possessing classes', who were transported to the General Government - the Jews being sent to the newly established ghettos. The next category to suffer were the small farmers, often given less than an hour to leave their villages while SS men tore down the crucifixes and holy pictures from their walls. Most of them also went eastward to the General Government, though some were conscripted as forced labour for war industry in Germany. Meanwhile, as a part of the Nazi-Soviet understanding, the ethnic German groups living in the newly acquired territories of the USSR - the Baltic states, Volhynia, Bessarabia - were expelled 'home to the Reich' and resettled on the abandoned Polish farms.
For all its root-and-branch vigour, this colonisation project was not much more successful, even in the short-term, than its predecessors. Deportations were broken on in the spring of 1941 and never resumed. About half a million Poles had been removed, not much more than six per cent of the total in the annexed territories, while som e 350,000 Volksdeutschen from the east arrived to replace them. At the end of the war, alI were driven out of Poland for ever.
What was new about this episode of German repression was its almost unimaginable savagery and cruelty - an entirely new quality of method. Between 1939 and 1944, the Nazis murdered something like 330,000 Poles in these annexed regions alone. But the policies themselves were familiar to any Pole who had heard his father describe the Bismarck period: colonisation, expulsion, the simultaneous attack on the language and the Church. EqualIy familiar was the German assumption that the ruling class in Poland and above all the intelligentsia, were incurable patriots, to be dealt with only by force. The Prussians had been saying this back in the 1880s. The Nazis found their own solution to the problem of the Polish intellectuals: systematic extermination.
In the General Government, with a population of over twelve million, a few weeks of weird calm folIowed the arrival of the Germans; theatres reopened and the universities prepared for the new academic year. But things changed instantly when Hans Frank took office. Stefan Starzyński, President of Warsaw, was arrested; the professors of alI higher education in Kraków were  invited to a meeting, seized and sent to concentration camps where many of them were shot. Similar purges took place in all the cities, as the massacre of the intellectual class began. During the Nazi occupation, Poland lost half its doctors and more than half its lawyers, forty per cent of its university professors, half its engineers and eighteen per cent of its priests. Frank told a German police conference in Kraków: 'The Fuehrer has told me that the leading groups in Polish society already in our hands are to be liquidated, and whoever appears to replace them is to be detained and after an appropriate interval exterminated . . . Gentlemen, we are not murderers. But as National Socialist these times lay upon us all the duty to ensure that no further resistance emerges from the Polish people.'
The policy for the General Government was that this region, too, would eventually be Germanised. AlI education above primary and technical level was abolished; all museums and libraries were closed; cultural and artistic activities were forbidden; paintings and sculptures were removed to the Reich, and monuments to great figures in Polish history were demolished. An universal, indiscriminate reign of terror descended on the Polish population, while the Jews, many thousands of whom had already been tormented in public and shot out of hand, were herded into walled-off ghetto quarters in the principal towns. Factories and offices were placed under German direction, to serve the war effort, and wages were frozen. At the same time, a rapid inflation began, reducing the purchasing power of ordinary Poles to a fraction of its pre-war level. The food rationing system that was eventually introduced allowed 2,613 calories a day to a German, but a mere 669 to a Pole. This was a frankly genocidal policy. Like the Jews, but on a slower time scale, the Poles had been designated as an inferior, vermin race to be eliminated from physical existence.
Especially after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the General Government was used as a reservoir of forced labour for the war industries and to replace German manpower called up for military service from the farms. By 1942, about a million Poles had been deported to work in Germany. Growing resistance to the mass round-ups, which required increasing numbers of police and troops and drove thousands of young men and women to seek refuge with the partisan bands in the forests, persuaded Hans Frank to question the whole policy. But he was overruled by the SS, now becoming an autonomous empire within the Reich which not only ran the concentration camps but possessed its own army - the Waffen-SS - and its own industrial economy. Village after village was burned and their inhabitants murdered for real or imagined resistance; as the historian Norman Davies has pointed out, the famous tragedy at Lidice in Czechoslovakia, where a village was destroyed and its inhabitants massacred, was repeated in some three hundred Polish villages during the Nazi occupation.
In November 1942, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuehrer of the SS, ordered that the colonisation policy should now be applied to the General Government. In the district of Zamość, near Lublin, some 40,000 Poles were driven from their villages, to be replaced by German settlers from Bessarabia. Their children were torn from them. A farmer' s daughter who was there, Wacława Kędzierska, saw how 'children up to the age of fourteen, even those as young as six weeks, were taken away. When their mothers didn't want to hand them over, the Germans hit the parents. And then they started to hit the children . . . a lot of the children we re thrown into the mud, even into the cesspit. They killed them. They took them by their legs and hit them against the corner of the barrack.' 
The children were screened for Aryan characteristics. Those suitable for germanisation were held in SS orphanages where many died of hunger or disease, and most were never seen again. The parents were either sent to concentration camps or deported for labour to the Reich.
The Zamość action was foIlowed in early 1943 by a new series of manhunts in Warsaw and the main cities of the General Government. Streets were blocked, cinemas, streetcars or even churches surrounded, and all those caught within the cordon transported. This time their destination was the concentration camps. The SS had begun to exploit the unpaid labour of the camps, numbering many hundreds of thousands, by inviting German industry to settle in 'enterprise zones' around the camp peripheries. This was proving a great success, from the SS point of view, but the turn-over of labour was inconveniently rapid (the average life expectancy at Auschwitz, for those not at once sent to the gas chambers, was about twelve weeks) and needed constant replenishment.
On this occasion, one of the supreme officers of the SS, 'Gestapo' Muller, laid down a target of 35,000 prisoners for the round-ups in the Polish cities, but insisted that they must be fit for work, 'as otherwise and contrary to intentions the concentration camps will be overstrained'. In practice, chaos developed as German security forces grabbed everyone, fit or unfit, without papers or even with a German work permit, male or female, in order to filI Muller's quota. Those unfit for slave labour we re picked out in the camps themselves. 'Overstrain' usually came to mean overloading the crematoria with their corpses.
For the Poles, life in the cities of the General Government slowly developed its own rules and expectations. Physical survival was the issue. There was no safety from the haphazard nature of Nazi terror. At any moment, one might be seized for a labour round-up, arrested as a hostage, or shot in the countless street executions - the inhabitants ordered to stay away from the windows; the victims, their mouths often stuffed with plaster-of-paris to stifle their screams, hustled up against the wall and machine-gunned to death.
These places instantly became shrines. General Bór-Komorowski, later the commander of the Warsaw Rising, describes in his memoirs how his wife Renia, 'with her baby in the pram, passed Senatorska Street where an execution had just taken place. The corpses had already been taken away, but blood was splashed all over the pavement and bits of brains were sticking to the walls. People were kneeling all around, and in a few seconds the whole place was covered with red and white flowers and burning candles. Flowers were put in every bullet-hole in the wall. My sister stopped to pray. German police appeared and she made off. When she looked back, they were shouting and beating people up - all in vain, for after a moment the crowd was back again and new flowers and new candles had appeared.
To stay alive required not only luck but law-breaking, and most of the population was involved in black-marketeering, rackets in stolen German supplies, theft from German-run factories and offices, bribery and the forgery of every kind of document. The peasants were besieged by town dwellers seeking food in exchange for jewellery, gold or furniture. Władysław Baran, a small farmer, recalls: 'People started to come to me from Warsaw, on bicycles. They could carry fifty kilos on a cycle; they weren't well dressed, their cycles were falling apart, and they pushed them on foot from Warsaw. Each took a few kilo s of wholemeal flour or potatoes; they were a picture of poverty . . .'
The only Germans in close contact with the city Poles were the German carpet-baggers and fortune-hunters who flocked to the General Government. They sold precious supplies and identity papers, but they were always dangerous and unreliable. An intense solidarity developed among Poles, who devised elaborate alarm systems and code-words to warn each other of nearby Germans or of a lapanka (round-up) in the next street. The exception was the odious class of Jew-hunters, who made a living by spotting and blackmailing Jews who had escaped from the ghettos and were trying to pass themselves on as gentiles. The Resistance imposed a death penalty for this crime, but the trade thrived throughout the occupation.
The Poles remain proud that - alone in Nazi-occupied Europe - they produced no 'Quislings', no regime to coliaborate with the Germans. However, this was partly the result of German policy, oriented towards the genocide of the Polish nation rather than towards establishing any client state.
(...)
Lack of food and medicines, and the shortage of clothes and especially shoes (many families wore wooden clogs in winter and went barefoot in summer), led to a collapse of public health; deaths from tuberculosis, for example, rose almost fourfold in Warsaw between 1939 and 1941. Self-help committees, tolerated by the Germans but backed by the resistance, ran soup kitchens and relief centres. Cultural life survived as best it could. The Germans took over all cinemas - the resistance mounted a rather unsuccessful movie boycott - but underground theatres flourished in many towns. One of these, the Rhapsodic Theatre in Kraków, featured a young actor named Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II.
(...)
In the midst of these events, the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century was taking place on Polish soil. The 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem', the systematic annihilation of the Jews of Europe, took place partly in the Baltic states and Nazi-dominated Russia, where it was carried out by the firing-squads of the Einsatzgruppen. But the central horror, the extermination of millions of human beings by industrial methods, was carried out in the gas chambers of concentration camps built on the territory of the General Government.
Intermittent massacres of Jews had markedp the first months of Nazi occupation. There followed a series of decrees which stripped Jews of all human and economic rights, reduced their rations to starvation level and - in the course of 1940 - herded them into walled-off ghettos within the larger cities and towns. The penalty for leaving the ghettos or for sheltering Jews was death. The Jewish Councils (judenrate), set up by the Germans, struggled to protect the ghetto populations by a series of ever-retreating compromises with the German authorities, but their task was hopeless. By 1941, over 100,000 Polish Jews had died or been murdered. Nightmarish conditions existed in typhus-ridden ghettos like that of Warsaw, where skeletal children prowled the streets and the corpses of those who had died of hunger or disease lay about the pavements.
The exact 'when' - and even the 'why' - of Hitler's secret order to carry out the methodical murder of European Jewry is not known. The order seems to have been given in late 1941, and was only confirmed by the infamous Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942.
For all the screaming rhetoric of 'extermination' and 'wiping-out', Nazi policy towards the Jews was impromptu and erratic. The first idea, forced emigration, was frustrated by the 'closed-door' attitude of the West, especially of Britain in Palestine, and then by the outbreak of war. The next plan seems to have been the deportation of Europe's Jews to Asian territories conquered from the Soviet Union, where they would be separated by sex to prevent breeding and then worked to death. The massacres by the Einsatzgruppen, who killed over a million Jews behind the advancing German armies, were seen as a mere clearing of the ground for what was to follow.
It has been argued that the halting of the German armies before Moscow in December 1941 determined the final form that the 'Solution' took. There was now no prospect of a rapid conquest of vast and empty Soviet territories; the war in the east would be long and hardo Meanwhile, the conditions in the ghettos and camps where Polish and other European Jews were being dumped were growing so appalling that the orderly German mind was alarmed. The time, space and resources for a 'working to death' policy were no longer available. An end had to be put to the 'Jewish problem', quickly and on the spot. 
The first experiments in gassing were carried out at Chełmno in 1941. Early in the following year, extermination camps with gas chambers were constructed at Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec, in the General Government, and in the winter of 1942-3 the concentration camp at Auschwitz, in Silesia, was extended to take a battery of immense gas chambers and crematoria which could - and did - slaughter and consume up to 15,000 people within twenty-four hours. Not only the Jews but the gypsy nation was condemned to genocide, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of others from almost every country in Europe. Auschwitz alone accounted for nearly 3 million dead. About 2.8 million Polish Jews perished in the extermination camps, with another million Jews brought to the gas chambers by train from all over the continent. Over 5 million Jews of all nationalities died in occupied Poland, in the camps or outside them.

In July 1942, the Germans began to deport the population of the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Against the prevailing mood of hopeless fatalism, a Jewish Fighting Organisation was set up, and managed to make contact with the Home Army outside. Bunkers and petrol bombs were prepared, and when the SS entered the almost empty ghetto for the final round-up on 19 April 1943, the Jewish resistance went into battle. It was a fight which the ghetto warriors knew they must lose; the odds were crushingly against them, and the Home Army and the Communist underground were able to do little to help. But this was a tight not for victory but for honour, and for the future of the Jewish people. The handful of men and women held out against tanks and artillery for almost a month, while the smoke of burning buildings and the stink of burning bodies drifted across Warsaw. Before he committed suicide with his comrades, Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Ghetto Rising, said: 'I have seen Jewish self-defence in all its glory.' Out of 3.35 million Polish Jews, about 340,000 were alive by the end of the war, most of them refugees in the Soviet Union. 
(...)
In July 1943, the hinge of the war began to turn. At the biggest tank battle in history, Hitler's offensive near Kursk was brought to a standstill and then driven back. The Red Army began to move westward, in a slow advance which was to end in Berlin almost two years later. In January 1944, the first Soviet troops crossed the line which had been the old Polish frontier in 1939.
Much had happened to the Poles, both to the London government and its resistance within the country. In April 1943, after the discovery of the bodies of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyń forest, near Smolensk, the Polish government had accused the Soviet Union of their murder, and Stalin had broken off relations with Sikorski. A month later, he had begun to recruit a Polish army under Soviet command. In July, Sikorski had been killed in an air crash at Gibraltar. After his death, his combined powers were divided between two of his senior colleagues in London: Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the Peasant Party leader, who became prime minister, and General Sosnkowski, who took command of Poland' s armed forces.
In Poland, Rowecki had been arrested and was succeeded as AK commander by Bór-Komorowski, a cavalry officer of conservative outlook. Meanwhile, the Communists and their allies were preparing for the arrival of the Red Army, and setting up what looked like the foundations for a pro-Soviet government.
The 'London' resistance clung on to the hope - or illusion - that Poland might be liberated from the west, or at least by Anglo-American and Polish forces arriving at the same time as the Red Army. In late 1943, however, the Warsaw leadership faced the growing possibility that this would not happen. If Poland were to be occupied by the Soviet Union alone, what should the resistance do to maintain and assert Poland' s independence, and to prevent the reduction of Poland to a Soviet protectorate?
Instructions arrived from London that the whole structure - the AK, the Government Delegate and all the rest - should stay concealed as the Soviet armies rolled over Poland and await further orders. Bór-Komorowski and his colleagues found this absurd and dishonourable. Instead, they planned an active policy. As the Soviet forces drew near, one AK unit after another would launch an insurrection against the disintegrating Germans, liberate its region, and meet the Red Army as 'host' in a manifestly free Polish state whose government would soon return from London.
This was 'Operation Tempest'. !ts weaknesses sprang from the ignorance of the underground leaders about the balance of power and priorities in the anti-Hitler coalition. In the first place, 'Tempest' assumed that the Soviet forces could be made to respect the pre-war frontiers. In fact, they had no intention of doing so, considering the lands acquired in September 1939 as integral regions of the USSR, while the British and Americans had shown that they would not risk a breach with Stalin by insisting that Poland should regain its old borders. Secondly, 'Tempest' was based on the belief that Stalin would accept the fait accompli of an anti-communist government in Poland with Western support. Again, this overlooked the Teheran meeting in November/ December 1943, at which Roosevelt and Churchill had extracted no guarantee from Stalin that he would recognise a post-war Polish government that refused to accept the new Soviet frontier along the 'Curzon Line' - roughly, the partition line between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.
So 'Tempest' ran its doomed course. In February 1944, the AK in Volhynia launched a local rising and joined forces with the advancing Soviet troops. At first, the Soviet officers were affable and cooperative, though they declined to make any political statements about frontiers. However, in April the new 'allies' we re defeated by a German counter-attack, and many of the Polish survivors were forced to enlist in the Soviet-commanded Polish army under General Berling. In July 1944, AK units helped the Red Army to drive the Germans out of Wilno, but a few days later their officers were arrested and their men either interned or drafted into the Berling army. Later in July, 6,000 AK troops joined Soviet forces in a stiff battle for Lwów. The outcome was much the same; the AK commander was to told that Lwów was a Soviet city and his men were given the choice of joining the Red Army or the Berling forces. When the pattern was repeated yet again near Lublin, within the Polish borders as the Soviet Union understood them, it was plain that 'Tempest' had failed. In military terms, the Home Army had fought well and gained glory. Politically, the attempt to make the Soviet commanders recognise its authority as the army of Poland's legal government was completely ineffective.
On 22 July, the authority of the London government over Poland had been formally challenged. The Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation issued its July Manifesto in Moscow, proclaiming a programme of democratic reforms and friendship with the Soviet Union. A few days later, it moved to newly liberated Lublin, and was reeognised by the USSR as the legitimate authority in Poland. Meanwhile, the forward troops of Marshal Rokossowsky's First Byelorussian Army reaehed the Vistula on 25 July. The guns of the approaehing Red Army eould be heard in Warsaw, where the Germans began a frantie evaeuation. It seemed obvious that Soviet forces would be in Warsaw within a few days. 
Bór-Komorowski and his offieers deeided for a rising in Warsaw. Indeed, given the wild exeitement boiling up in the eapital, they might not have been able to prevent one. All their calculations - about enemy strength, about relief by the Red Army, about Allied support, about the political effeets of the rising - proved quite wrong. There began on 1 August 1944 the biggest, the most heroic, and by far the bloodiest, urban insurrection that Europe has ever seen. It ended in disaster - a disaster in whieh not one of its survivors has ever regretted taking part.
In 1940, Winston Churchill broadcast to the Polish nation. He spoke from a Britain under siege, carrying on the war against Hitler alone - but not quite alone, for in the streets of London, between the German air raids, there could be seen soldiers in foreign uniforms, some of them wearing the 'Poland' shoulder-flash. He said: 'This war will be lon g and hard, but the end is sure. The end will reward all toil, alldisappointment, all suffering, in those who faithfulIy serve the cause of European and world freedom.'
No nation served that cause more faithfulIy than the Poles. They fought Hitler from the first day of war to the last, on land, at sea and in the air. Polish troops fought in Poland itself, in Russia and North Africa, in Norway, Italy, France and the Low Countries. They were in at the kill in Germany, and Polish troops helped to conquer Berlin. The Polish navy was in action, on the surface and in submarines, through the Battle of the Atlantic, in the North  Sea and the English Channel. Poland's airmen took part in the Battle of Britain, in the bombing offensive against Germany, and in the support of the armies over every front. One in five of the entire population of Poland perished in the conflict. They gave new meaning to the old slogan of the Polish exiles who fought in every revolution for democracy throughout Europe in the nineteenth century: 'For your freedom and ours!' But in the end it was true to say that, while no nation suffered so much, none gained so little.
The end of the war turned out a poor reward for 'all toil, all disappointment'. Poland in 1939 was an independent sovereign state. It was no longer a parliamentary democracy and the colonels' regime of the Sanacja after Pilsudski's death was disliked by most of the population, but these were private problems which the Poles intended to solve within the family. In 1945, a ruined and decimated Poland had regained its formal independence, but was tied closely to the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and controlled by Polish Communists whose ideology was alien to the great majority of Poles. 
Allies had withdrawn recognition from the legal government to which most Poles had given allegiance throughout the German occupation, and had forced upon the nation the loss of its eastern territories, granting in exchange the German provinces as far west as the rivers Oder and Neisse. A ruthless civil conflict was being waged between pro-Communist forces, aided by the Red Army, and the remnants of the wartime Home Army resistance in the hills and forests.
This was hardly the 'independence' that the British guarantee to Poland in 1939 had sworn to restore. Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers in the West, who had for six years told themselves that every pace in their march through so many foreign countries was a step on the way home, now chose to stay abroad as exiles. )
Many things might have been different, but only in detail. The outlines of what was to happen to Poland became inevitable on 22 June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. This had two results, both inescapable. The first was to ensure the eventual defeat of Germany, which had broken the fundamental precept of German strategy: to avoid a war on two fronts. The second was to bring Russian power permanently in to the heart of Europe, something which statesmen had been trying to prevent for over a hundred years. Everything else followed. There was no chance that the armies of the West, weaker and led with less resolution than the Red Army, could liberate Poland before the Soviet Union. There was no chance that Britain and the United States would risk the collapse of the anti-Hitler coalition in the middle of the war by defying Stalin over the future of Poland - and even if they had dane so, no chance that their defiance would have been effective. Finally, although Stalin seems to have been at first flexible about the nature of the internal regime he preferred for Poland, there was no chance that he would permit the Polish state to regain the freedom of action it had possessed before the war.
In 1940, none of this was apparent. The Soviet Union was Hitler's ally, supplying him with trainloads of grain and oil. The United States was neutral, though hostile to Germany. In France, the British and French armies waited cautiously for the inevitable German offensive to begin. Their prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, still clung to the hope that the war might not last long, and could end in a negotiated peace.

With great difficulty, some 43,000 Polish officers and men, determined to carry on the war, had made their way to France from Romania and Hungary. Another 40,000 men were recruited from the large Polish community in France, mostly from the coal-mining regions of the north. Sikorski's army saw action in April 1940, when the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark; a Polish brigade landed with the Aliied force near Narvik, only to be evacuated again a few weeks later.
On 10 May the German armies attacked in the west. Holland surrendered after five days, Belgium was rapidly overrun, and General von Rundstedt achieved complete surprise as his Panzer divisions thrust through the Ardennes, outflanked the Maginot Line defences and drove deep into France. Within ten days, the British had been cut off and were preparing to evacuate across the Channel through Dunkirk. The French in the north-east were in chaotic retreat.
The Poles were stationed further to the south. By the time they went into action, in early June, the campaign was lost. Though the Poles fought hard, they were driven into retreat as the French divisions around them fell to pieces. Some 13,000 men were forced back against the Swiss frontier; they beat off  German attacks, but - in a hopeless situation - decided to cross the border and seek refuge in neutral Switzerland. Other units retreated across France until they reached the Atlantic coast, where some were able to board ship for Britain. Out of his army of 80,000, Sikorski was left with about 25,000, counting the air force and the navy. Between a quarter and a fifth were officers; at the end of the September Campaign in 1939 many ordinary soldiers had chosen to stay in Poland rather than cross the borders into exile. The broken remains of the Polis h regiments were now sent to Scotland, where they prepared to defend the east coast against the expected German invasion.
Winston Churchill had become the British prime minister and formed an all-party government on the day that the German offensive began. Now he assured Sikorski of his full support, ordering the heads of his armed forces to give the Poles every assistance. The Polish government reassembled in London, setting up its General Staff in the Rubens Hotel.
In August 1940, the Battle of Britain opened, as the Germans began the air offensive against southern England and London which was intended to break the Royal Air Force and elear the way for a sea-borne invasion across the Channel. Eighty-one Polish pilots fought in the RAF, and two Polish fighter squadrons - 302 Poznań and 303 Tadeusz Kościuszko - took part in the battle. The Polish fighter pilots became a legend in wartime Britain for their ferocity, skill and recklessness, and accounted for one in six of ali German aircraft shot down in the four months of the Battle. But it was more than thirty years later that Britain revealed another, secret Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain and to eventual Aliied victory. By 1940, the British had broken the code of the German 'Enigma' enciphering machine and were able to read Nazi radio traffic. This was only made possible by a--'pre-war feat of Polish military intelligence, aided by a group of brilliant young mathematicians: they had worked out the 'Enigma' system, built a replica, and passed all its results to the French and the British.
As the threat of German invasion receded, the Poles in Britain were given a badly needed pause. In Scotland, the army trained and exercised, striking up a warm friendship with the Scottish people. General Sosnkowski regained contact with the underground in Poland, and from February 1941 couriers and agents were parachuted into the German-occupied areas. The only land fighting was in North Africa, where in December 1940 the British attacked and destroyed a far larger Italian army. The Polish Carpathian Brigade, composed of troops who had escaped from Romania, was nearby in Palestine, but did not take part in the offensive for the bizarre reason that Sikorski had forgotten to declare war on Italy. This was hastily remedied.
The European war became a world war on 22 June 1941, when German armies stormed across the demarcation line in Poland and attacked the Soviet Union. Churchill at once offered Stalin unconditional support. This put Sikorski in a delicate position, dependent as he was on British hospitality. He issued a statement rejoicing at the outbreak of war between Poland' s enemies and suggesting that any Polish-Soviet alliance should be conditional on Soviet recognition of the 1939 frontiers and the release of Poles in captivity within the USSR. Combined British and Soviet pressure, however, showed Sikorski that he would have to shelve the frontier problem, and on 30 July a Polish-Soviet agreement was signed in London. It was too much for several members of the Polish government, including Sosnkowski, who assumed that the Soviet Union would be rapidly crushed by Hitler and saw no reason to make concessions to Stalin. They resigned.
The agreement promised mutual support in the war, arranged for the formation of a Polish army under the London government on Soviet soil, and declared that Poles captive in the Soviet Union should receive 'amnesty' (although they had committed no crime save that of being Polish). On frontiers, the pact merely stated that territorial changes under the Nazi-Soviet pact were no longer valid. To comfort Sikorski, the British issued a declaration that they did not recognise changes in Poland's borders after August 1939.
Whatever its political shortcomings from the Polish point of view, the Polish-Soviet agreement was utterly justified in human terms. Slowly and reluctantly, the gates of the Siberian and Asian prison camps swung open, and hundreds of thousands of Poles - soldiers, women, officials, priests, even orphaned children - began to make their way towards the centres where the new Polish army was being gathered. Many had already died; many we re not released. But the rest set out on the journey by rail, sledge, river raf t, or on foot. In the chaos of wartime, the Soviet authorities gave them little assistance or food, and thousands perished on the way. Aleksandra Jarmulska was in an Arctic labour camp when the news came of the Polish-Soviet agreement. We slept in a communal hut just on wooden planks, and there was no cruelty: we were just told that we can't escape from there; we would be eaten by polar bears or die in the snows if we did, but if we worked and earned some money. we could survive.' When they were released, Aleksandra and her companion made a raf t for their river journey to find their army. 'The river started freezing at the banks, and sometimes the raft couldn't get through and we just had to cm pieces of the supports away to negotiate ourselves along. And sometimes the raft would stick in the shallows, and then whoever was on it had to get into the river to push.'
The army commander chosen by Sikorski, Genera1 Władysław Anders, had spent the last two years in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Energetic and aggressive, Anders was intensely anti-Russian, and was personally convinced that the Soviet Union was losing the war against Hitler. He set up his headquarters at Buzuluk, between the Volga and the UraI mountains. By December 1941, he had 40,000 Polish soldiers, and 70,000 by March 1942. This was hard to correlate with Polish records which showed that some 180,000 men had been taken prisoner by Soviet forces in 1939. Stranger still was the absence of officers. Only a few hundred arrived in the early months, although some 15,000 had been made Soviet prisoners-of-war.
On 30 November, Sikorski himself arrived in the Soviet Union, welcomed on the snowy airfield by Vyacheslav Molotov, the man whose signature on me Nazi-Soviet pact had condemned Poland to extinction. On 3 December, he and Anders met Stalin and were guests at a banquet the following day. There were arguments about the slow pace of the releases of Poles, about the missing officers, about inadequate rations and about the Polish frontiers. On all these problems Stalin was evasive. But before the newsreel cameras, Stalin and Sikorski signed a joint declaration proclaiming their intention to fight Germany to the end. Sikorski went on to Buzuluk, where he inspected the troops, confirmed to his satisfaction their impatience to get back into battle against the Germans, and saw the mass of Polish civilians and families around the camps being slowly fed and nursed back to health.
Many of those who had reached the Anders army were too far gone to recover. Aleksandra Jarmulska, who had made the journey from the Arctic by raft and train, found starvation even in the army camps.The civilians were still being denied Soviet food ration cards. 'One morning, I just woke up and couldn't wake my mother. And then I realised she had died in her sleep . . . There we re so many people dying there at that time and the soldiers who were assigned to the job of burying them were like the ghosts of an army. They just couldn't cope with it.'
Scenes like these, coupled with his impressions of the Soviet leaders, left Sikorski with no illusions about Soviet-Polish relations in the past and their problems for the future. But he remained convinced that there was no alternative to the pact with Stalin if Poland were to revive, victorious and independent, after the war. '
But the problems grew worse, not better. The Polish forces under Anders were moved eastward to new camps near the Caspian Sea. Their rations were cut by the Soviet authorities, and disease broke out. Early in 1942, Anders refused a Soviet request to send a division to the front on the plausible grounds that his men were under-armed and unfit. This refusal, later made much of by Soviet propaganda as evidence that the Poles were reluctant to fight the 'Hiderites', covered a serious disagreement now emerging between Sikorski and Anders.
Sikorski continued to stand by his agreement with Stalin that the Polish forces in the Soviet Union would fight on the Eastern Front alongside the Red Army. But Anders, whose distrust of Russians had grown even stronger, now pressed Sikorśki to allow his forces to be evacuated to Iran, which was under British control.
At first, Sikorski would not hear of this. He allowed Anders to evacuate those he could not feed because of the ration shortage. But he had three powerful reasons for keeping Polish troops in the Soviet Union. He would retain some leverage over Stalin, the army would continue to act as magnet and refuge for hundreds of thousands of Poles still missing, and - above all - a free Polish army under his command would help to liberate Poland from the east, frustrating any Soviet attempt to bring Poland under Soviet domination. Unfortunately, Stalin understood this last reason perfecdy well.
Stalin decided that this alien presence on his own soil was more trouble than it was worth; the German thrust at Moscow had been beaten on in December 1941, and his military situation was no longer desperate. He began to encourage Anders in his plans to leave. In London, Churchill - now desperate in turn for troops to stem the German offensive against Egypt, which began under General Rommel in June 1942 - also started pushing the Polish government to let Anders come out of Russia. Sikorski was in no position to defy this combined pressure, and in August 1942 ships carrying Polish troops set out across the Caspian Sea for the Iranian shore.
In all, Anders was able to lead some 115,000 soldiers and civilians out of the Soviet Union. In the safety of Iran, they were at last given sufficient food and clothing by the British, and the troops were issued with new weapons. At the last moment Anders had beaten on a Soviet objection to the departure of soldiers and their families who had Polish citizenship but not Polish 'nationality' - which meant Jews. They came tao. But over a million Poles remained in the Soviet Union. With the army gone, the Polish embassy in Moscow had little leverage to use in persuading Stalin to release them. The evacuation to Iran was seen by many Poles as a divine mercy, a flight from Babylonian captivity. For Sikorski, however, it was his worst diplomatic defeat, a calamity for his plans.
Deprived of a presence on the Eastern Front, the weakness of Sikorski' s position became steadily more painful. In Decemher 1942, he flew to the United States and urged Roosevelt to think seriously about an invasion of the Balkans. He hoped that an Anglo - American force could reach Poland through Jugoslavia and Hungary, and lay the foundations of a free Central European Federation before the Red Army arrived. Roosevelt gave him only vague answers. A few weeks later, in January 1943, the Soviet Union informed the Polish government in London that all Poles who had been living in the territories seized in 1939 were now Soviet citizens. This not only deprived the Polish embassy in Moscow of its right to help Poles left in the Soviet Union; it revealed beyond all doubt that Stalin intended to keep those territories after the war.
But all  Sikorski's efforts to preserve at least a working relationship with the Soviet Union were about to be smashed apart. On 13 April 1943, German radio announced the discovery of mass graves near the village of Katyń, in the district of  Smolensk. Katyń was Soviet territory, but it had been occupied by the Nazis since the summer of 1941. In the graves lay the bodies of Polish officers, their hands tied behind their backs, their skulls shattered by pistol-shots from behind. The first Nazi broadcast claimed there were 10,000 of them. In fact, some 4,300 bodies were finally dug up.
The Germans proclaimed that the Polish officers had been 'murdered by the Bolsheviks'. At first, the Poles hesitated. They instinctively rejected murder charges made by mass murderers like the Nazis. They could see the deadly diplomatic trap into which Nazi propaganda intended to push them. They found it hard to believe that even the Russians could have committed a crime so revolting. But the evidence was too strong. Papers found on the bodies, their condition and the degree of vegetation growth above them, left little room for doubt. These were the officers from Kozielsk, one of the three Soviet camps for officer-prisoners established in 1939, and they had been shot between April and early June 1940. Now the Poles recalled all their enquiries about the missing 15,000 officers in 1941 and 1942, whose letters had stopped so suddenly in the spring of 1940. They remembered Stalin' s queer, evasive answers to Sikorski and to Anders: 'They escaped to Manchuria', or just, 'Things sometimes happen. . .'
Two days later, Radio Moscow announced that the Germans had committed the atrocity in 1941, after capturing Smolensk. Nearly fifty years later, this is still the Soviet version of events. Almost nothing supports it; all the evidence accumulated since points even more directly at Soviet guilt. Few Poles, in Poland or abroad, believe anything different.
There had been about 5,000 officers in the Kozielsk 'special camp'. No trace has ever been found of the 4,000 officers in Starobielsk camp or of the 6,500 prisoners at Ostashkov. Both camps were 'wound up' in Apil l 940. After that, there is only silence and darkness. One account, circulating years later in  gulags, said that the Poles were locked inside barges which were deliberately sunk in the White Sea.

Why? Nobody knows that either, outside the Kremlin. It looks like an act of selective genocide against a part of the Polish national elite, closely parallel to Hitler's order to exterminate the Polish intellectual class. For Stalin, this act have been a small affair compared to some of his other slaughters. Some think it was simply an error by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), was misunderstood an order to 'liquidate' the special camps.
The Polish government, in spite of Churchill' s warnings to Sikorski demanded a Katyń enquiry by the International Red Cross. For the first time an open split had appeared in the anti-Hitler coalition. German propaganda rejoiced over its triumph. On 24 April, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government in London, accusing it of a 'treacherosu blow to the USSR' and of trying to 'please Hitler's tyranny'.
Stalin now moved rapidly to set up a new and menacing Polish policy of  own. In May, the nucleus of a Polish army under Soviet command was formulated by Colonel General- Zygmunt Berling. Its political guidance  from the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP), a grouping of pro-Soviet Poles headed by Wanda Wasilewska. It was not long before volunteers began to pour into the Berling army's camps. Most of them were Poles who had not been able to reach the Anders army in time; they had no affection for the Soviet Union, but here, at least, was a chance both to return home and to fight the Nazis. They had to swear an oath to the Soviet Union as well as to Poland, but the Polish flag was flown, the national anthem sung, and there was even a priest to say Mass. By July 1943, they already numbered over 14,000. By early 1944 Berling and his second-in-command, General Karol Świerczewski, who had fought as the illustrious 'General Walter' in the Spanish Civil War, had nearly 44,000 men behind them. 
In the aftermath of the Katyń affair, while the British still reproached the Poles for provoking a breach in the alliance, Sikorski flew to the Middle East. He met General Anders and visited his troops, now in Iraq and about to be formed into the Second Polish Corps to take part in the invasion of Italy. He set oH home, and made a landing at Gibraltar. The next day on 4 July 1943, his aircraft took off from the Gibraltar airfield, at once lost height, and crashed into the sea. All but the Czech pilot died.
Władysław Sikorski's body was brought back to Britain and buried in the Polish mili tary cemetary at Newark, deep in the English countryside. A British enquiry found no traces of sabotage in the aircraft wreck, concluding that a rudder had probably failed. But in their grief the Poles fell prey to many suspicions: that Soviet agents or Sikorski' s political rivals or even Churchill had engineered his death. No serious evidence for any of these theories has emerged.
The death of Sikorski was both tragic and disastrous. Upright, austere, not without arrogance, Sikorski possessed a heroic authority which had held the exile factions together; only he would have been capable of forcing through a policy of alliance with the Soviet Union which broke with the Pilsudskian tradition of hostility to Russia and went against the deep emotional reactions of Poles to the events of 1939. Even after Katyń, he had been planning to overcome the breach with Stalin. Now the Polish leadership divided. General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, the restlessly suspicious officer who mistrusted both the Russian and Anglo-American intentions for Poland, took over Sikorski' s post as commander-in-chief. The office of prime minister went to Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of the Peasant Party, a stubborn but radical politician who was determined to carry forward the ideas of his dead predecessor.
Sosnkowski and Mikołajczyk, never close, now become bitter adversaries. There were periods when the two leaders of Poland refused even to speak to one another, and diverted their energies into blocking each other's intentions. On the whole, though, Mikołajczyk prevailed. In the east, the Red Army was now on the offensive, heading towards Poland. Mikołajczyk knew that some relationship with the Soviet Union must be rebuilt. If he did not try to achieve that, he would be abdicating all responsibility for his country.
At the end of November 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Teheran. Their central purpose was to reach agreement on how to carry forward the war. Stalin and Roosevelt rejected Churchill' s argument for an invasion of the Balkans, which might have forestalled the Soviet liberation and occupation of at least part of eastern Europe, and it was agreed instead that the Americans and the British would land in northern France and fight their way towards Germany.

Near the end of the conference, there was a discussion on the future of eastern Europe. The Big Three accepted that there would be predominant Soviet influence in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the annexed Baltic states and Jugoslavia. Poland was more complicated. Stalin repeated his promise that he would establish a 'strong and independent' Poland, a promise which in his own way he kept: Polish fears that he intended to absorb the whole of Poland as a new republic of the Soviet Union were groundless. But the three men at Teheran decided, in secret and without consulting Mikołajczyk, that the Polish state would be moved bodily several hundred miles to the west. The Soviet Union would absorb the old eastern territories, in which Poles were a minority, and set its frontier along the 1920 Curzon Line. In the west, Poland would take over almost the whole of Germany east of the rivers Oder and Neisse: Silesia with its mineral wealth and industries and the great city of Breslau, Pomerania with a long stretch of Baltic coast including Danzig, and the southern part of East Prussia.
Churchill thought he could persuade the Polish government in exile to accept an outline of these terms. After all, they offered Poland a strong state which would be ethnically much more united - once the Germans had been expelled from their lost provinces - and economically stronger. Stalin had his doubts, and reserved the right to set up a government which would consent to these terms if the London Poles refused. Stalin was right. Mikołajczyk's government rebelled. They could hardly reject the offer of expansion to the west - an ambition harboured by many Poles before the war - but would not recognise the new Western Territories as 'compensation' for lands lost in the east. The Curzon Line was the sticking-point. There now followed months of wrangling over the frontier between the London Poles and an increasingly exasperated British government. The Poles suggested in February 1944 that (they could renounce some of the old eastern lands, but absolutely refused to give up the ancient Polish centres of Lwów and Wilno. Churchill and his foreign secretary Anthony Eden, obliged to spend precious hours and days arguing over 'obscure' place-names in eastern Europe, came to consider the London Poles as unrealistic and unreasonable.
There was a failure of imagination here. The British could not understand why the Poles seemed unable to divorce the two issues of independence and frontiers, which appeared to the pragmatic Churchill quite separate.
The problem was history: the history of the Partitions. Every loss of territory inflicted by Poland's neighbours had led at once to a reduction of Poland' s independence, and to an internal weakening of the Polish state. The Polish government in London and the Delegation and Home Army command in Warsaw were unanimous: a surrender of territory to Russia would mean that the future Poland would be a Soviet puppet, and 'compensation' elsewhere was irrelevant.
Mikołajczyk, however, refused to give up the struggle. He was determined to find a way of renewing relations with the Soviet Union which would be acceptable to his more obstinate colleagues in the Polish government, who now began to suspect him of 'pro-Soviet' weakness. In June 1944, he met Roosevelt once more, in the very days that the Allies were landing on the Normandy beaches. He was welcomed like a great statesman - Roosevelt had his eye on the Polish vote in the approaching election. The President, good-natured but evasive, told his guest that he would see that Poland kept the city of Lwów and much of Galicia after the war, but doubted whether Stalin could be persuaded to give up Wilno. This was a grass deceit on the part of Roosevelt, who at Teheran had agreed in secret talks that Poland' s frontier would be the Curzon Line - granting Lwów and eastern Galicia to the Soviet Union.
In Poland itself, events were beginning to slip out of Mikolajczyk's contra. The Red Army was closing on Warsaw, accompanied by the Berling army which had grown in size and prowess since its first hard-fought batde at Lenino in September 1943. 'Operation Tempest', the attempt by the Home Army to liberate regions of Poland before the Soviet troops arrived, was failing. The Communist-dominated Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) installed itself at Lublin in late July; if Mikolajczyk was to prevent the PKWN becoming the provisional government of Poland, he had little time left.
Churchill urged him to find some way of merging the London government with the PKWN, accepting a Communist element in the future Polish regime as the price for retaining some influence over events. On 29 July, Mikołajczyk and his foreign minister, Tadeusz Romer, flew to Moscow for a visit that lasted a fortnight. It was the last hope for the London government.
Two days after Mikołajczyk's arrival, the Warsaw Rising began. Taken by surprise and suspicious of its motives, Stalin reproached Mikołajczyk for not informing him in advance - although Soviet broadcasts to Warsaw had been calling for an insurrection for days before it broke out. He refused to consider any other eastern frontier than the Curzon Line, which put both Lwów and Wilno on the Soviet side of the border, and urged the Polish prime minister to talk to the PKWN. A meeting was arranged, and Mikołajczyk found himself facing some of the unknown men and women who were about to tak e power in his country: Wanda Wasilewska, Bolesław Bierut, a loyal supporter of Stalin and a Communist, and Edward Osóbka-Morawski, an obscure member of the Polish Socialist Party. They offered him a coalition government in which they would have fourteen seats in the Cabinet and London would have only four, although Mikołajczyk would become prime minister. Mikołajczyk, angry and agonised over Soviet reluctance to help the Warsaw Rising, turned them down and returned to London on l0 August.
By now, Polish soldiers on all fronts we re becoming aware of the outlines of the Teheran decisions, and of a proposed change of frontiers. For many of them, these changes meant that they would never see their homes again, unless they chose to become Soviet citizens after the war. The men of Berling's army, recruited from those imprisoned or deported in 1939, came almost entirely from the eastern territories. But so, for the same reasons, did the Polish Second Corps under General Anders, now fighting in Italy. And a large part of the Polish forces in Britain, who crossed the Channel to enter the Normandy baules in August 1944, were also easterners who had been with the regiments that took refuge in Romania and Hungary in 1939 or had been evacuated from me Soviet Union in 1942.
There was bitter talk, in the officers' messes and in the ranks. But the Poles, loyal to their alliance even when they saw that they were losing their country, fought on. In May 1944, the Second Corps - at an appalling cost in dead and wounded - succeeded where the British and Americans had failed and stormed the Italian monastery of  Monte Cassino. In France, the Polish First Armoured Division helped to inflict on the Germans the disastrous defeat at Falaise; under General Maczek, the divison drove on through the Low Countries and liberated the Dutch city of Breda in October. A Polish paratroop brigade commanded by General Sosabowski took part in the airborne landings at Arnhem in September 1944, a noble but avoidable failure.
Given a choice, they would all have preferred to be in Warsaw, fighting and dying with their own people. The Rising, intended to last only a few days before the Soviet forces arrived, went on for two months of desperate street fighting which cost about 200,000 lives and left most of the capital an uninhabited wilderness of ruins.
General Bór-Komorowski and his commanders had some 30,000 men and women in their forces, mostly from the Home Army but including formations from the NSZ and the Communist People's Army. They had no heavy weapons and just over 700 automatic weapons, including machine-pistols. For an action lasting less than a week, against the rearguard of a departing enemy, this might have been enough.
But everything went wrong, not always through the mistakes of the Rising's leaders. In the first days, in glorious festivals of patriotic rejoicing, much of the city was liberated. Meanwhile, however, the German retreat had stopped, and armoured divisions moved across the Vistula to inflict a sharp defeat on the Soviet forces approaching the city. The Red Army fell back, but even when it had reorganised itself, made no further move to come to Warsaw's rescue. The Soviet aircraft which had been seen over the city every day now suddenly vanished. German reinforcements arrived, closed a ring around Warsaw, and - with the help of units from General Vlasov' s renegade Russian army - began to fight their way back street by street.
The temporary setback before Warsaw does not explain the fact that the Soviet forces now sat passively in their trenches, week after week, while the Germans crushed the Rising. Stalin cabled Mikolajczyk that the Rising was a 'reckless adventure' which he would not assist. On 12 August, Roosevelt and Churchill asked him to permit Western aircraft dropping supplies to Warsaw to land on Soviet airfields. Stalin refused. Only on 12 September did he allow American bombers to land at Poltava in the Ukraine, and order some Soviet airdrops to the insurgents. By then, Warsaw was hidden by smoke and the insurgents had been driven back into a small perimeter; most containers of arms and supplies fell into German hands. Stalin dismissed the Rising as a 'mindless brawl mounted by adventurers'. But in fact he could read all too clearly the minds of those who had launched it, and knew that the Rising was intended to confront him with the accomplished fact of a free capital city controlled by the representatives of a non-Communist government. He had no intention of helping this design to succeed.
So the Poles in Warsaw fought and died at their barricades and cursed the Russians for doing nothing, while the German bombers - unchallenged - steadily reduced the town to rubble. A few days after the start of the Rising, the Germans counter-attacked with tanks and artillery and cut the liberated area into several pieces. As they advanced, they methodically drove civilians in to the courtyards, machine-gunned them and then set fire to the buildings. The siege of the Old Town lasted until 1 September, when the surviving defenders 
escaped through the sewers to another bastion of resistance in the modern centre of Warsaw.
The British and Americans had not been warned of the Rising any more than the Soviet Dnion. Six days before it broke out, General Bór-Komorowski appealed for the Polish Paratroop Brigade to be dropped into the city. Nobody had given serious thought to the reinforcement problems of a prolonged insurrection, and this idea was completely impractical; there was no way that an armada of slow-moving gliders and towing aircraft could reach Warsaw, even if they we re not shot down on the way. But the Allies made efforts to supply the Rising, even without the use of Soviet airfields. Polish, British and South African squadrons flew missions from Brindisi in Italy, a 1,700-mile return flight. Their losses in men and aircraft were suicidal, and - counting the later American mission - only 44 out of 149 parachuted containers reached the insurgents.
On l0 September, the Soviet forces to the east of the Vistula at last mounted an attack and reached the bank of the river in the Warsaw suburb of Praga. Among them were Polish troops of the Berling army, who could now see the burning city across the water and hear the noise of battle. Some Polish units managed to cross the Vistula, but the Germans now held the other shore in strength, and they were forced to give up their bridgeheads with heavy losses. The army group commanded by Marshal Rokossovsky, to which the Poles belonged, made no attempt at a full-scale river crossing.
District by district, the last pockets held by the Rising began to fall. The Germans drove unarmed Polish civilians before their troops as they advanced, to screen them from fire. The execution squads, somb from the SS, some composed of drunken Russian deserters, slaughtered their way from house to house. Home Army hospitals, when captured, were burned with patients, doctors and nurses still inside. Hungry, filthy, exhausted and almost without ammunition, the defenders felI back from cellar to cellar, women and children attacking German tanks with home-made petrol-bombs, the dead buried in gardens and bomb craters.
The final surrender did not come until 2 October 1944. The Home Army survivors were granted the status of combatants and made prisoners-of-war; the entire remaining civilian population was marched out of the city to internment camps. Hitler ordered the complete razing of Warsaw, so that no settlement would ever arise there again, and demolition squads set to work with flame-throwers and dynamite among the silent, gutted streets. When they had finished, ninety-three per cent of the city's buildings were destroyed or beyond repair.
The Warsaw Rising of 1944 is one of the supreme events of Polish history. It brought to an awful climax the romantic tradition of armed uprising which stretched back to 1794. It convinced most of the generation who took part in it that in modern conditions that tradition no longer had a place: after another such rising, there would be no Poland left. But the Warsaw Rising was also a time of freedom, a 63-day revelation of how Poles could act and feel and behave to one another, which left a hot residue of pride to keep the nation warm through the bleak years that followed.
The Rising was not just a military action, but a community of the people with their soldiers, a community with its own songs and newspapers, its radio and theatres, its own film unit and cinemas. Even children took a full part. All who took part remember with love the laczniczki, the girls who ran with messages for the insurgents and died in their hundreds and the Szare Szeregi (Grey Ranks), the boys and girls of the Scout movement who fought to the end. Like many Polish upheavals, the Rising also left a moral legacy behind it.
Many older citizens of Warsaw today still try to measure their own behaviour by the devotion, purity and generosity which they remember from the summer of 1944.
The best historian of the Warsaw Rising, Jan Ciechanowski, concludes that its political motives and its military motives could never have been reconciled. 'In view of the total absence of  liaison with the Russians, and the lack of reliable data concerning their deployment and intentions, the Home Army leaders were militarily unjustified in embarking on an insurrection against the Germans.' The predicament of Bór- Komorowski was this; 'to fight against the Germans successfully he had to cooperate with the Russians militarily, yet he was unable to do so wholeheartedly because he wished to oppose them politically.

The failure of the Rising was a fatal and decisive defeat both for the Home Army and for the Polish government in London. With its leadership dead or imprisoned, and the capital destroyed, much of the fighting spirit went out of the Home Army. Some units ceased active operations, allowing many of their men to bury their weapons and return home. A few prepared for a new armed struggle against Soviet forces and the Communist authorities. In the liberated areas, where the PKWN now announced conscription, many thousands of ex-Home Army soldiers allowed themselves to be drawn into the Berling army, which numbered 290,000 by the end of 1944.
Stalin's decision in September to give the Rising some assistance, though too little and too late, inspired Churchill to make one last effort to solve what he called, in moments of despair, 'the Polish imbroglio'. In London, General Sosnkowski had been dismissed from the post of commander-in-chief after an outburst in which he accused Britain of betraying Poland; Churchill hoped that Mikołajczyk, free of his implacably anti-Russian rival, might now find it possible to bargain with Stalin. In October 1944, Churchill and Eden flew to Moscow, and Mikołajczyk followed them on 12 October.
There took place in Moscow a tragic, Shakespearian confrontation. It was a collision between Churchill and Mikołajczyk, two men who shared the same political values of liberty and democracy, whose stubborn temperaments were similar, and who at heart regarded one another with real affection. Stalin and Molotov scarcely took part. Mikołajczyk brought with him his Cabinet's final offer: an all-party government for post-war Poland in which the Communists would have a fifth of the ministries, and a redrawing of the eastern frontier which would leave Wilno and Lwów, with the nearby Galician oilfields, in Poland. Stalin turned this down. When Mikołajczyk retorted that Roosevelt had told him that Lwów should stay Polish, Molotov revealed to him that the President had agreed to the Curzon Line at Teheran, ten months earlier.
Deeply shaken, Mikołajczyk now met Churchill and Eden in private. Churchill reproached him: if he had only agreed to the Curzon Line frontier earlier in the year, Stalin would not have set up a rival 'government' in the form of the Lublin Committee - the PKWN. Mikołajczyk bitterly reminded him of Britain's pledges to Poland. Churchill shouted at him that he wanted to start a third world war. 'You're a callous people who want to wreck Europe. I shall leave you to your own troubles. You have only your miserable, petty, selfish  interests in mind!'
He threatened to withdraw recognition of the London government, and added that Mikołajczyk ought to be in a lunatic asylum. Beside himself with rage and misery, Mikołajczyk demanded permission to be parachuted into Poland, so that he could perish in battle with the Home Army. 'I prefer to die fighting for the independence of my country, rather than to be hanged later by the Russians in fulI view of your British ambassador!'
At this Churchill marched out of the room. Both men were close to tears. After some moments, Churchill returned and put his arm round the Pole's shoulders. But they had reached the end of a line, and they knew it. A last suggestion by Mikołajczyk that Poland could give up Wilno if Lwów could be saved was put to the Kremlin. Stalin, no doubt aware of this highly satisfactory quarrel through well-placed microphones, placidly refused.
Stanisław Mikołajczyk went back to London. There he told his colIeagues candidly that there was no longer any room for manoeuvre. If they wanted to have any share of the future government, they would have to swalIow the Soviet terms and the Curzon Line. He urged them to do so, reminding them of the rich new territories promised to Poland in the west. But it was too much for most of the London Poles, and on 24 November Mikołajczyk resigned.
This was the end of the Polish exile government as a force in international politics. From now on, world statesmen acted as if it no longer existed. In December, the PKWN proclaimed itself the provisional government of Poland, with Osóbka-Morawski as prime minister, Bolesław Bierut as head of state and Władysław Gomułka as a deputy premier. It was recognised by the Soviet Union a few days later.
On 12 January 1945, the Soviet armies on the Vistula resumed the offensive. The German defences broke, and the Red Army drove rapidly across central and western Poland towards the German frontier. The men of the Berling army entered Warsaw on 17 January, stepping in horrified silence through a desert of frozen rubble. Behind them, welI wrapped up against the savage frost, came a group of men whom most Poles had never heard "of - the new government. After more than five years of Nazi occupation, liberation had come at last, but wearing a uniform woven of irony. 
In early February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea. They planned the final phase of the war and the joint administration of occupied Germany in the interval before the peace conference. But no peace conference has ever taken place to make a formal settlement of the Second World War, and in its absence the agreements reached by the Big Three at Yalta have been treated as the charter for the division of Europe into 'zones of influence'. At Yalta, many now believe, Britain and the United States betrayed all the principles for which the war had been fought by handing over Europe east of the river Elbe to Joseph Stalin.
Yalta does not really deserve this bad name. In the first place, there was little Churchill and Roosevelt could do to prevent Soviet domination of the areas liberated by the Red Army, short of threatening a fresh war. Secondly, Yalta for the most part only ratified decisions taken earlier, especially at Teheran. As far as Poland was concerned, the West did attempt - in a callous, casual way - to ensure that Poland- would not become a Communised puppet of the Soviet Union, and that the political will of the Polish people would be freely expressed. The worst that can be said about Churchill and Roosevelt on this occasion is that they willingly deceived themselves about Stalin' s intention to keep his promises.
The three leaders agreed that Poland would be run by a provisional government including 'alI democratic and anti-Nazi elements', until free elections could be held. This temporary government was to include Poles from the London camp. On frontiers, Yalta again confirmed the Curzon Line in the east, but there was no precise agreement on how much of Germany would be added to Poland in the west.
Stanisław Mikołajczyk decided to accept the Yalta blueprint. It was a frightening gambIe. The London government in exile had instantly denounced Yalta as a new Partition. In March, sixteen leaders of the resistance in Poland we re invited to a 'meeting' with Marshal Zhukov, kidnapped and imprisoned in the Lubyanka in Moscow to await trial for - among other grotesque charges - collaborating with the Germans. In the Polish forests and villages, remnants of partisan bands were beginning to clash with Soviet security forces. But Mikołajczyk felt that if the Soviet assurances at Yalta meant anything at all, he stood a chance of rallying the Peasant Party within Poland and leading a non-Communist block of parties to victory in the elections.
On 2 May, Berlin fell to Soviet and Polish troops. On 8 May, the war in Europe ended.

Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals

Judgement : War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

Judge PARKER:

(...)
One of the most notorious means of terrorising the people in occupied territories was the use of concentration camps. They were first established in Germany at the moment of the seizure of power by the Nazi Government. Their original purpose was to imprison without trial all those persons who were opposed to the Government, or who were in any way obnoxious to German authority. With the aid of a secret police force, this practice was widely extended and in course of time concentration camps became places of organised and systematic murder, where millions of people were destroyed.

In the administration of the occupied territories the concentration camps were used to destroy all opposition groups. The persons arrested by the Gestapo were as a rule sent to concentration camps. They were conveyed to the camps in many cases without any care whatever being taken for them, and great numbers died on the way. Those who arrived at the camp were subject to systematic cruelty. They were given hard physical labour, inadequate food, clothes and shelter, and were subject at all times to the rigours of a soulless regime, and the private whims of individual guards. In the report of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate's Section of the 3rd U.S. Army, under date 21st June, 1945, the conditions at the Flossenburg concentration camp were investigated, and one passage may be quoted:

" Flossenburg concentration camp can be described as a factory dealing in death. Although this camp had in view the primary object of putting to work the mass slave labour, another of its primary objects was the elimination of human lives by the methods employed in handling the prisoners. Hunger and starvation rations sadism, inadequate clothing, medical neglect, disease, beatings, hangings, freezing, forced suicides, shooting, etc., all played a major role in obtaining their object. Prisoners were murdered at random, spite killings against Jews were common, injections of poison and shooting in the neck were everyday occurrences; epidemics of typhus and spotted fever were permitted to run rampant as a means of eliminating prisoners, life in this camp meant nothing. Killing became a common thing, so common that a quick death was welcomed by the unfortunate ones."

The murder and ill-treatment of civilian populations reached its height in the treatment of the citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland. Some four weeks before the invasion of Russia began, special task forces of the SIPO and SD, called Einsatz Groups, were formed on the orders of Himmler for the purpose of following the German armies into Russia, combating partisans and members of Resistance Groups, and exterminating the Jews and communist leaders and other sections of the population. In the beginning, four such Einsatz Groups were formed, one operating in the Baltic States, one towards Moscow, one towards Kiev, and one operating in the south of Russia. Ohlendorf, former chief of Amt III of the RSHA, who led the fourth group, stated in his affidavit:

" When the German army invaded Russia, I was leader of Einsatzgruppe D, in the southern sector, and in the course of the year during which I was leader of the Einsatzgruppe D it liquidated approximately 90,000 men, women and children. The majority of those liquidated were Jews, but there were also among them some communist functionaries."

" in view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished, not by legal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the armed forces as is alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the population . . . Commanders must find the means of keeping order by applying suitable draconian measures."

" It should be possible to avoid atrocities and to bury those who have been liquidated. To lock men, women and children into barns and set fire to them does not appear to be a suitable method of combating bands, even if it is desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German cause, and hurts our reputation severely."

". . . Then the electric floodlights which had been erected all round the ghetto were switched on. SS and militia details of four to six members entered or at least tried to enter the houses. Where the doors and windows were closed, and the inhabitants did not open upon the knocking, the SS men and militia broke the windows, forced the doors with beams and crowbars, and entered the dwelling. The owners were driven on to the street just as they were, regardless of whether they were dressed or whether they had been in bed.... Car after car was filled. Over it hung the screaming of women and children, the cracking of whips and rifle shots."

". . . Now we heard shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks, men, women and children of all ages, had to undress upon the orders of an SS man, who carried a riding or dog whip.... Without screaming or crying, these people undressed, stood around by families, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for the command of another SS man, who stood near the excavation, also with a whip in his hand.... At that moment the SS man at the excavation called something to his comrade. The latter counted off about 20 persons, and instructed them to walk behind the earth mound.... I walked around the mound and stood in front of a tremendous grave; closely pressed together, the people were lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. The excavation was already two-thirds full; I estimated that it contained about a thousand people.... Now already the next group approached, descended into the excavation, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot."

" It is not our task to Germanise the East in the old sense, that is to teach the people there the German language and the German law, but to see to it that only people of purely Germanic blood live in the East."

" The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and Germanic health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable."

" What happens to a Russian, a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take. If necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur, otherwise it is of no interest to me."

It was the same story in the occupied area of the Soviet Union. At the time of the launching of the German attack in June, 1941, Rosenberg told his collaborators:

" The object of feeding the German people stands this year without a doubt at the top of the list of Germany's claims on the East, and here the southern territories and the northern Caucasus will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the German people.... A very extensive evacuation will be necessary, without any doubt, and it is sure that the future will how very hard years in store for the Russians."

A somewhat similar fate was planned for Czechoslovakia by the defendant von Neurath, in August, 1940; the intelligentsia were to be "expelled," but the rest of the population was to be Germanised rather than expelled or exterminated, since there was a shortage of Germans to replace them.

In the West the population of Alsace were the victims of a German " expulsion action." Between July and December, 1940, 105,000 Alsatians were either deported from their homes or prevented from returning to them.

A captured German report dated 7th August, 1942, with regard to Alsace states that:

" The problem of race will be given first consideration, and this in such a manner that persons of racial value will be deported to Germany proper, and racially inferior persons to France."

(A recess was taken.)

THE PRESIDENT: I now ask General Nikitochenko to continue the reading of the judgment.

General NIKTOCHENKO: Article 49 of the Hague Convention provides that an occupying power may levy a contribution of money from the occupied territory to pay for the needs of the army of occupation, and for the administration of the territory in question. Article 52 of the Hague Convention provides that an occupying power may make requisitions in kind only for the needs of the army of occupation, and that these requisitions shall be in proportion to the resources of the country. These Articles, together with Article 48, dealing with the expenditure of money collected in taxes, and Articles 53, 55 and 56, dealing with public property, make it clear that under the rules of war, the economy of an occupied country can only be required to bear the expenses of the occupation, and these should not be greater than ,the economy of the country can reasonably be expected to bear. Article 56 reads as follows:

" The property of municipalities, of religious, charitable, educational, artistic and scientific institutions, although belonging to the State, is to be accorded the same standing as private property. All pre-meditated seizure, destruction. or damage of such institutions historical monuments, works of art and science, is prohibited and should be prosecuted."

" God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live. That is what I expect of your exertions. This everlasting concern about foreign people must cease now, once and for all. I have here before me reports on what you are expected to deliver. It is nothing at all, when I consider your territories. It makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve."

" The task for the economic treatment of the various administrative regions is different, depending on whether the country is involved which will be incorporated politically into the German Reich, or whether we will deal with the Government-General, which in all probability will not be made a part of Germany. In the first mentioned territories, the . . . safeguarding of all their productive facilities and supplies must be aimed at, as well s a complete incorporation into the Greater German economic system, at the earliest possible time. On the other hand, there must be removed from the territories of the Government-General all raw materials, scrap materials, machines, etc., which are of use for the German war economy. Enterprises which are not absolutely necessary for the meagre maintenance of the naked existence of the population must be transferred to Germany, unless such transfer would require an unreasonably long period of time, and would make it more practicable to exploit those enterprises by giving them German orders, to be executed at their present location."

In many of the occupied countries of the East and the West, the authorities maintained the presence of paying for all the property which they seized. This elaborate presence of payment merely disguised the fact that the goods sent to Germany from these occupied countries were paid for by the occupied countries themselves, either by the device of excessive occupation costs only forced loans in return for a credit balance on a " clearing account " which was an account merely in name.

In most of the occupied countries of the East even this presence of legality was not maintained, economic exploitation became deliberate plunder. This policy was first put into effect in the administration of the Government-General in Poland. The main exploitation of the raw materials in the East was centred on agricultural products and very large amounts of food were shipped from the Government-General to Germany.

The evidence of the widespread starvation among the Polish ,people in the Government-General indicates the ruthlessness and the severity with which the policy of exploitation was carried out.

The occupation of the territories of the U.S.S.R., was characterised by premeditated and systematic looting. Before the attack on the U.S.S.R., an economic staff -Oldenburg- was organised to ensure the most efficient exploitation of Soviet territories. The German armies were to be fed out of Soviet territory, even if "many millions of people will be starved to death." An OKW directive issued before the attack said:

" To obtain the greatest possible quantity of food and crude oil for Germany- that is the main economic purpose of the campaign."

" We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings."

In addition to the seizure of raw materials and manufactured articles, a wholesale seizure was made of art treasures, furniture, textiles and similar articles in all the invaded countries.

The defendant Rosenberg was designated by Hitler on the 29th January 1940, Head of the Centre for National Socialist Ideological and Educational Research, and thereafter the organisation known as the " Einsatzstab Rosenberg" conducted its operations on a very great scale. Originally designed for the establishment of a research library, it developed into a project for the seizure of cultural treasures. On the 1st March, 1942, Hitler issued a further decree, authorising Rosenberg to search libraries lodges and cultural establishments, to seize material from these establishments, as well as culture treasures owned by Jews. Similar directions were given where the ownership could not be clearly established. The decree directed the cooperation of the Wehrmacht High Command, and indicated that Rosenberg's activities in the West were to be conducted in his capacity as Reichsleiter, and in the East in his capacity as Reichsminister. Thereafter, Rosenberg's activities were extended to the occupied countries. The report of Robert Scholz, Chief of the special staff for Pictorial Art, stated:

"During the period from March, 1941, to July, 1944, the special staff for Pictorial Art brought into the Reich 29 large shipments, including 137 freight cars with 4,174 cases of art works."

Museums, palaces and libraries in the occupied territories of the U.S.S.R. were systematically looted. Rosenberg's Einsatzstab, Ribbentrop's special " Battalion ", the Reichscommissars and representatives of the Military Command seized objects of cultural and historical value belonging to the people of the Soviet Union, which were sent to Germany. Thus, the Reichscommissar of the Ukraine removed paintings and objects of art from Kiev and Kharkov and sent them to East Prussia. Rare volumes and objects of art from the palaces of Peterhof, Tsarskeye Selo, and Pavlovsk were shipped to Germany. In his letter to Rosenberg of the 3rd October, 1941, Reichscommissar Kube stated that the value of the objects of art taken from Byelorussia ran into millions of roubles. The scale of this plundering can also be seen in the letter sent from Rosenberg's department to von Milde-Schreden in which it is stated that during the month of October, 1943, alone, about 40 box-cars loaded with objects of cultural value were transported to the Reich.

With regard to the suggestion that the purpose of the seizure of art treasures was protective and meant for their preservation, it is necessary to say a few words. On the 1st December, 1939, Himmler, as the Reich Commissioner for the " strengthening of Germanism ", issued a decree to the regional officers of the secret police in the annexed eastern territories, and to the commanders of the security service in Radom, Warsaw and Lublin. This decree contained administrative directions for carrying out the art seizure programme, and in Clause 1 it is stated:

" To strengthen Germanism in the defence of the Reich, all articles mentioned in Section 2 of this decree are hereby confiscated.... They are confiscated for the benefit of the German Reich, and are at the disposal of the Reich Commissioner for the strengthening of Germanism."

" I was able to gain some knowledge on the public and private collections, as well as clerical property, in Cracow and Warsaw. It is true that we cannot hope too much to enrich ourselves from the acquisition of great art works of paintings and sculptures, with the exception of the Veit-Stoss altar, and the plates of Hans von Kulnback in the Church of Maria in Cracow . . . and several other works from the national museum in Warsaw "

Article 6 (b) of the Charter provides that the " ill-treatment ,or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose, of civilian population of or in occupied territory" shall be a war crime. The laws relating to forced labour by the inhabitants of occupied territories are found in Article 52 of The Hague Convention, which provides:-

" Requisition in kind and services shall not be demanded from municipalities or inhabitants except for the needs of the army of occupation. They shall be in proportion to the resources of the country, and of such a nature as not to involve the inhabitants in the obligation of taking part in military operations against their own country."

" The territory which now works for us contains more than 250,000,000 men, but the territory which works indirectly for us includes now more than 350,000,000. In the measure in which it concerns German territory, the domain which we have taken under our administration, it is not doubtful that we shall succeed in harnessing the very last man to this work."

In the early stages of the war, manpower in the occupied territories was under the control of various occupation authorities, and the procedure varied from country to country. In all the occupied territories compulsory labour service was promptly instituted. Inhabitants of the occupied countries were conscripted and compelled to work in local occupations, to assist the German war economy. In many cases they were forced to work on German fortifications and military installations. As local supplies of raw materials and local industrial capacity became' inadequate to meet the German requirements, the system of deporting labourers to Germany was put into force. By the middle of April, 1940, compulsory deportation of labourers to Germany had been ordered in the Government General; and a similar procedure was followed in other eastern territories as they were occupied. A description of this compulsory deportation from Poland was given by Himmler. In an address to SS officers he recalled how in weather 40 degrees below zero they had to " haul away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands." On a later occasion Himmler stated:-

" Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.... We must realise that we have 6-7 million foreigners in Germany.... They are none of them dangerous so long as we take severe measures at the merest trifles."

" During all this time a great number of Frenchmen were recruited, and voluntarily went to Germany."

" Not only voluntary, some were recruited forcibly."

" The calling up started after the recruitment no longer yielded enough results."

" Out of the five million workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily,"

" Let us forget for the moment whether or not some slight pressure was used. Formally, at least, they were volunteers."

The defendant Sauckel was directly under the defendant Goering as Commissioner of the Four Year Plan, and a Goering decree of the 27th March, 1942, transferred all his authority over manpower to Sauckel. Sauckel's instructions, too, were that foreign labour should be recruited on a voluntary basis, but also provided that " where, however, in the occupied territories the appeal for volunteers does not suffice, obligatory service and drafting must under all circumstances be resorted to. " Rules requiring labour service in Germany were published in all the occupied territories. The number of labourers to be supplied was fixed by Sauckel, and the local authorities were instructed to meet these requirements by conscription if necessary. That conscription was the rule rather than the exception is shown by the statement of Sauckel already quoted, on the 1st March, 1944.

The defendant Sauckel frequently asserted that the workers belonging to foreign nations were treated humanely, and that the conditions in which they lived were good. But whatever the intention of Sauckel may have been, and however much he may have desired that foreign labourers should be treated humanely, the evidence before the Tribunal establishes the fact that the conscription of labour was accomplished in many cases by drastic and violent methods. The " mistakes and blunders " were on a very great scale. Man-hunts took place in the streets, at motion picture houses, even at churches and at night in private houses. Houses were sometimes burnt down, and the families taken as hostages, practices which were described by the defendant Rosenberg as having their origin " in the blackest periods of the slave trade." The methods used in obtaining forced labour from the Ukraine appear from an order issued to SD officers which stated:

" It will not be possible always to refrain from using force.... When searching villages, especially when it has been necessary to burn down a village, the whole population will be put at the disposal of the Commissioner by force.... As a rule no more children will be shot.... If we limit harsh measures through the above orders for the time being, it is only done for the following reason.... The most important thing is the recruitment of workers."

" All the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent, at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure."

" We have made a request for an order that a certain percentage of men in the Ack-Ack artillery must be Russians; 50,000 will be taken altogether. 30,000 are already employed as gunners. This is an amusing thing, that Russians must work the guns."

"At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it to-day, as raw material, as labour. What after all thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted, but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labour, is that the prisoners - died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger."

" The aim of this new gigantic labour mobilisation is to use all the rich and tremendous sources conquered and secured for us by our fighting armed forces under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, for the armament of the armed forces, and also for the nutrition of the Homeland. The raw materials, as well as the fertility of the conquered territories and their human labour power, are to be used completely and conscientiously to the profit of Germany and her Allies.... All prisoners of war from the territories of the West, as well as the East, actually in Germany, must be completely incorporated into the German armament and nutrition industries.... Consequently it is an immediate necessity to use the human reserves of the conquered Soviet territory to the fullest extent. Should we not succeed in obtaining the necessary amount of labour on a voluntary basis, we must immediately institute conscription or forced labour.... The complete employment of all prisoners of war, as well as the use of a gigantic number of new foreign civilian workers, men and women, has become an indisputable necessity for the solution of the mobilisation of the labour programme in this war."

When the witness Bach Zelewski was asked how Ohlendorf could admit the murder of 90,000 people, he replied:

"I am of the opinion that when, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race, and Jews not even human, then such an outcome is inevitable."

" We have fought against Jewry, we have fought against it for years: and we have allowed ourselves to make utterances and my own diary has become a witness against me in this connection- utterances which are terrible.... A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased."

With the seizure of power, the persecution of the Jews was intensified. A series of discriminatory laws were passed, which limited the offices and professions permitted to Jews; and restrictions were placed on their family life and their rights of citizenship. By the autumn of 1938, the Nazi policy towards the Jews had reached the stage where it was directed towards the complete exclusion of Jews from German life. Pogroms were organised which included the burning and demolishing of synagogues, the looting of Jewish businesses, and the arrest of prominent Jewish business men. A collective fine of one billion marks was imposed on the Jews, the seizure of Jewish assets was authorised, and the movement of Jews was restricted by regulations to certain specified districts and hours. The creation of ghettoes was carried out on an extensive scale, and by an order of the Security Police Jews were compelled to wear a yellow star to be worn on the breast and back.

It was contended for the Prosecution that certain aspects of this anti-Semitic policy were connected with the plans for aggressive war. The violent measures taken against the Jews in November, 1938, were nominally in retaliation for the killing of an official of the German Embassy in Paris. But the decision to seize Austria and Czechoslovakia had been made a year before. The imposition of a fine of one billion marks was made, and the confiscation of the financial holdings of the Jews was decreed, at a time when German armament expenditure had put the German treasury in difficulties, and when the reduction of expenditure on armaments was being considered. These steps were taken, moreover, with the approval of the defendant Goering, who had been given responsibility for economic matters of this kind, and who was the strongest advocate of an extensive rearmament programme notwithstanding the financial difficulties.

It was further said that the connection of the anti-Semitic policy with aggressive war was not limited to economic matters. The German Foreign Office circular, in an article of 25th January, 1939, entitled " Jewish question as a factor in German Foreign Policy in the year 1938", described the new phase in the Nazi anti-Semitic policy in these words:

" It is certainly no coincidence that the fateful year 1938 has brought nearer the solution of the Jewish question simultaneously with the realisation of the idea of Greater Germany, since the Jewish policy was both the basis and consequence of the events of the year 1938. The advance made by Jewish influence and the destructive Jewish spirit in politics, economy, and culture paralysed the power and the will of the German people to rise again, more perhaps even than the power policy opposition of the former enemy Allied powers of the first World War. The healing of this sickness among the people was therefore certainly one of the most important requirements for exerting the force which, in the year 1938, resulted in the joining together of Greater Germany in defiance of the world."

The plan for exterminating the Jews was developed shortly after the attack on the Soviet Union. Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, formed for the purpose of breaking the resistance of the population of the areas lying behind the German armies in the East, were given the duty of exterminating the Jews in those areas. The effectiveness of the work of the Einsatzgruppen is shown by the fact that in February, 1942, Heydrich was able to report that Estonia had already been cleared of Jews and that in Riga the number of Jews had been reduced from 29,500 to 2,500. Altogether the Einsatzgruppen operating in the occupied Baltic States killed over 135,000 Jews in three months.

Nor did these special units operate completely independently of the German Armed Forces. There is clear evidence that leaders of the Einsatzgruppen obtained the co-operation of Army Commanders. In one case the relations between an Einsatzgruppe and the military authorities was described at the time as being "very close, almost cordial "; in another case the smoothness of an Einsatz-commando's operation was attributed to the " understanding for this procedure " shown by the army authorities.

Units of the Security Police and SD in the occupied territories of the East, which were under civil administration, were given a similar task. The planned and systematic character of the Jewish persecutions is best illustrated by the original report of the SS Brigadier-General Stroop, who was in charge of the destruction of the ghetto in Warsaw, which took place in 1943. The Tribunal received in evidence that report, illustrated with photographs, bearing on its title page: "The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists." The volume records a series of reports sent by Stroop to the Higher SS and Police Fuehrer East. In April and May, 1943, in one report, Stroop wrote:

" The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could only be suppressed by energetic actions of our troops day and night. The Reichsfuehrer SS ordered therefore on the 23rd April, 1943 the cleaning out of the ghetto with utter ruthlessness and merciless tenacity. I therefore decided to destroy and burn down the entire ghetto, without regard to the armament factories. These factories were systematically dismantled and then burnt. Jews usually left their hideouts, but frequently remained in the burning buildings, and jumped out of the windows only when the heat became unbearable. They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire.... Life in the sewers was not pleasant after the first week. Many times we could hear loud voices in the sewers.... Tear gas bombs were thrown into the manholes, and the Jews driven out of the sewers and captured. Countless numbers of Jews were liquidated in sewers and bunkers through blasting. The longer the resistance continued, the tougher became the members of the Waffen SS, Police and Wehrmacht, who always discharged their duties in an exemplary manner."

These atrocities were all part and parcel of the policy inaugurated in 1941, and it is not surprising that there should be evidence that one or two German officials entered vain protests against the brutal manner in which the killings were carried out. But the methods employed never conformed to a single pattern. The massacres of Rowno and Dubno, of which the German engineer Graebe spoke, were examples of one method, the systematic extermination of Jews in concentration camps, was another Part of the " final solution " was the gathering of Jews from all German occupied Europe in concentration camps. Their physical condition was the test of life or death. All who were fit to work were used as slave labourers in the concentration camps; all who were not fit to work were destroyed in gas chambers and their bodies burnt. Certain concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz were set aside for this main purpose. With regard to Auschwitz, the Tribunal heard the evidence of Hoess, the Commandant of the camp from 1st May, 1940, to 1st December, 1943. He estimated that in the camp of Auschwitz alone in that time 2,500,000 persons were exterminated, and that a further 500,000 died from disease and starvation. Hoess described the screening for extermination by stating in evidence:

" We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavoured to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realised our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated."

" It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one half-hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses."

Evidence was given of the treatment of the inmates before and after their extermination. There was testimony that the hair of women victims was cut off before they were killed, and shipped to Germany, there to be used in the manufacture of mattresses. The clothes, money and valuables of the inmates were also salvaged and sent to the appropriate agencies for disposition. After the extermination the gold teeth and fillings were taken from the heads of the corpses and sent to the Reichsbank.

After cremation the ashes were used for fertilizer, and in some instances attempts were made to utilise the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap. Special groups travelled through Europe to find Jews and subject them to the " final solution." German missions were sent to such satellite countries as Hungary and Bulgaria, to arrange for the shipment of Jews to extermination camps and it is known that by the end of 1944, 400,000 Jews from Hungary had been murdered at Auschwitz. Evidence has also been given of the evacuation of 110,000 Jews from part of Roumania for "liquidation." Adolf Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this programme by Hitler, has estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000,000 Jews, of which 4.000.000 were killed in the extermination institutions.

more: The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Die Urteile der Nürnberger Prozesse, Die Hinrichtung der Kriegsverbrecher des 3. Reiches

After all the half-measures of the years before 1939, a sweeping and radical land reform was carried through. The estates were broken up and distributed to the peasants; only in the Western Territories did the government keep the big Prussian estates intact, to be used as state farms. It is one of the ironies of Polish history that it was Communist-inspired policy that turned most of Poland into a patchwork of little private strip-fields, owned by peasants whose fierce independence and primitive methods have hampered the planned economy ever since. Basic industries were nationalised, and by 1946 the state sector controlled over ninety per cent of industrial production.
Poland in 1945 was ready, even impatient, for swift and revolutionary social change. The radical mood which had arisen during the Nazi occupation still prevailed; not only workers and peasants but the surviving intellectuals wanted to create a new, strong, socially just and egalitarian nation, to overcome all the weaknesses which had contributed to the loss of independence in 1939. In another country, this mood would have given a Communist Party its historie opportunity to take the leadership of this hunger for change. But in Poland, where the Communists had been escorted to power by Soviet bayonets, it was a different matter.
As party leader, Władysław Gomułka saw this very clearly. He was unlike most of his colleagues in the PPR leadership in two ways: he was a worker rather than an intellectual, and he had spent the war in the underground in Poland rather than in the Soviet Union. His two predecessors, both parachuted in from Moscow, had died in the war: Marceli Nowotko was murdered in a still-mysterious feud in 1942, and his successor Pawel Finder had been arrested by the Gestapo the following year. Gomułka had led the PPR side in the unsuccessful negotiations for a common military and political platform with the Home Army. As the new secretary of the PPR, he had taken an independent line, helped by an accidental but convenient breakdown in radio contact with Moscow when he took office.
Gomułka was a harsh intolerant personality with a violent temper. His grim, bony skulI, eyes peering at the world through steel-rimmed spectacles, encouraged his opponents to regard him as a pitiless Marxist fanatic. But although he was a convinced Communist, he was never a 'Comintern man' who took orders unquestioningly from the Great Socialist Motherland. The fact that he was in prison at the time probably saved him from the fate of his comrades in the old KPP, who were summoned to Moscow and for the most part murdered in 1938.
This was a crime which Gomulka never forgot. He accepted the need for close alliance between Poland and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet military and political support without which - given the strength of the non-Communist parties in the first years - the Communists would neither have acquired the main share of power nor kept it for more than a few weeks. But he intended to find a 'Polish Road to Socialism' which would avoid the mistakes of the Soviet Union and find gradual acceptance in a Catholic nation whose patriotic tradition was anti-Russian.
In this up hill task, he faced three main problems. The first was Soviet behaviour within Poland, where Soviet 'advisers' had taken command of the security police and where Russian soldiers we re running wild, looting and frequently killing. The second was his own party. The PPR membership had risen from 30,000 at the beginning of 1945 to some 300,000 by April, swamping the party with careerists, half-baked revolutionaries and mere brigands who in some places were threatening to collectivise the land and even announcing that Poland was to become a republic of the Soviet Union.
The third problem, which became dangerous the moment that Mikolajczyk returned to Poland, was the huge revival of non-Communist politics, headed by the Peasant Party. Gomulka might wish to give a democratic appearance as he moved cautiously along his 'Polish Road' but, unless he could smash or cripple these political rivals before the 'free elections' prescribed by Yalta, the PPR would be swept away.
Gomulka made some progress. He ensured that the new government behaved with ostentatious respect towards the Church, and Bierut, as head of state, walked with Catholic bishops in religious processions. The Soviet Union made a faint show of goodwill by imposing only light sentences on the kidnapped resistance leaders in Moscow. More important for Poland's stability was the final Big Three meeting at Potsdam in July 1945, at which Stalin - against British and American doubts - insisted on the demarcation of Poland' s new western border along the rivers Oder and Neisse, including the city of Stettin (Szczecin) on the west bank of the Oder estuary. Final recognition of the Oder-Neisse frontier was deferred to a future peace conference. As for Gomulka's problems with the PPR, the bubble burst soon after Mikolajczyk's return; party membership collapsed to about 65,000 in the summer of 1945 as masses of Poles defected to the Peasant Party and the other revolving groups.
But the bloodshed went on. Although Bór- Komorowski's successor as head of the Home Army, General Leopold Okulicki, had dissolved the AK in January, some Home Army units and many NSZ bands carried on the struggle, raiding towns and villages to murder PPR members and ambushing Soviet convoys on the roads. In return, Polish security troops aided by Soviet regulars carried out their own repressions and atrocities. An amnesty in August 1945 brought 42,000 men and women out of the underground, but Okulicki's successor, Colonel Jan Rzepecki, then organised a new Freedom and lndependence Resistance (WiN), in touch with the exile government in London, and fought on. A separate problem was a desperate and determined army of Ukrainian partisans in the foothills of the Carpathians, whose final success before dissolving and escaping to the West was to ambush and kill General Karol Świerczewski ('General Walter' of the Spanish Civil War) in March 1947.
The fighting - almost a Polish Civil war - cost tens of thousands of lives and poisoned political life with hatred, as Gomułka and Bierut accused Mikołajczyk and his allies of secret contact with the underground. It petered out only in early 1947, when another amnesty brought most of the surviving guerrillas out of the forests. The Ukrainian population of south-eastern Poland suffered savage punishment. Their villages were destroyed; some Ukrainian groups were resettled in the Western Territories and the rest deported to summary execution or labour camps in the Soviet Union.
In June 1946, there was a first trial of strength between the political parties of the new Poland. The Communists needed public evidence that the 'programme of the left' had popular support; ingeniously, they proposed a referendum on three questions to which they knew that most Poles - whatever their politics - would be inclined to answer  'Yes'. The referendum asked the electors whether they approved of the abolition of the Senate (the upper house of parliament), of land reform and the nationalisation of basic industries, and of the new frontiers on the Oder-Neisse line.
These questions put Mikołajczyk in a trap - as they were meant to. His party had supported all three changes. Yet he could not miss this chance to show the world the strength of the PSL. Rather unconvincingly, he launched a campaign for a 'Yes' to the last two points but a 'No' to the abolition of the Senate. The PPR, supported by most of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), toured the country calling for 'Three Times Yes'.
The question on the Senate had become a vote of confidence in the government's domination by the Communists, and the campaign was a chaos of abuse and intimidation. The polling took place on 30 June. Ten days later, the government announced the results: on the vital first question, sixty-eight per cent had voted 'Yes' and only thirty-two per cent 'No'. Jerzy Morawski, then one of the younger Communist leaders, today admits with bitter candour: 'I found out afterwards that the results had been faked. In reality, the situation was probably just the reverse: two-thirds had voted for what Mikołajczyk was asking.' For the inner circle of the PPR (the Communists), who knew the real totals, the referendum was an ugly shock. Morawski recalls: 'It was a warning which showed how strong the influence of Mikołajczyk's opposition was in Poland. It showed how much effort to pressurise, destroy, intimidate and discredit Mikołajczyk's opposition was still needed in order to win the elections.'

It was an effort which Gomułka and Bierut now proceeded to make. The Yalta 'free' elections did not take place until January 1947, but the six months that followed the 'Three Times Yes' referendum brought an onslaught of official terror against the Peasant Party. Meetings of the PSL were broken up by mobs, party buildings were destroyed, PSL members were threatened with the loss of their jobs, and there was astring of arrests, kidnappings and murders. In the midst of this violence, a horrific incident took place at Kielce in July 1946, when a building sheltering Jews on their way from the USSR to Palestine was attacked and forty of them were killed. At the time, everybody blamed everyone else for the 'Kielce Pogrom'. Mikołajczyk claimed it was a Communist police provocation, while others saw it as a spontaneous explosion of the anti-Semitism which was, undeniably, a part of the hysterical mood of Poland in the first years after the war. The Communists said the pogrom was the work of right-wing nationalists. The right-wingers and several Catholic bishops retorted by pointing out that many of the Communist leaders who had spent the war in the Soviet Union were Jews, especially in the secret police: a propaganda point which has festered in Polish consciousness ever since.
In the teeth of the storm, Mikołajczyk fought an erratic campaign. He appealed for international supervision of the elections, but Britain and the United States, now preoccupied with their confrontation with the Soviet Union in occupied Germany, paid no attention. For a time, the key to his victory seemed to lie with the PPS, the Polish socialists, now in tragic disorder. One fraction in the PPS wanted an open struggle against the Communists; even the pliable Osóbka-Morawski, the prime minister, was now rebelling against Gomułka's domineering style. Others, some from a genuine belief that the left must hold together and put through a socialist programme, some because they were fellow travellers planted in the PPS by the Communists or by Soviet intelligence, stood by the government and looked forward to an eventual fusion with the PPR. But when the Polish socialists approached the Peasant Party and asked them to join the (democratic bloc', hoping to keep Communist influence in the next government to a minimum, Mikołajczyk turned them down, refusing a secret offer of a quarter of the Sejm seats which would have made a mockery of the elections before they were even held.
Another body-blow to Mikołajczyk followed in September. Under President Truman, the United States was growing increasingly nervous about Soviet intentions in Europe. The Communist parties in France and Italy were powerful and militant; the western zones of Germany were sinking into a mire of hunger and hopelessness which looked like a breeding-ground for revolution. Conditions might soon be ripe for Stalin to advance his ideology and power to the Atlantic, if he so wished. In this situation, American aims rapidly changed from the hope of keeping Europe united to a policy of drawing a fire-break across the continent which Communism could not surrnount.The first requirement of the new policy was to show the Germans that the United States was not a hostile occupying power but a potential friend.