The development of Russo-Polish relations was bound to be a special test of relations between the Soviet Union and the West. Britain had gone to war, ostensibly at least, on behalf of Poland. In the United States there was a real sympathy for Polish aspirations toward liberty, going back to the time of the eighteenth-century partitions. The new Poland had owed its creation in considerable degree to Woodrow Wilson, and its extinction in 1939 had aroused strong feeling, not only among the 6,000,000 Americans of Polish origin. For their part the Polish people had an ancient distrust of both of their powerful neighbors, who had so often shown themselves capable of working together to the detriment of Poland.

The Russians and the Poles were both Slavs, yet in vital respects they lived in different worlds. For many centuries the Poles had felt the effects of Roman and Western civilization, especially through the Catholic Church. The Russians had had a very different history. Even their version of Christianity was Eastern in origin and powerful Asiatic influences had not been too greatly modified by contact with Europe.

Poles Deported to Russia. The Russian occupation of Eastern Poland was therefore a great shock to the Poles, not only because they considered it an unjustified stab in the back, but because the Soviets began at once to eliminate the entire Polish leadership in the occupied area. Between February 10, 1940, and June 1941 about 1,500,000 people were forcibly deported into the interior of the Soviet Union. There were four mass deportations—February, April and June 1940; June 1941.¹

The deportations swept up everyone who had had any conceivable connection with the political life of the Polish State, members of the learned professions, skilled workers and engineers, trade union leaders, émigrés from Russia, persons who had travelled abroad, and well-to-do peasants, along with aristocrats, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists and other property owners. The last deportation, just before the German invasion, took away all those in prison, those in the earlier categories who had evaded deportations, and everyone who had had any dealings with the Soviet regime or who had served it in any capacity.

The deportees were herded into long trains of freight cars and locked in, with only a hole high up for the introduction of food and one in the center of the floor for the elimination of excreta. Hand baggage was permitted and, when not lost, often meant survival. The guards were uniformly heartless, even about supplying water or fuel for the tiny stove. Medical attention was practically non-existent. Suffering from the weather was extreme, both in the bitter cold of winter and the boiling temperatures of summer. The journeys occupied several weeks, if not longer, for most of the trains went deep into the far north or into Siberia.

The exiled Poles were consigned to one of three fates: prison, labor camp (lagier), or “free exile.” In Poland the Russian prisons were unbelievably crowded, filthy and disease ridden. In Russia they were scientifically constructed to permit all kinds of pressure upon prisoners, in order that all might confess to whatever charges had been brought against them. Usually confession was induced by keeping the victim constantly under brilliant light, forbidding sleep for many days, and by prolonged, often repeated questioning.²

Slave Labor. The great numbers of Poles who were sent to lagiers found their position hopeless. The labor camps were nearly all in areas where the winters were long and extremely cold. The prisoners did the roughest kind of work in forests, mines, road or canal building for at least twelve hours a day, and never with sufficient food. Food depended upon the achievement of the norm. A day’s work was always set so high that no one could achieve it. Those who came nearest ate from the best kitchen. The weakest ate from the last of three kitchens, getting very little nourishment. They therefore died rapidly and even the strongest could not emerge from a five or eight year sentence. This was the more certain since the immediate administration of the prisoners was in the hands of prisoners, who received enough food for bare subsistence if they brought sufficient pressure to bear upon their fellows to strive for the norm. Since political prisoners could not be elected to these posts they were always held by hardened criminals. A system of graft did enable some few to survive. Good clothing issued to the prisoners seldom reached them. All lived in rags and had to use heavy, frozen mud cakes to protect their feet in winter. Some doctors tried to help, but they could exempt only a certain percentage of the inmates from work, and hospitals were extremely primitive.

The original Bolsheviks, who inaugurated the work camp system, had believed that they were establishing a humanitarian device, whereby erring people would be educated and regenerated by their own labor, instead of being sterilized by confinement in prison.³ In twenty years the lagier institution had degenerated to the point where it threatened to corrupt and destroy the whole Soviet system, especially since the NKVD, which administered the lagiers, had become one of the greatest vested interests in the world. It used the slave laborers for its immense raw material and construction projects.⁴

This picture of lagier life was brought out of Russia by the Poles amnestied in 1941. They reported also that those of their number sent to “free exile,” into fatcories or to primitive and remote collective farms, were not much better off.

For these deportations, which were also carried out in the three Baltic States, the Red leaders had two reasons. One was to remove every element in the population which could resist with any effectiveness the introduction of the Soviet system of collective farming and state ownership of all economic properties. The other motive was to deport from the new frontier areas all elements with any appreciable ability to help the Germans, should invasion come. The device of populating the frontier districts with Great Russians had been used often by the Tsars. Its use in 1939 and 1940 must have seemed extremely urgent to Moscow, after German aggression had been turned loose to range over the continent.

It has to be remembered, also, that it was the Germans who first decided, deliberately and maliciously, to destroy the Polish nation, simply because the Poles were, in their eyes, sub-human Slavs and their lands were desired. A Polish communique of April 17, 1943, charged the Germans with mass arrests of reserve officers and their incarceration in camps “where they die a slow death,” with forcible conscription of 200,000 Poles, the execution of the families of those who escaped and the massacre of 1,500,000 people by executions and in concentration camps.

The latter figure was much more than doubled by the time the war ended. In the murder camp at Majdanek, near Lublin, many hundreds of thousands of people were burned. Most of them were Jews, but a great many were Poles and Russians. Our Ambassador Lane saw 200,000 pairs of shoes, including many tiny ones, which the Germans had not had time to remove. At Danzig he also saw and photographed a German soap factory containing the remains of human bodies lying in vats of alcohol, together with dried human skin ready for the manufacture of lamp shades.⁵ The Germans deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to forced labor in Germany, forcibly seized Polish girls for their military brothels and made every effort to exterminate the entire leadership of the Polish nation. Libraries were destroyed and scientific instruments confiscated. It was not intended that the Poles should ever rise again, and if the Germans had won the war the Polish people could have existed only at menial labor until Germans were bred, by any and all means, to fill their land.

The Polish Government-in-Exile. All this, however, did not reconcile the deported Poles to their fate in Russia, nor the Polish Govemment-in-Exile to the loss of Eastern Poland. When the Polish Government fled to France, on September 17, 1939, the Pilsudski-Beck elements which had dominated it, largely disappeared for the time being, though some of them reappeared later in London. Two men from the old regime, in voluntary exile in France, headed the Government in Exile. They were received very coolly in France but by June 1940, when France collapsed, they had managed to collect some 90,000 troops, including those in the Near East forces. Though exhorted by Pétain and Weygand to surrender when France did, Premier General Sikorski flew to London and struck hands with Winston Churchill, who sent ships to take off considerable Polish forces from Bordeaux. The Polish Government thereafter resided in London and a year later had accumulated 40,000 troops, including about 10,000 airmen who gave a fine account of themselves against the Germans in the Battle of Britain.

The Attempt at Russo-Polish Cooperation

Russo-Polish Relations Renewed. When Russia entered the war in June 1941, negotiations were begun for a Russo-Polish agreement. The British brought strong pressure upon Sikorski to agree to territorial concessions to Russia, knowing that they were inevitable, but without result. A formula was at length worked out and embodied in a Russo-Polish treaty of July 30, 1941, which stated that the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 had “lost their validity.” This obvious truth could also be interpreted as restoring the previous boundary, but since it contained no guarantee that the Russians would not insist upon a change, Foreign Minister Zaleski and one other member of the Polish Cabinet resigned. The British Government gave the Poles a note saying that it did not recognize any territorial changes which had become effective in Poland since August 1939, but in Parliament Foreign Minister Eden was compelled to say that this statement did not involve any guarantee of Polish frontiers. Russo-Polish relations were accordingly renewed with an unsolved conflict left in abeyance. This action was taken at a time when the Poles were in a stronger position than they would ever be again, unless the loss of the war by Russia was assumed. Since Russia was then heavily on the defensive militarily she was likely to grant better terms at this point than later.

On August 14, 1941, a Polish-Soviet military agreement was signed in Moscow which provided for the creation of a Polish Army in Russia, under the sovereignty of Poland but under the operational control of the Soviet High Command. The Russians would be responsible for pay and rations. Equipment would be provided jointly. The Polish forces were to be recruited from the deportees in Russia and from the prisoners of war, said by the Soviet paper Red Star, on September 17,1940, to total 181,000 men and 9369 officers. The agreement was implemented by a Soviet decree, signed by President Kalinin on August 12, 1941, which granted amnesty to “all Polish citizens on Soviet territory.”

Then it developed that the orders of even the most powerful dictatorship are not self-executing. Most of the Poles were held in far-away labor camps, where the voice of Moscow was somewhat dimmed. Some camps released the Poles promptly, others slowly and partially, still others not at all. Many camp commanders could not understand the release of anyone, let alone large numbers. They were, moreover, under heavy compulsion to fulfil their production quotas. How could this be done if they lost part of their labor force? Some provided transportation for the Poles and others did not. Many of those released were soon rearrested and returned to the camps by the NKVD, who also could not comprehend such doings. Those who were set free were generally emaciated, ragged and destitute. Yet large numbers of them did manage to reach Polish concentration points. They were, of course, a great trial to the communities through which they passed, carrying their hunger and disease with them. The situation was greatly complicated also by the fact that many Poles did not wait for their formal release, in their joy to be able to get away. Those who did wait received, “without exception,” certificates without which they would later be in trouble.⁶

To facilitate the salvaging of these people the Soviet Government permitted the Poles to set up an elaborate relief system, manned by several thousand Polish officials, which operated through eight hundred relief stations, schools and hospitals, functioning “throughout the Soviet Union” and bringing help to hundreds of thousands of released Poles. Never before had any foreign organization had such an opportunity to see what went on in the Soviet Union, unless possibly during the famine relief after World War I. In the early weeks even the NKVD gave “genuine cooperation.” The human problem involved was beyond its resources. Later the cooperation of the various Soviet authorities varied with the rise and fall of political friction between the two governments. Finally in April 1943, after a year and a half, the Soviet Government took complete control of the Polish relief operations.⁷

In the meantime great difficulties arose over the organization of the Polish Army. The Polish troops were very irregularly and poorly supplied with food. They had to live in tents in winter and received very few arms. It is difficult to say how much of this trouble was due to the dire preoccupation and distress of the Russians in their desperate efforts to stem the German inundation. It is equally hard to know how much of it sprang from the reluctance of the Russians to build up on their own soil the army of a Government with which they had deep sources of friction. Most probably the two things combined, at least in the minds of lower officials.

On December 3, 1941, General Sikorski and General Anders had a long interview with Stalin. When the Poles presented their complaint about the sufferings of the Polish recruits, Stalin asked General Panfilov severely: “Who is to blame for this?” Panfilov, alternately pale and red, said that instructions had been issued. Stalin demanded: “When did I give the order to increase the quantity of food rations for the Poles?” Panfilov replied: “Two and a half weeks ago.” Then Stalin asked fiercely: “Why was my order not carried out? Do you expect them to eat your instructions?” Afterwards, Stalin kept General Anders to ask if Panfilov was cooperating about the supplies. Anders replied that he was but appeared unable to do much. Stalin replied that he very much regretted that he had not seen Anders earlier and twice asked him to come again.⁸

At the same meeting Stalin thought all the Poles had been liberated from the labor camps. Molotov agreed that camp commanders had a strong motive for holding them, but Stalin commented grimly that such commanders should be punished.

Up to this time it seems clear that, within the limits of their totalitarian system, the Russians were doing their best to undo the great wrong done to the Polish prisoners, and to establish a new basis for friendship.

Another problem, the whereabouts of the nine thousand officers known to have been captured by the Russians, seriously complicated Russo-Polish relations—fatally in the end. General Anders had been released from prison in Moscow, after a bad time. Then the officers whom he had expected to train his prospective army did not report. Only about four hundred turned up. Earlier inquiries brought no information, and on November 14, 1941, Polish Ambassador Kot took up the mystery with Stalin. Stalin was surprised that any Poles had not been liberated, insisting that: “Our amnesty knows no exceptions.” After pacing the room Stalin used the telephone, listened to a long explanation and changed the subject.⁹

No Agreement on Frontiers. The Kremlin talks of early December 1941, were also featured by another very important discussion. On December 1, the day of Sikorski’s arrival, a Soviet note stated that all Ukrainian and White Russian residents of the disputed Polish territory had acquired citizenship of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Government’s readiness to recognize as Polish citizens persons of Polish origin was affirmed, but the same recognition could not be granted to persons of other origin, “since the question of the frontiers between the U.S.S.R. and Poland has not been settled and is subject to settlement in the future.”

After the banquet which closed the negotiations Stalin suddenly turned to Sikorski with a smile and asked: “should we not now talk about the frontier between Poland and Russia?” Sikorski saw no reason to discuss a matter finally settled since 1921. Nevertheless, Stalin would like to see some alterations in the frontiers, to which Sikorski replied that he had no right to discuss the matter without a definite mandate from the Polish Parliament, and that it was not a matter for discussion during a war. However, Stalin continued to insist that “it would be useful if we discussed it” and added: “After all, the alterations I want to suggest are very slight. You seem to think, General, that I really want you to agree to some great territorial sacrifices. What I want is only a very slight alteration of your pre-war frontier—one which would hardly change your territorial status and would in no way seriously affect it. In fact, a chut chut, which in Russian means a hardly perceptible alteration.” Sikorski replied that even a chut chut alteration was more than he had a right to discuss. The territory of his country was inviolable and he could not compromise with the principle,¹⁰ in spite of the fact that the disputed territory contained between five and eight million Ukrainians who had been “an unhappy and rebellious minority before the war,”¹¹ plus a couple of million equally dissatisfied White Russians. Though there had not been more than 2,500,000 Poles in the area in 1931, out of 11,000,000 people, Sikorski could not discuss an adjustment.¹²

This was a crucial moment in the attempt to establish Russian-Polish cooperation. The position assumed by Sikorski was lofty and he doubtless thought strategically sound. It was backed absolutely in Washington, though not in London. As Sikorski spoke, the Russians had been retreating steadily since the first German onslaught in June. They were now back to Moscow itself. The Germans were hammering away only a few miles from the Kremlin. Their advance was to be stopped and hurled back during the next two days, but surely this was a favorable moment for the Polish leader to discuss the disputed boundary. Indeed it was probably his first and last opportunity to secure acceptable terms.

It can be reasoned, of course, that if Sikorski had once begun to bargain Stalin would have pushed him from one point to another until he had attained the boundary seized in 1939. However, the whole tenor of the conversations, and the military situation, suggested a different result, a compromise which would have been better than anything obtainable thereafter. It can be said, also, that regardless of where the boundary was put Russia would have gone ahead to dominate the whole of Poland, as she later did. This too might have happened. Considering what the Poles had suffered, it was perhaps impossible for even the most enlightened leader of the Poles, which Sikorski was, to make a fundamental, across the board agreement with Russia. Yet if it could have been done then, the future course of events might have been quite different. At least it would have been more difficult for the Russians to invalidate such an agreement. A few days earlier there had been a meeting of Polish Communists at Saratov, the origin of the Soviet-sponsored movement which later became the Government of Poland, but this movement would easily have been squelched had the Russians wished to do so. At this time it was merely an alternative in which the Russians had not yet invested anything.

Military Pact Dissolved. Both the mystery of the missing officers and the failure of Stalin’s attempt to settle the frontier question combined with other factors to cause the breakdown of the Polish-Soviet military agreements. There is strong reason for believing that at this point the Russians were open to a real agreement with the Poles. The most damning of all Polish books on this period, from the standpoint of condemning Soviet acts, states that when Sikorski “arrived within Soviet territory he was received by the Soviet authorities everywhere, and by Marshal Stalin in person, with the highest honours; much more important, he was received with, it seemed, a spontaneous cordiality and in a truly constructive spirit.”¹³

On every question discussed, also, Stalin seemed anxious to do his best to reach agreement and promote cooperation. Yet in every case a cloud arose. In the case of military cooperation it was the desire of the Poles to remove their troops from Russia. As early as November 5, 1941, President Roosevelt had suggested that if the Russians found it difficult to feed and equip the Polish Army, they might help to transfer them to a place where we could. This idea had likewise been approved by Churchill. But when Sikorski proposed to Stalin that the Polish recruits be transferred to Iran for training, Stalin was not unnaturally irritated and displeased. Sikorski promised that they would be returned to the Russian front, reinforced by several divisions. Stalin replied: “I know that once your men leave for Iran they will never return here.” Then he added, with a grin, “that evidently England needed more Polish soldiers badly.” When the two men first met, Sikorski had dispelled Stalin’s suspicion that he was an agent of Churchill. Now that suspicion returned. Both Sikorski and Anders insisted that they wanted to fight the Germans “right here,” but Stalin had his doubts. Eventually he agreed that two or three divisions might leave, but added that he would give the Poles the place and the means to organize “an additional seven divisions here.” It was at this point in the discussion that Stalin learned about the poor care being given to the Polish troops. He then confessed that there were other reasons for the transfer idea besides British insistence.¹⁴

Thereafter, the military cooperation swiftly disintegrated. A general mobilization of the Poles in Russia was not permitted until February 24, and on March 18 General Anders was ordered to evacuate 44,000 Polish soldiers and civilians to Iran at once. Transport on the Caspian Sea was provided with dispatch and the 44,000 were transferred to Iran in four days’ time. Only three divisions of Poles remained, and these, together with civilians swelling the total to 71,000 persons, were transferred to Iran during the summer. During April the Poles in Russia were mobilized, but into Soviet labor battalions and factories.

Deadlock. By this time the rift between Russia and the Polish Government was probably irreparable. The Russians felt, whether justly or not, that the Poles had deserted them when they badly needed help, and the Poles who departed were glad to leave the land in which they had suffered so unjustly.

On its part the Polish Government was advocating, in a letter from Sikorski to Welles in Washington, on March 25, 1942, a system of federations in Eastern Central Europe between the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Adriatic.¹⁵ The Poles could say that such a Polish-dominated federation would protect Russia from future German onslaughts, but it was certain that Russia would regard this scheme as another cordon sanitaire, as ineffective as the last one and to be rejected at any cost. Here were Polish aspirations which could not conceivably be implemented, unless Western armies could occupy Eastern Europe before the Russians did. Ciechanowski says that it was the expectation of this Balkan front which finally decided the Poles to try to transfer their army from Russia to the Middle East.¹⁶

Sikorski represented the mild wing of the Poles living abroad. The bulk of the American Poles were already organized on ultra nationalistic, anti-Russian lines. When Sikorski visited the United States in March 1942 he implored them to abstain from raising any territorial issues, but in vain. At that time he had the full support of the American Government. It was in mid-April 1942 that President Roosevelt practically compelled Britain to refrain from conceding Soviet territorial demands in the British-Soviet treaty of alliance. Ambassador Winant told Churchill that the President would make a public statement disassociating the United States from such an agreement.¹⁷ During Sikorski’s second trip to the United States in December, 1942, the Right Wing in his London Government took advantage of his absence to propose publicly a federation with the three Baltic States. They thus took the diplomatic offensive against Russia and compelled Sikorski publicly to reaffirm Poland’s pre-war boundaries, on February 25, 1943.¹⁸

By this time the Russians had taken the worst that the Germans could deliver, throughout another fighting season, and at Stalingrad had turned them back for good. If in December 1941, when the Germans thundered at the gates of Moscow, there was some faint justification for the idea that Poland did not need to compromise there was no conceivable basis for this idea after Stalingrad, or for the phantasy that Poland could somehow extract the Baltic States from Russia and really play the Great Power role again after the war. After Russia had failed to disintegrate under the first German assault it should have been evident that, as between Russia and Poland, Russia did not need to compromise. She could dictate. Poland had no chance whatever to dictate—unless she could perchance rely on the idea firmly held in Washington that everything done in Eastern Europe in 1939 might be undone in a grand and solemn peace conference after the war, which would make all things right according to the highest moral principles, as conceived in Washington.

On January 16, 1943, the Soviet Government announced that all Polish deportees in Russia were now Russian citizens, racial Poles included, because they came from a part of the U.S.S.R. A Polish note of January 26 insistently demanded a reversal of this decree, but lacked all means to enforce observance. This was becoming apparent to American officials. On January 30, Under Secretary of State Welles asked Polish Ambassador Ciechanowski: “Am I to understand that the Polish Government is determined not to sacrifice even an inch of its eastern territory?” On February 16 the President was compelled to stress that the moment was unfavorable for any effective diplomatic intervention in Moscow. The Soviets were forging ahead militarily, while the Americans were held up in Africa. The Poles were advised to restrain themselves and urged to keep quiet about their difficulties with the U.S.S.R.¹⁹ On February 4 the Russians urged the Poles in Russia to enlist in the Soviet-sponsored Polish army, and the British Government was even more intent than Washington in urging the Poles to restrain themselves.

The Fall of the London Government

The Katyn Crisis

The ground was obviously slipping out from under the London Poles. This was evident also in Berlin, where the most successful divisive movement of the entire war was executed on April 13, 1943, when the Nazi radio announced that the graves of the missing Polish officers had been discovered in the Katyn Forest, ten miles east of Smolensk.

The German press and radio made a field day out of the alleged discovery, charging that the Poles had been murdered by the “Jewish executioners of the GPU” in April 1940. Goebbels promptly announced that German Red Cross organizations had appealed to the International Red Cross in Geneva to aid in the investigation of the crime, and the next day the Polish Minister of War announced that his Government had also asked the International Red Cross to investigate. This announcement indicated belief by the London Polish Government that the German claim was true, a belief which is still held by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the most redoubtable fighter for a democratic Poland in the years which followed.

Mikolajczyk says that the Polish underground had reported that mail from the Polish officers in Russia to their families in Poland had ceased abruptly in March 1940. He states that on April 5, 1940, the Russians began to break up three camps containing Polish prisoners of war and to send out groups of sixty to three hundred men, presumably for repatriation; that about 8500 officers disappeared, of whom only four hundred sent to a different destination were afterwards released. Diaries, newspapers and other documents fixed the time of the murders. At Katyn only men from one of the three Russian prison camps were found. The others are still undiscovered. He learned from a Soviet officer in London that the crime was probably a mistake, due to Stalin’s refusal to delegate authority and to the literal mindedness of the Russian secret police. A Red army officer inquiring what was to be done with the camps received from Stalin a notation containing the single word “Liquidate.” The NKVD took no chances about the meaning of the order. A year later when inquiries began to be made, Stalin did not know how it was carried out.²⁰

On April 16 the Polish Minister of National Defense issued a long statement summarizing the history of the case and pointing strongly to Russian guilt. On April 25 the Soviets broke relations with the Polish Government, citing the simultaneous hostile campaign in the German and Polish press as evidence of “contact and accord.”²¹

Opinion in the Allied world generally agreed that the Poles had fallen into a Nazi trap. They had certainly associated themselves with the Nazi charges and given the Russians the perfect opportunity for breaking relations, for which they had rather obviously been waiting. In their defense the Polish officials maintained that Polish opinion all over the world was in such a high state of indignation that they simply had to take some action. Undoubtedly they felt that way, but the action taken could have no good result for the Polish cause.

Who Was Guilty? Who did kill the Polish officers depends upon the time that the crime was committed. If before July 1941, when the Germans overran the Smolensk region, it would be the Russians; if later the Germans were guilty. The Germans appointed a commission of doctors from the territories under their control which rendered a fifteen point report accusing the Russians. The Russians appointed a commission of their own citizens which exhumed several hundreds of the bodies in January 1944. They invited the foreign correspondents to visit the scene, and Miss Kathleen Harriman, daughter of U.S. Ambassador Harriman, accompanied the party. They observed that the bodies were partly mummified and that they wore Polish uniforms and black boots. The Russian Commission contended that the good condition of the bodies, uniforms, belts and buttons made it scientifically impossible for them to have been there since March 1940.²²

Waverley Root made a long and very careful analysis of the reports of both commissions and the witnesses and documents produced by each. His conclusion was that neither is more credible than the other. He examined exhaustively the clues pointing toward the Russians and found them all answerable. Some of the factors indicating German guilt he thought less accountable. The Germans would also have a more powerful motive for the crime. Root’s examination of Death at Katyn and other literature published by the Poles also elicited no direct or credible evidence of Russian guilt.

On the other hand, one witness had given close to first hand testimony against the Germans. On August 25, 1943, a Hungarian, Ludwig Victor von Tohathy, then a prisoner of war in the Marine Hospital on Ellis Island, New York, made a long affidavit relating his experiences in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. One part of his story related that in early December 1941 about five thousand Russian war prisoners, all captured near Smolensk, were brought into camp. Being able to speak Russian, he learned from them that they had been forced to-bury 10,000 Polish officers who had been machine-gunned by the Germans. (The method of killing was an error, since they had all been killed by pistol shots through the base of the brain.) The Germans then called the Russian prisoners up for “medical examination” and injected them with typhus bacilli. Those who did not soon die were shot in a soundproof chamber. Tohathy gave the names of several other people who had helped carry the corpses to the crematorium. He supplied details of the death of Kurt Schuschnigg, Jr.²³

The whole question was the subject of a Congressional inquiry in 1951, the evidence adduced pointing to Russian guilt. The chief witness was Lieutenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet, Jr., who as a prisoner of the Germans was forced to go to Katyn to see the bodies. Though he had no positive evidence, he concluded that the uniforms and boots were too new to have been worn two years in a prison camp.²⁴

The evidence in the case is conflicting. On balance it indicates that the Russians killed the officers, but of one thing we may be certain; neither the Russians nor the Germans would have been interested in the survival of this key group of nationalistic Poles. The Russians undoubtedly had the first opportunity to eliminate them. On the other hand, the mania of the Germans for exterminating Polish leaders was amply demonstrated throughout the German occupation.

Poland’s Position Weakens. After the Russo-Polish break, on April 25, events moved rapidly. On May 9 the creation of a Polish division to serve with the Red Army was announced. On June 12 the Union of Polish Patriots was publicly approved in Moscow, the London Government replying with an announcement that it would continue its efforts to establish a Central European federation. In mid-June Premier Sikorski was compelled to go to the Near East by a serious disciplinary situation among the Polish troops there. He remonstrated with many officers in General Anders’ command who were incensed at the idea that he might make concessions to Russia.²⁵

On July 4 Sikorski was killed in a plane crash near Gibraltar, on the return journey, an event which made the situation of the London Government hopeless. The Russians were well aware of Sikorski’s consistent opposition to the Pilsudski-Beck policies. He was succeeded as Premier by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, leader of the Peasant Party, who was balanced by General Sosnkowski and Vice-Premier Kwapinski, both strongly anti-Russian. On November 19, 1943, Secretary Hull was obliged to tell Ciechanowski that since the Allies had no armed forces in Central Europe to support their arguments it was unlikely that the Soviets would change their position without some compromise on the territorial issue.²⁶

The Poles could not contemplate this. During his visit to Washington in March 1943, Foreign Minister Eden said that Sikorski seemed to be conspiring with the small states of the Balkans to gain support for aims that were “very large” and unreal, influenced by expectation that both the Soviets and the Germans would be greatly weakened by the war, enabling the Polish forces and people to play a greater part.²⁷

Nearly a year later, on January 5, 1944, as the Red armies were surging across Poland’s old boundary in the East, the Polish Government made a broadcast from London about establishing the sovereignty of Poland over the liberated territory as soon as possible. On January 20 Churchill put the need for concession to Premier Mikolajczyk in curt and ominous fashion. The British Government was for a strong, free Poland “from the Curzon line to the Oder.” Britain and the United States “would not go to war to defend the earlier frontiers of Poland.”²⁸

However, the underground leaders in Poland and the armed forces in Italy, for whom General Anders spoke, opposed any cession to Russia, They were willing to accept the territory offered in the West, but not to concede anything in the East. In London some of the inner group were saying that the only real hope for Poland lay in a war between the West and the Soviet Union.²⁹

In Washington, Ciechanowski anxiously visited Hull on January 4, 1944, only to learn that the Soviet military position was so much better than that of the Western Allies that it was impossible for the President to coerce or threaten Stalin.³⁰

The Russians insisted that they could not have any dealings with the Polish Government in its existing form and the Poles resisted any pressure for the expulsion of their anti-Soviet elements as an infringement upon their fast disappearing sovereignty. Churchill brought open pressure on the Polish Government in a speech to the House of Commons, on February 22, 1944, insisting that compromise was necessary. Mikolajczyk desired to come to Washington, but his visit was postponed, since D-Day was imminent, and it was to be coordinated with Russian military movements in the East to hold the Germans there. As Hull recorded: “We could not afford to become partisan in the Polish question to the extent of alienating Russia at that crucial moment.”³¹ In lieu of a visit Mikolajczyk wrote the President a long letter recalling how he had been restrained from appeals to public opinion. This lack was remedied considerably by 147 speeches delivered in our Congress on May 3, Poland’s independence day, praising Poland, stressing the necessity of justice to her and criticizing Soviet expansion.³² There was also a natural intensification of the anti-Soviet campaign among Poles everywhere. The underground newspaper Penstwo Polski, supported by the Govemment-in-Exile, declared: “An essential condition both for our victory and our very existence is at least the weakening, if not the defeat, of Russia.”³³

Mikolajczyk visited Washington June 5 to 14 and was given a cordial reception. Before his departure from London, President Benes of Czechoslovakia had been asked by Moscow to tell him that the Soviets would open informal discussions on two conditions, the acceptance of the Curzon Line and the reconstitution of the Government.³⁴ On June 20 the London Government was moderately reorganized. General Kukiel was dropped as Minister of National Defense and General Sosnkowski was replaced by Tomasz Arciszewski as presidential-successor, though he kept his post as Commander-in-Chief. The new President designate, an old Pilsudski Socialist, was also anti-Soviet.³⁵

On June 22 all members of the Polish Army in the U.S.S.R. were given the option of regaining their Polish citizenship. The Union of Polish Patriots formally repudiated the Govemment-in-Exile, denouncing it as illegal. On July 1 a decree of the Supreme Soviet granted the right to resume Polish citizenship to all persons formerly residing in the disputed territory in Eastern Poland, including White Russians and Ukrainians. Members of families were included.³⁶

The members of the Home Army in Poland now found themselves in a most painful predicament. As the Soviet forces advanced, the Home Army rose against the Germans, just before the Red forces got there, and helped to deliver the towns to the Russians. They were cordially thanked and promised equipment for further operations by the Red Army officers. Then a few days later their leaders were arrested, some shot, others deported, and the troops given the choice of joining the Soviet Army or being disbanded. On July 25 the Supreme Soviet recognized the Polish National Council, organized by the Union of Patriots, as a provisional administrative authority for Polish territories recovered from the Germans. On August 2 the U.S.S.R. and the Polish Committee of National Liberation exchanged envoys. The London Government was now opposed by a complete replica of itself in the rear of the Red armies advancing through Poland. If anything could be done to save the situation, speed was essential. Roosevelt asked Stalin to receive Mikolajczyk in Moscow and he arrived there on July 30.

The Warsaw Uprising

He was received without ceremony, Molotov asking him why he had come, and his progress with Stalin was no better. He was obliged to see the Lublin Poles, whom he found insisting that there was no fighting going on in Warsaw. Actually the commander of the Polish Home Army in Warsaw, General Tadeuz Bor Komorowski, had on August 1, 1944, launched a long-planned effort to seize the city from the Germans. The Russian armies were only some twenty miles away. Their guns could be heard. For days the Warsaw Poles had watched great streams of defeated and dishevelled Germans, both military and civilian, going through the city westward, carrying great amounts of equipment with them. Even the tanks had geese and other loot on top.

The Poles therefore rose, immediately after some fifteen strong radio appeals from Moscow for a rising, expecting the Russians to be in the city within a few days, and quickly seized control of a large part of the city. The Reds, however, stopped their drive and permitted the heroic Home Army of some 30,000 men to fight a steadily losing battle with the Germans for sixty-three days, during which 250,000 Poles were killed and the remainder of the city’s population, some 350,000 people, was herded out while the Germans methodically destroyed most of the city. The Russians failed to send aid by air, except on one occasion when they dropped guns and ammunition which did not fit together, and they frustrated British and American aid by air, except on one or two occasions. The Russian purpose was to secure the destruction of the Warsaw Home Army by the Germans.

This is the version of one of the greatest tragedies of the war which appears in Mikolajczyk’s Rape of Poland and in Lane’s I Saw Poland Betrayed. It is undoubtedly believed by those on the losing side of the Polish struggle and by their sympathizers. Lane calls the tragedy a “cold-blooded, premeditated crime against Poland . . . an incredible betrayal.”

Did Russia Plan It? To what extent is this condemnation justified? When the Warsaw uprising was called, the Red Army was at the height of an astonishingly successful offensive. Beginning on June 23, it had moved nearly four hundred miles in the direction of Warsaw by August 1. The Germans were literally running away from the Russians. The current war maps of the time show that the Russians were making a direct assault on Warsaw with tremendous force. The tip of their great spearhead, coming from a southeasterly direction was inside Praga, the eastern suburb of Warsaw, on August 1. The Russians were apparently making a grand bid for the capture of Warsaw. If they could do so they would have control of the most important communications center in Poland, the best bridges over the Vistula and be able to push on toward Germany rapidly.

Mikolajczyk supplies evidence that the Russians expected to sweep into Warsaw. When he saw Molotov on July 30, 1944, the latter said almost airily: “We’ll take Warsaw soon; we are already about six miles from Warsaw.” When he saw Stalin on the night of August 3 Stalin said: “We hoped to take Warsaw on August 5 or 6, but the Germans were defending it more savagely than we had expected. There would be a small delay in capturing the city.” He insisted that he was “eager to help your Home Army there,” but did not know how to communicate with its commanders.³⁷

This was true, since the uprising had been called without establishing contact with the Red Army. This important fact is not disputed by either side. General Bor states it in his book, The Unconquerables, saying: “We had not been able to establish coordination with the Red Army Command.”³⁸

There is some dispute as to whether the Warsaw Poles knew that a huge column of fresh German tank divisions was moving over the Modlin Bridge, north of Warsaw, at the time the uprising was called. It appears that neither they nor the Russians appreciated properly the great preparations made by the Germans to hold the line of the Vistula, the last great natural obstacle between the Red Army and Berlin. This is the real answer to the question: “Who was responsible for the Warsaw tragedy?”

The Germans had also fortified the Warsaw bridgehead with several rings of fortifications around Praga, including powerful steel and concrete fortresses, broad mine fields and all the other defensive devices. This fortified semicircle extended as far out as sixty miles and when the Russians began to penetrate it they were soon slowed down. On August 2, 1944, artillery attacks on Praga were reported. The next day there was a tremendous battle for possession of a narrow strip of territory along twenty miles of the east bank of the river. On August 8 the “stiffest German resistance in forty-six days” was reported on all parts of the line. Regrouping of the Red Army was reported on the 11th. The north flank of the Red Army was exposed and on the 12th a Russian column moved in that direction toward East Prussia. The opening of a one hundred mile front northeast of Warsaw was reported on the 14th. These moves pointed toward encirclement operations, rather than frontal attack.³⁹

On August 18 the Russians were thrown back northeast of Warsaw by a fierce German attack. By the 25th the Russians had been forced back thirty-five miles from the Vistula near Krakow in the south. Setbacks were also suffered in the north. By August 10 the Red Army had driven a corridor to the Baltic Sea, east of Riga. It was cut on the 12th and again on the 23rd. On September 8, some thirty-eight days after the Warsaw uprising began, the communiques reported that “Russians in the Warsaw region are making encouraging progress in what is described as the bitterest and costliest battle since Stalingrad.”

These dispatches make clear what had happened. At the end of a drive of almost unparalleled length, when their offensive force was spent, the Russians ran into the extremely formidable belt of defenses before Warsaw. They were driven back, had to stop to rest, regroup, build railways, bring up supplies and begin again. It was six weeks after the rising began before they fought their way into Praga again.

That the Red Army did not deliberately wait outside of Warsaw for the Home Army to be destroyed in the city is fully established by the military history of the time. The Russians suffered very great losses which would have been avoided had they been able to march into the city at the top of their long drive. They had every reason to do so, since it would have been a great triumph and shortened the war notably. When they were stopped cold and had to retreat, they then began to say that they had always intended to take Warsaw by encirclement, to save the city from destruction and also to greatly reduce their own losses. This was the method which they used later, early in January 1945, to capture Warsaw and all of the other remaining strong points in Poland. Great, wide sweeps by their columns, knifing back and forth unexpectedly, confused the Germans and almost eliminated the losses from attacking fixed positions.

Was Air Aid Denied? There remains the controversy over whether the Russians deliberately denied air aid. General Bor says that both Russian and German planes disappeared during the first few days of the uprising. The weather was bad. Some help arrived from the British on the 11th, 12th and 13th of August 1944, supplies being dropped at night. Churchill began early to ask the Russians for air aid, but on August 5 Stalin told him that it was unimaginable that a few Polish detachments could have captured Warsaw when the Nazis were defending the capital with four fresh tank divisions. On August 14, when our Government intervened, the same reply was returned. The Soviet note added that the Warsaw uprising was a “purely adventurist affair,” and the Soviet Government would not support it. On the 17th, Molotov told Harriman that it had become evident by August 12 that the movement in Warsaw was inspired by men antagonistic to the Soviet Union. Roosevelt and Churchill then made a joint appeal direct to Stalin on the 20th, and he finally gave permission for one shuttle flight on September 18. About one hundred American bombers flew over the city at night, dropping supplies and going on to Russian-held territory. A second flight was cancelled for operational reasons.⁴⁰

An account more favorable to the Soviets was written by Anna Louise Strong, who was behind the Russian front during the uprising, and who interviewed a number of men and women who had taken part in the struggle. She states that the underground forces in Warsaw had divided into two groups, about twenty-five thousand belonging to the Home Army and 7500 to the People’s Army. The latter group regarded the Russians as liberators. This division among the Poles is also substantiated elsewhere.⁴¹ At the close of the struggle, according to this account, the Home Army made terms for surrender to the Germans, leaving the People’s Army as outlaws. Some of these people crossed the river, with Russian aid, and gave Miss Strong their stories.

Earlier the Home Army had resisted establishing contact with the Red Army, but two girls crossed the river on September 10 and gave locations of the resistance fighters to the Red Army. On September 12 a Russian plane dropped letters giving instructions for signals on Lelevela Square. That night and for ten succeeding nights small Soviet planes came in low and dropped supplies into the Square without parachutes, both food and munitions. Two Russian radio men were also dropped for liaison. Artillery support was then given, but a battalion of the First Polish Army which managed to cross from Praga was soon destroyed by the Germans.⁴²

Last Chance. General Bor states that orders by him to Home Army units throughout Poland to march to his relief met with obstructions by the Russians in the part of Poland controlled by them. Those who tried to come were disarmed.⁴³ There is no reason to doubt this, since the rounding up of the Home Army units by the Red Army began on July 25, in accordance with the military decree of the 21st—the date on which the Polish National Liberation Committee had been recognized as the administrative authority for the liberated Polish territory.

These events can hardly have been unrelated to the decision made on July 29 to begin the Warsaw uprising. The outlook of the London Poles and their Home Army in Warsaw was desperate. It was perfectly plain that all vestiges of their authority in Poland would be eliminated with the advance of the Red armies. There was one chance, and only one, of retaining a foothold in Poland, political, military or diplomatic. That was to be in effective control of the national capital when the Red Army and its Polish allies arrived. This might not save the situation for the anti-Soviet Poles, but it was the one thing they could try of their own volition. It was already clear, too, that the diplomatic help of their Western allies was steadily weakening and not likely to be of much avail.

When, therefore, the Red Army seemed about to march into Warsaw the Home Army struck. By the testimony of its opponents, the City Hall, police stations and other buildings of political importance were taken, and military positions, such as the bridges and the citadel, neglected.⁴⁴ The move was a desperate gamble. Yet if the Russians had soon marched in, finding the Home Army in effective control of the city, as it was for some time, the London regime would have had a pawn which would greatly have embarrassed its opponents.

This was, of course, clearly recognized by the Russians, as soon as they understood what had happened, and they refused to exert themselves thereafter in behalf of a group which was hostile to them. In the early weeks there was little, if anything, which they could do. They were too busy meeting the German counter-offensive. Later they were not disposed to make a costly frontal assault to save the Home Army.

Moscow Conference Stalemate. The heart-rending tragedy of Warsaw ended on October 1, 1944, when the Home Army surrendered. This disaster was immediately followed by a diplomatic crisis of the first magnitude. Churchill and Eden, who had gone to Moscow to salvage what they could in the Balkans, urged Premier Mikolajczyk to come to Moscow at once for the “last chance for the Polish Government to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union.” Mikolajczyk and three associates arrived in Moscow on October 12. He told the assembled conference, in which Harriman sat, that there was “no possibility for the merger of the legal Polish Government with the Lublin Committee.” He also staunchly refused, against Churchill’s advocacy, to accept the Curzon Line, even after he learned that that had been substantially settled at Teheran.

After this first session, Churchill reproached Mikolajczyk for not accepting the Curzon Line early in 1944, when he had been urged to do so. Then there would have been no Lublin Committee of Liberation, Churchill declared. If the Poles were still obdurate Churchill threatened to tell the House of Commons that he entirely agreed with Stalin. He added that “I talked to your General Anders the other day, and he seems to entertain the hope that after the defeat of the Germans the Allies will then beat Russia.” Unable to move Mikolajczyk, Churchill told him in his most impassioned manner that he was “absolutely crazy.” If he missed this chance he would lose everything.

Unless he accepted the Curzon Line he was “out of business forever.” The Russians would “sweep through your country and your people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihilation.”

At last Mikolajczyk agreed to recommend the acceptance of the Curzon Line to his Government, on condition that Lwow and the oil deposits near it be left to Poland. Roosevelt had urged this solution earlier, but Stalin would not agree to it.⁴⁵ He was determined, as later events demonstrated, to absorb the Ruthenians in the tip of Czechoslovakia, behind Lwow, and to establish a firm territorial connection with Czechoslovakia and with Hungary, across the Carpathians. He was keenly aware that he had not been able to intervene in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich crisis, for lack of land connection.

The Rise of Soviet Controlled Poland

The London Government Moribund. It was as well for Mikolajczyk that his territorial offer was rejected, for he told Harriman on November 23 that his Cabinet would not have accepted even that solution. Since only his own Peasant Party supported him in trying for a territorial settlement, Mikolajczyk resigned as Premier the next day. Churchill lamented the intransigence of the Polish Government before the Commons on December 15, reiterating his belief that its attitude about the frontier question was self-destructive. Late in December the Lublin Committee declared itself a provisional government and sought recognition as such. The Soviet Government gave it on January 5, 1945. The London Polish Government protested violently, but was obliged to dissolve the Home Army on January 19.

The Government-in-Exile had played its last card. Some of its leaders had shared the expectation of General Anders that the Russians and Germans would wear each other out, permitting the Anders Army to return and dominate Central Europe. When events moved otherwise there was no real hope for the exiled Poles, unless Anglo-American armies could carry them back into Poland. This was the expectation which had buoyed up General Sikorski. On January 10, 1943, he told Ciechanowski, with passionate intensity: “I shall live, because I have still one thing to do. I shall lead our troops in a victorious offensive into Germany and through Germany back into Poland.”⁴⁶ When this hope disappeared all was lost, unless the Western Powers could retrieve the situation at Yalta.

Yalta Hopes Illusory. They believed they had done so. Roosevelt was relaxed and relieved, especially about Poland.

The Yalta Agreement appeared to have performed a miracle. At the last moment it seemed to have snatched Poland from the Soviet grip and restored her to the West. “Free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot” would surely give Poland a Western orientation. The Government was to be reorganized, moreover, to give this result. The word “reorganized” was used and the Allied Commission was to consult “in the first instance in Moscow” with the members of the existing Provisional Government and others. This enabled Molotov to insist that only men acceptable to the Lublin Government could be included in the “new” government which the Yalta Agreement mentioned twice and which the West apparently expected to be a really new creation.⁴⁷

Actually, the Yalta Agreement on Poland was “a compromise between the inevitable and the impossible.”⁴⁸ It was impossible at that late date to create a Poland oriented diplomatically to the East, but politically and ideologically to the West. The Lublin Government had served the Soviets well. It was certainly a puppet, but it was dependable from the Soviet standpoint. It doubtless had the willing support of only a minority of the Poles, yet the minority was sizeable and it contained many sincere patriots. It was not possible for Moscow to see this regime liquidated and lost in a new one in which the utterly embittered London Poles and Home Army people might predominate. The most that Moscow could permit, given its military position and authoritarian habits, was that a few relatively harmless representatives of the other Poland should be admitted into the already functioning Polish Government.

Hopkins’ Last Mission. On the other hand, Russian intransigence deeply alarmed the West. The Russians were not going to permit the Poles to freely choose our kind of government, our way of life. When the deadlock was complete Harry Hopkins was sent to Moscow by President Truman, arriving on May 26, 1945. Hopkins assured Stalin, in all earnestness, that “two months ago there had been overwhelming sympathy among the American people for the Soviet Union.” Now that same body of opinion, especially the supporters of Roosevelt’s policies, was gravely disturbed. Everything was endangered. Stalin replied that Soviet governmental circles were alarmed about a number of recent American moves. He cited the admission of Argentina to the UN, our insistence that France must be a member of the Reparations Commission—an insult to the Soviet Union because she had opened her frontier to the Germans; the “brutal” stoppage of lend-lease, even though that order had been reversed; the failure to turn over to Russia her share of the German Navy and merchant fleet; and the attitude of the United States Government toward the Polish question.

Stalin said that “at Yalta it had been agreed that the existing government was to be reconstructed and anyone with common sense could see that this meant that the present government was to form the basis of the new. He said no other understanding of the Yalta Agreement was possible.” He insisted that the British Conservatives were trying to revive the cordon sanitaire system on the Soviet borders. He “did not intend to have the British manage the affairs of Poland and that is exactly what they want to do.” Russian opinion had also to be considered, since Poland had been liberated at a great cost of Russian life.⁴⁹

In between the six Hopkins’ meetings with Stalin there was an animated discussion with Washington by cable of various names for the “new” Polish Government. On June 17, 1945, the Polish leaders who had finally been agreed upon met in Moscow to form a new government. Cardinal Sapieha and Wincenty Witos, two great leaders from Poland, were unable to go. On June 21 the composition of a new government of National Unity was announced.

The Sixteen Polish Leaders. Both the negotiations and Allied relations were embittered during the spring and summer of 1945 by the case of the sixteen Warsaw leaders of the London Government who had been imprisoned by the Soviets. Polish sources agree that at the end of February the sixteen had been invited to a conference with Soviet General Ivanov, and after negotiations and assurances that their safety would be “completely assured” the meeting took place near Warsaw on March 28. The Polish leaders, including Vice Premier Jankowski and General Okulicki, late commandant of the Polish Home Army which had been disbanded on January 19, did not return. On April 6 the London Government announced their disappearance and presumable arrest. This was confirmed by Molotov at the San Francisco Conference in the middle of May. The men were taken to Moscow and tried for “diversionary activities” behind the Red Army. They were tried at the same time the Unity Government was being formed. All except one confessed their guilt, as prisoners prepared by the NKVD almost invariably did. Three were acquitted and the rest received prison terms varying from one year up to sixteen years for General Okulicki. Six of the convicted were amnestied in August.⁵⁰

An account of the case which questioned the treachery of the Russians was given later by Dr. Irving Langmuir, Associate Director of the General Electric Research Laboratory, who visited Russia in June 1945 as a delegate to a scientific Congress. He stated that Ambassador Harriman told him that the sixteen Poles had been arrested in Poland for distributing arms for use against the Russians. They had not been invited to Russia for a conference. Langmuir attended some of the sessions of their trial. He noted that the defendants were proud of their actions against Russia, one stating that he was willing to fight Russia for a Polish exit to the Black Sea. Langmuir believed the Poles had a fair trial and he had never heard of any retraction of the charge widely published in our press that the sixteen had been invited to Russia for a conference.⁵¹

A “Unity” Government in Poland. The new Cabinet of National Unity was formed on June 28, 1945. The Communist Party, called the Worker’s Party, and its satellite parties controlled a majority of the ministries directly and others through vice ministers. Mikolajczyk and one or two other London Poles returned and joined the Cabinet. His Polish Peasant Party was allotted six Cabinet posts, though not the controlling ones.

Mikolajczyk was received everywhere with acclaim and he soon believed, with much reason, that at least sixty per cent of the people favored his Peasant Party. In addition to his own Peasant following, about half of the small business men and intelligentsia in the towns joined the Peasant Party, together with nearly all of the conservatives and reactionaries whose old political parties had been outlawed. He frequently repudiated the support of some of these groups, but they had nowhere else to go.⁵² As in other East European countries, they became peasants. In Hungary the feudal elements crowded into the Small Landholders Party, though they had for generations frustrated small land-holding.

On July 5 Secretary of State Byrnes recognized the Provisional Government of National Unity and withdrew recognition from the London Polish Government. For some weeks Ambassador Ciechanowski had found that even his best friends in the State Department gradually became too busy to receive him.

Potsdam. At the Potsdam Conference, late in July 1945, Western resistance to the new Poland took the form of opposition to the western boundaries established by the Soviet Union for the new state. Many months before, Moscow had decided that Poland should be compensated for her losses to Russia at the expense of Germany. The Poles should receive three-fourths of East Prussia, the remainder of Silesia, Pomerania and a tip of Brandenburg—that is, everything over to the Niesse and Oder rivers, including the city of Stettin on the other side of the Oder. The administration of all of this German territory was turned over to Poland just before the Potsdam Conference. This unilateral action was protested strongly by Truman and Churchill, but they had no way of reversing the Russian decision, which was agreed to in the Potsdam communique. President Truman did insist, time after time, that there could be no transfer of territory until there was a peace conference and the Yalta formula was reaffirmed, saying that the “final delimitation” of the Western frontier should await the peace settlement. The Yalta provisions about free and unfettered elections were also restated in full, with freedom of reporting for the press added.⁵³

A New Poland. Poland thus remained in effective possession of rich German territories, but without legal title to them. Two of the nine million Germans who had lived in these areas still remained, but these were speedily deported into the rump of Germany. The Poles, who had been crowded by the Germans into Central Poland, could now spread out and a vast repatriation of the deported Poles from the U.S.S.R., and from the eastern half of Poland transferred to Russia, supplied four million citizens for the territory taken from Germany.⁵⁴ A large part of the original deportees to Russia were finally repatriated, and the Ukrainians remaining in Poland were transferred to the Ukraine.

The new Poland thus created is much stronger than the one destroyed in 1939, except for the loss in the war of one-fifth of the Polish people, including much of Poland’s leadership. The new state has great resources of coal, is far stronger industrially, has a broad seacoast with adequate ports, and richer agricultural lands. It has almost entirely lost the great racial minorities which resented their inferior status in pre-war Poland and is now racially homogeneous.

As between Germany and Poland the settlement is just enough. The Germans were responsible for the death of some eight million Polish citizens. They killed 700,000 in Warsaw alone. Poland had a higher percentage of human losses than any other participant in World War II. The Germans did their best to murder the Polish nation and to enslave the remnant permanently. They used every device of sadistic cruelty to torture and degrade the Polish people. The Dark Side of the Moon, the Polish book of horrors in Russia, is a record of much heartlessness and inhumanity, of callousness to suffering and ruthless exaction of labor, but it contains little of deliberate, sadistic cruelty. Odd Nansen, the son of Fridtjof Nansen, has left a full record of his eternity spent in German prisons, including Sachsenhausen, in his diary From Day to Day.⁵⁵ It contains many instances of “the purest sadism, of a craving for the sight of pain, the display of power, the exercise of hate.”⁵⁶ I do not find in The Dark Side of the Moon any such record of calculated bestiality and deliberate depravity. It was left to the Germans to exterminate races in wholesale fashion, including multitudes of little children, by starvation, cremation and other methods, after suffering every kind of indignity.⁵⁷

Polish industry was wrecked, her soils, forests and livestock gravely depleted, her transportation system ruined “beyond belief”; her schools, public buildings of every kind, private dwellings and business houses were damaged beyond use in huge numbers. If ever a people deserved restitution at the hands of their destroyers, it was the Poles.

American Policy Ineffective. From the standpoint of the West the manner of Poland’s restoration was unpalatable. The State Department’s policy of refusing to agree to any territorial settlements until the peace conference broke down completely. The Dunn-Atherton memorandum, which was the basis of this policy, assumed that in 1939 Russia was an equal partner in crime with Germany and that her motives in taking territory were no more justifiable than Germany’s. When this thesis was enforced upon the British in May 1942, and they were compelled to refuse acceptance of Russia’s 1941 frontiers, the Russians were put upon notice that the West would not willingly grant what they conceived to be their minimum geographic security. They were obliged to leave their boundaries to the arbitrament of war and as military success developed they were free to establish their security step by step, a little at a time, until they had achieved far more than they could have hoped for in 1942. Our policy of refusing recognition of Russia’s 1941 boundaries until the peace conference met was completely abortive. By leaving the Russians unbound we lost the opportunity of setting any legal limits to their gains by a cordial acceptance of what they had done for themselves after the West scuttled the League of Nations and turned Germany toward Russia. There was only one chance in a hundred that Russia could ever be talked out of the territories acquired in 1939, unless she lost the war, yet she was put upon notice that any gains from the war, including the 1941 frontiers, would have to be won militarily.

The result was that Poland was liberated directly by Soviet arms. The indirect contribution of the Anglo-American war effort was immense, but not visible to the Polish people. Soviet armies were on the spot and they determined the character and extent of the new state. Stalin’s often repeated promise of a strong Poland was amply fulfilled, at Germany’s expense. The new Poland was thereby bound firmly to Russia, for without unqualified Russian support Germany would certainly insist upon recovering much of the land she had lost to Poland.

Political War. The political struggle in Poland after Mikolajczyk’s return was bitter and bloody. At first his presence lessened the political tension. Then as immense crowds paid him tribute he was impelled to fight for the rule of the majority while the dominant minority was correspondingly steeled to defeat him. He knew that he had the strong backing of the American and British Governments. It was his only real reliance, but it was diplomatic and far away. Everyone knew that the West would not go to war over Poland at that time. Every conceivable handicap was imposed on the Polish Peasant Party. Its newspaper was heavily censored and starved for newsprint, control of the election machinery was seized, very onerous electoral requirements invented. Peasant Party meetings were systematically attacked, thousands of Party workers were arrested, large numbers of them were beaten and tortured and many killed. The opposition naturally fought back against these repressive measures, aided by large numbers of underground fighters.

Homer Bigart, one of the best American reporters, suggested that it was unfair to judge the Polish Government by Western standards. Since Poland lived under a continued threat of underground terror of the Right, it was inevitable that the government should impose a legalized terror from the Left.⁵⁸ The whole country was devastated and brutalized by years of German rule. Scores of thousands of desperate men belonging to various underground organizations lived in the woods, had arms and used them freely against their hated opponents, including Russian troops. Many of the latter deserted and added to the anarchy of violence. Simple brigandage was prevalent and the Russo-Polish flying squads often behaved as badly as the marauders.⁵⁹

Losses were heavy on both sides. On November 24, 1946, the Government announced that 2483 security police agents had been killed.⁶⁰

Uncertain of success, the Government first tried a referendum on June 30, 1946, to test its ability to “win” an election. Three questions were proposed to the voters. The opposition did not contest the approval of land reform and nationalization of industries or approval of the new western frontiers, but it did oppose the abolition of the Senate, and apparently won a very large majority where the vote could be honestly counted. The count was falsified in most places and the official result gave the Government a victory of 68 per cent to 32.

The same story was repeated in the national elections finally permitted on January 5, 1947, over protests by the American and British Governments that promises of Yalta and Potsdam were being violated. This time the Peasant Party candidates’ names were stricken from the ballot in ten of the fifty-two voting districts and a stupendous Government victory was announced. The Government bloc was said to have won 327 seats in the Sejm to 24 for the Polish Peasant Party. After a few rearguard actions in the new parliament Mikolajczyk escaped from Poland to save his life, late in October 1947, feeling that he had aided in bringing more than two hundred and fifty thousand underground fighters out of hiding and back to citizenship.⁶¹ An amnesty proclaimed after the election, on February 21, 1947, had brought about twenty thousand out of the woods. This ended the worst of the fighting which in the early stages had almost approached civil war proportions.

Mikolajczyk had made a valiant fight, one foredoomed to failure. The Leftist government which he entered could not have permitted his victory, even if it had wished, without bringing outright Soviet intervention. Two obvious courses had been open to him. He could go back to Poland, join the Government bloc in a minority status and work loyally from the inside to try to ameliorate Communist domination. At one time he was offered twenty per cent of the seats in the Constitutional Diet. He asked for seventy-five per cent. Feeling that he represented the nation he was unable to do otherwise than to fight a losing battle for control.⁶²

Some Unresolved Questions

This brief review of the Polish drama raises several questions.

1. Was Stalin Insincere at Yalta?

It is easy to conclude, as the great majority of Americans have, that Stalin was wholly insincere in the agreements he made at Yalta. He had not the slightest intention of permitting the Poles to determine their own way of life. He knew that he was going to impose communism upon Poland and incorporate her eventually into the Soviet Union. So at Yalta he merely made promises to please the Western leaders, who sincerely thought they had secured a free and democratic Poland.

This judgment satisfied all of our combative instincts. To what extent does the available evidence verify it?

In mid-October 1944, Mikolajczyk asked Stalin directly if he intended to make Poland a Communist state after the war. “No,” Stalin said, “absolutely not. Communism does not fit the Poles. They are too individualistic, too nationalistic. Poland’s future economy should be based on private enterprise. Poland will be a capitalistic state.” He added that there was no middle system. Capitalism could assume many forms, but what is not communism is capitalism.

In August 1944, Mikolajczyk had sounded Stalin out on the idea, voiced by a captured German officer, that Germany would embrace communism so devoutly as to rule the world, Russia included. Stalin “scoffed impatiently” and replied, “Communism on a German is like a saddle on a cow.” Then he said that the four great Allies must remain close friends for many years after the war because Germany could be expected to start a new war after about twenty-five years.⁶³

It may be that Stalin was concealing his intentions about Poland, but it would hardly seem that he was at that time planning to communize Germany. He hated the Germans too much for their barbarities in Russia to wish to share his communist religion with them. He preferred alliance with the West to any such dubious experiment.

When Harry Hopkins was sent to Moscow, in late May 1945, to try to break the deadlock which prevented the implementing of the Yalta accord on Poland, Stalin explained his attitude toward Poland, as follows: The Germans had twice invaded Russia through Poland in the course of twenty-five years. Nobody who had not lived through such invasions could imagine what they were like. It was not warfare. It was a new incursion of the Huns, made possible by Poland’s weakness and hostility. Her weakness also enabled the Germans to do what they wished in the West, as well as the East, “since the two were mixed together.” It was therefore a vital interest to Russia to have Poland both strong and friendly.

Stalin continued that the Polish people did not want the Soviet system and that “it must develop from within on the basis” of conditions which were not present in Poland, which would live under the parliamentary system. The Soviet system was “not exportable.” All that the Soviet Union wanted was “that Poland should not be in a position to open the gates to Germany.”⁶⁴

Was Stalin merely pulling the wool over Hopkins’ eyes?

He spoke these words to his friend Harry Hopkins, the man who had come to Moscow soon after the German attack and convinced him that the West really wanted to help Russia in her worst hour. The close relationship thus established had been maintained throughout the war, especially in the inter-Allied conferences. After Roosevelt’s death, Hopkins was the man in all the West whom Stalin had most reason to trust, and least reason to hoodwink. Stalin was not speaking for publication. He was talking intimately with Hopkins, yet everything he said would be reported to Washington and London, and stand against him in history.

It is possible that he was concealing a deep laid plan, but more probable that he was describing the situation as he then saw it. What he said could as easily mean that he was willing for Poland to remain capitalistic and parliamentary, democratic in our sense of the word, if only she were a firm Soviet ally. He was willing to concede everything else if he could only be sure of that. Yet when he came to examine the names of men for the new Polish Government he rejected almost every one mentioned from among the London Poles and nearly all of their associates in Poland. He was sure he could not trust them to be friendly. When it came to the scratch he found himself able to trust only the Lublin Poles who had voluntarily aligned themselves with Russia.

On his side, Mikolajczyk was equally unable to trust the Lublin Poles. He rejected them as renegades and sought to take the power from their hands through free and unfettered elections. It must be assumed that Stalin’s thinking would change during the year and a half of deadly political warfare which ensued in Poland, just as the thinking and attitudes of the Western leaders changed during this period, a time during which the cold war between the Soviet Union and the West became frigid indeed. Two years after Yalta the situation was certainly very different from what Roosevelt had expected, and there is no reason to believe that Stalin could have foreseen everything which occurred during that interval. To make this assumption would be to credit him with supernatural powers.

The whole story of Yalta indicates that Stalin wanted to continue his wartime association with the West, on his terms as much as possible, but on a basis of compromise and accommodation. In his talk with Hopkins quoted above he still had that idea, for he went on to say that Germany could not have been defeated in either of the two world wars without the intervention of the United States. Indeed, the United States had more reason to be a world power than any other state. “For this reason he fully recognized the right of the United States as a world power to participate in the Polish question and that the Soviet interest in Poland does not in any way exclude those of England and the United States.”⁶⁵

Late in June 1945, at the close of the Moscow discussions which set up the Polish Government of National Unity, Stalin arose to speak and to propose a toast, saying: “Poland is a big country now, backed by Soviet Russia and the Allies. But no country, even the biggest country in the world, can today feel secure with but a single alliance. The Germans can arise again, as they did after World War I, and assume great strength and military power. If this is the case, the Soviet-Polish alliance will not be sufficient. Thus, both nations must have alliances with the West . . . with Great Britain, France, and the United States. I drink a toast to those Allies!”⁶⁶

There was no reason why Stalin should have said this unless he believed it. He uttered a profound political truth, one which did not point toward an imperialistic Russia trying to conquer the world. Nor, did he anticipate that Poland would be one of the principal means of dividing Russia and the West. In the same short speech he said he knew there were people who doubted the real intentions of Russia toward the Poles. These people should observe current events, they would find that their suspicions had no basis.

It can hardly be questioned that Russia’s primary, overmastering purpose in Poland was security, to get a strong Poland loyally allied to Russia, possessing herself real strength for dealing with any future German onslaught and ready to call in the full power of the Red Army instantly if one should occur.

This controlling Russian objective did not arise out of any dogma. It did not originate in any man’s mind. It was burned into the minds of scores of millions of Soviet citizens by what the Germans did in Russia.

The Soviet Union would have a friendly Poland, but Stalin did not foresee that the political struggle about to take place in Poland would go far toward alienating Russia from her Western allies. In late June 1945 he regarded that as a calamity, insisting that both Russia and Poland “must have alliances with the West.”

2. How could Poland have been saved for the West?

The West deliberately gave Poland away at Munich. It is conceivable that the self-centered and ill-informed Chamberlain was not aware of this, but the craven French leaders were. They knew that, after Czechoslovakia, Poland would be next on Hitler’s list and that they would be absolutely powerless to save her. They also knew enough about Nazi plans and manias to know that more was intended for Poland than a slight rectification of the Corridor. If any doubt about this existed, it was dissipated by the raging Nazi campaign against Poland in the summer of 1939.

After Germany struck, there was but one hope of making amends to Poland and reclaiming her for the Western system. That was to defeat Germany. This the Allies were totally unable to do until Russia entered the war. Thereafter Poland could be kept out of the Russian orbit only if Western armies marched across Germany into Poland. Yet even after the entry of the United States into the war the British opposed this kind of campaign. Churchill fought to the bitter end to prevent a direct, massive assault upon Germany. He not only prevented a landing in France in 1942 but by securing the North African detour he also prevented it in 1943.

If in 1943 the great military strength and the immense logistical effort used up in Africa and Italy had been hurled across the Channel instead, when Germany’s armies were still deep in Russia and her strength in France much weaker than in 1944, the Western armies might have met the Russian armies on the plains of Poland.

Such a meeting was deeply and intensely desired by the Russians. Far from objecting to our presence in Poland they would have been delighted by it. It would have meant the saving of millions of Russian lives, a shortening of the war and the spending of at least several hundred thousand additional American and British lives. In such circumstances the Russians would have been pleased to strike hands with us in Poland. The Polish problem would have looked very different to them and we would have had the power to help police Polish elections on the spot.

It may well be that this situation would have led to graver trouble with Russia over Poland than has occurred, but only in such a military development was there any chance of our being able to exclude a Russian solution of the Polish problem. At the last minute we could not reclaim by diplomacy alone what both diplomacy and military policy had surrendered, especially since American diplomacy refused to make any settlement about Poland until compelled to do so, step by step, by military events.

3. What Future for Poland?

There was general agreement that a most remarkable national revival began in Poland during the first three years after Germany’s defeat. In the summer of 1948 John Gunther visited Warsaw and was astonished at what he saw. He reported the “massive energy and zip” the Poles had put into the rebuilding of Warsaw. He spoke of “electric animation and effervescence.” Warsaw was the liveliest capital in Europe. Food was cheap, good and plentiful. The people were rebuilding the city almost entirely with hand tools, with very few of the great machines we use so plentifully, but every Pole he met was “almost bursting with hope.”

This was by no means due solely to the character of the Government. Indeed, most Poles hated Russia. He did not see in Warsaw a single Red flag, a photograph of Stalin or a Russian soldier. There were few signs of overt pressure on the people. An American who bitterly hated the regime told him that there was no arbitrary use of the police power, no concentration camps or terrorism. The Poles were building for the future. They did not expect another war to tear down their city again.⁶⁷

On January 2 and 3, 1949, the New York Times’ correspondent, Sydney Gruson, reported that to return to Warsaw after three months’ absence was to have one’s breath taken away. The change he saw justified President Bierut’s description of Poland as a country “pulsating with work.” Much had been accomplished under the impetus of an intensive one-month production drive and labor competition to celebrate the final merger of the communist and socialist parties. The results had astounded both the people and the Government. Many new ways of saving time and work had been discovered. Two new bridges across the Vistula had been completed. Blocks of new flats “providing better housing than Polish workers had ever enjoyed before” had been completed and new ones started. Rationing had been abolished entirely, wages raised and prices lowered. Shops had been well stocked during the holidays, with plenty of customers from all levels of the population.

The Government was buoyant with confidence that it was steadily winning honest support. Its detractors acknowledged that it had gradually won the grudging acceptance of a majority, mainly because they were no longer able to envisage an alternative. A year earlier a majority had unquestionably been positively opposed to the Government.

In February 1949 the Atlantic Monthly had a report on Poland which told of deep resentment among the Poles because of Russia’s interference in their affairs, along with the admission that the new administration had brought them stability, prosperity and a will to work. There was plenty of money in circulation, particularly among the poorer and peasant classes. Women had attained a position of strength and power in the nation. They got equal pay for equal work and had important positions in the Government. The people looked well and reasonably happy.

However, merciless propaganda against the richer peasants had begun. This was likely to fail, but the rapid industrialization of the country would promote collectivization of the land by supplying the necessary machines and draining away peasant workers. Some pressure upon Catholic schools and religious orders had begun, and education promised in time to indoctrinate the young people in the theories of Marx and Lenin. Government control of all phases of Polish life had tightened after the defection of Yugoslavia from communist orthodoxy in 1948.

Then the cold war turned hot in Korea in 1950 and the great rearmament of the West which accompanied and followed it led Stalin into the nearly fatal error of arming Poland and the other East European states heavily—on top of the back-breaking burdens of reconstruction and heavy industrialization—leading to privations and resentments which could only be controlled by police state methods.

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