The Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact
In the two years leading up to the invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler, Führer und Reichskanzler of Nazi Germany, and Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, secretly conspired together to take control of other countries in Eastern Europe.
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, through their ambassadors and foreign service officers, negotiated in secret to stake out German and Soviet spheres of influence among countries of Eastern Europe that each intended to overpower and control in the near future. Hitler and Stalin discussed how they would divide those countries between them without getting in each other’s way.
On August 24, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with a secret protocol establishing Soviet and German spheres of influence across Eastern Europe.
The protocol specified that when Germany invaded Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union would partition Poland between them, and the Soviet Union would be free to overrun Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and the Bessarabia region of Romania. The Soviet Union already occupied Lithuania.
Seven days after signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and one day after the Supreme Soviet (the highest body of state authority) of the Soviet Union approved the pact, both countries, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, had conspired and agreed to invade Poland.
The event that began the Second World War was the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the north, south, and west. Sixteen days later, on September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Within a month, the Polish armed forces were overwhelmed, and the campaign was ended on October 6, 1939.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union then divided and annexed the whole of Poland between them under the terms of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty.
The Republic of Poland (Rzeczpospolita Polska), 1918-1939, had disappeared. The Polish government-in-exile, first in Paris, then in Angers, and finally in London, gradually ceased to be a recognized partner in the Allied coalition.
After the Axis attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the entirety of Poland was occupied by Germany, which proceeded to inflict Nazi racial and genocidal policies on the people of Poland.
Under the occupations of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Polish citizens suffered enormous human and material losses. According to the Institute of National Remembrance estimates, about 5.6 million Polish citizens died due to the German occupation, and about 150,000 due to the Soviet occupation.
The Jews were singled out by the Germans for a quick and total annihilation, and about 90 percent of Polish Jews (nearly three million) were murdered as part of the Holocaust. Jews, Poles, Romani people and prisoners of many other ethnicities were killed en masse at Nazi extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibór.
After the Fall of France, the Polish government-in-exile was evacuated to London. The Polish armed forces were reconstituted and fought alongside the Western Allies in France, Britain, and elsewhere.
Fifteen Polish squadrons, including No. 303 Squadron, were part of the British Royal Air Force Fighter Command and the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy that fought against the German Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain.
Of the 66 Allied fighter squadrons engaged in the Battle of Britain, No. 303 Squadron, flying Hawker Hurricanes, shot down more German aircraft than any of the other 65 RAF squadrons that fought in the Battle of Britain, even though No. 303 Squadron joined the fray two months after the battle had begun.
As part of an agreement between the Polish government-in-exile and the United Kingdom, No. 303 Squadron of the RAF, also known as the “Tadeusz Kościuszko Warszawa” (“Thaddeus Kosciuszko City of Warsaw”) Fighter Squadron, was formed in July 1940 in Blackpool, England before deployment to RAF Northolt on August 2, 1940.
A total of 145 Polish fighter pilots served in the RAF during the Battle of Britain, making up the largest non-British contribution. By the end of the war, around 19,400 Poles were serving in the Polish Air Forces in Great Britain and in the RAF.
Polskie Siły Powietrzne was the name of the Polish Air Forces formed in France and the United Kingdom during the Second World War. The core of the Polish air units fighting alongside the Allies were experienced veterans of the 1939 invasion of Poland. They contributed significantly to the Allied victory in the Battle of Britain and Allied air operations during the war.
The Battle of Britain lasted for 113 days from July 10 to October 31, 1940. It was one of the most important aerial battles of the Second World War. Nearly 3,000 aircrew from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and other Allied countries defended Great Britain, with about a third either being killed or wounded. Since then, these airmen have been referred to as “The Few” and have been honored with ceremonies and flypasts on each anniversary day of the Battle of Britain.
In the summer of 1940, France and nearly all of the nations of western Europe had been overwhelmingly defeated by the blitzkrieg lightning war of Nazi Germany. That summer, the people of Great Britain were standing alone, staunchly defending their island home against the threat of German invasion.
On August 20, 1940, in this crucial moment of greatest danger, standing before the House of Commons, Winston Churchill addressed the people of Great Britain, the British Commonwealth, all of Europe, and all the world, delivering one of his most famous speeches.
On that day, Winston Churchill praised the airmen of the Royal Air Force, the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, and other Allied airmen who were fighting alone, against overwhelming odds, defending the British people and all free people of Europe in the fight of their lives against Nazi Germany.
Winston Churchill honored “The Few,” saying it plainly, making it clear, that “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” His words also recall the speech in William Shakespeare’s play, Henry V, referring to “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .”
In his speech about “The Few,” Winston Churchill was highlighting the profoundly momentous debt owed to those few airmen, who with their bravery and sacrifice, were the last ditch defenders of western Europe, fighting for the freedom of free people everywhere, in the face of overwhelming odds against them in the summer of 1940.
Regarding Poland’s participation in the Battle of Britain, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, head of RAF Fighter Command, wrote that “Had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of the Battle (of Britain) would have been the same.”
Soon after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, a Polish Resistance movement began organizing. Its largest military component was a part of the Polish Underground State network that became known as the Home Army.
The whole clandestine structure was formally directed by the Polish government-in-exile through its delegation resident in Poland. There were also peasant, right-wing, leftist, Jewish, and Soviet partisan resistance organizations.
Among the failed anti-German uprisings were the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising that tried to prevent the domination of Poland by the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Poles were subjected to both Nazi German and Soviet persecution. The Germans killed an estimated two million ethnic Poles. Generalplan Ost contemplated turning the remaining majority of Poles into slave labor. Poles perceived as “undesirable” were simply killed. Ethnic cleansing and massacres of Poles, and to a lesser extent, Ukrainians, were perpetrated by the Nazis in western Ukraine.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions, in April and May 1940, of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, through the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin’s order.
Although the killings also occurred in the NKVD prisons in Kalinin, Kharkiv, and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German forces in April 1943.
The massacre is a crime against humanity, a crime against peace, a war crime, and within the Polish Penal Code, a Communist crime. According to a resolution of the Polish parliament (Sejm), it bears the hallmarks of a genocide. The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin.
Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia that the Soviets decided were “intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials.”
The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state. The people who were murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and 700–900 Polish Jews.
The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in April 1943. Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile when it asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
After the Vistula–Oder offensive, when the mass graves fell into Soviet control, the Soviet Union claimed that the Nazis had killed the victims, and it continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.
An investigation conducted by the office of the prosecutors general of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify this action as a war crime or as an act of mass murder.
The investigation was closed on the grounds that the perpetrators were dead, and since the Russian government would not classify the dead as victims of the Great Purge, formal posthumous rehabilitation was deemed inapplicable.
In November 2010, hoping to improve relations with Poland, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration condemning Stalin and other Soviet officials for ordering the massacre. In 2021, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the memorial complex at Katyn on its Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a place of federal importance to one of only regional importance.