Summer 1939. Just recreated, as they say, from a needle, the German Wehrmacht has already concentrated on the borders of Poland. Hitler and his closest associates, who managed to receive repeated carte blanche from the West both for the restoration of the armed forces and for territorial amendments to the Treaty of Versailles, have no doubt that nothing can prevent the invasion of Polish territory.
Even the USSR, which repeatedly offered Poland to come to an agreement, was neutralized by the notorious Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. However, Warsaw does not want to believe not only the intelligence data, but also their own eyes. Polish Ambassador to Germany Jozef Lipski, starting in the spring, regularly bombarded the then head of the Polish Foreign Ministry, Jozef Beck, with letters about "a detailed clarification of the German side of many benefits from the joint military action of Germany and Poland against the USSR."
Even at the end of July 1939, when the mass repressions of the Nazis against the Poles in East Prussia, Western Silesia and the former Czechoslovak-Polish border area sharply intensified, practically no one among the Polish leaders expressed concern. Pan Pilsudski's heirs reassured themselves with the hope that Berlin was about to declare an alliance between Germany and Poland against the USSR.
More precisely, it was about the preliminary joint military plan "Wschodni pytanie" ("Eastern question"), which the general staffs of Poland and Germany jointly developed, albeit in general terms, by the end of 1938. As the resident of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in Belarus during the war years, later the head of the Polish Communist Party in 1948-56, Boleslav Bierut (1891-56), recalled, the "Eastern Question" plan envisaged, for example, joint military strikes on Minsk, Gomel, Zhitomir and Kiev.
Autonomous Polish Kiev
It is clear that for this the Polish army simply let the German troops … to the Polish-Soviet border. However, Berlin and Warsaw could not agree on who and in what part of Soviet Ukraine will be in charge. Contradictions sometimes took an absurd form. Thus, the Leaders of the new Rzecz Pospolita sought nothing less than a free port in Odessa or, at least, in Belgorod-Dnestrovsky.
Further - more, from Warsaw immediately, even at the stage of developing joint military plans, they demanded some kind of joint autonomy for the puppet power in Kiev. Autonomy either from Warsaw or from Berlin, but for some reason the Nazis immediately refused to their Polish partners. In the same way, the attempts of the Pilsudsters to persuade the Nazis to give up, or, more precisely, to "return" Lithuania to them, also suffered a fiasco. However, for some reason Berlin agreed to transfer only its Kaunas region to Warsaw, which, however, could be regarded as an unprecedented generosity. After all, Kaunas, the former small town Kovno from 1920 to 1939, was the capital of independent Lithuania.
Lithuania itself acted much more decently under those conditions. When on September 10, 1939, taking into account the inevitable military defeat of Poland, the German Foreign Ministry unequivocally offered Lithuania to annex the Vilna region (now it has become a capital region for Lithuania), the Lithuanian authorities refused the "gift" on the same day. But Polish troops had completely withdrawn from there the day before. They prudently headed towards the Wehrmacht-blocked citadel of Modlin, north of Warsaw).
The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry immediately rushed to declare "the invariability of the position of neutrality in the German-Polish war."Nevertheless, just a little over a month later - in October 1939, after the defeat of Poland, Lithuania still received the long-suffering Vilna region. Which in 1920, on a wave of victorious euphoria, after the victory over the Soviets, was quickly captured by envy by Polish legionnaires.
Berlin is my friend?
However, every single joint project with Berlin ended up in ruins. And this despite the fact that on the eve of the Nazi aggression, Warsaw, as is well known, invariably flatly refused Soviet military assistance. In the same way, even before the signing of the notorious pact, the USSR was denied the passage of Soviet troops to the Polish-Slovak and Polish-German borders.
The military attaché of Poland in Turkey, General Tadeusz Mahalski, on instructions from Warsaw, tried to influence the Nazi leadership through the German ambassador to Turkey, ex-chancellor von Papen. Throughout the first half of September 1939, when German tanks were already rushing towards Warsaw, Krakow and Danzig, Makhalsky convinced von Papen that the German aggression must be stopped, and at the moment the Polish-German joint invasion of the USSR was much more expedient.
However, in Berlin they have already taken a bite at the bit, having decided to precisely fulfill their obligations under the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. But Makhalsky continued unsuccessfully to insist on Turkey's mediation in the settlement of the Polish-German war. However, the Turkish authorities then chose not to intervene in the situation at all. Moreover, as the then President of Turkey Ismet Inonu believed, the fate of Poland was predetermined by Germany long before September 1, 1939. And so it happened …
However, back on January 26, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, after a meeting in Berlin with the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry, J. Beck, made the following entry for Hitler:
"Mr. Beck does not hide the fact that Poland still claims Soviet Ukraine and access to the Black Sea. Believing that this can be achieved jointly with the Reich and even with Romania, and the rest of the issues should be resolved on the basis of a compromise."
Such plans were fully reflected in the well-known conversation of Józef Beck with Hitler in January 1938, which in many ways prompted the USSR to go for temporary cooperation with Hitler's Germany.
By the way, even in the official doctrine of the Polish General Staff, approved in November 1938, it was quite specifically said:
“The dismemberment of Russia is at the heart of our policy in the East. Therefore, our possible position will be reduced to the following formula: who exactly will take part in the partition, and Poland should not remain passive at this wonderful historical moment. … The challenge is to be well prepared physically and spiritually in advance. The main goal is to weaken, defeat and divide Russia."
At the same time, Poland, counting on the implementation of these plans, immediately recognized Germany's rejection of the Memel region (Klaipeda region) from Lithuania at the end of March 1939, which completely deprived Kaunas of almost the entire Lithuanian part of the Baltic coast. Warsaw was also not slow to recognize the occupation in mid-March 1939 by Germany "remaining" after the well-known, and with indirect Polish participation, Munich redistribution (1938) of Czechoslovakia.
Summing up, we note that Germany, with her traditional pedantry, surrounded Poland for the subsequent crushing blow to it. One has only to be surprised that in Warsaw in the fall of 1939, as they say, they were perplexed: for what?..
The absurdity, or rather, suicide, not only of the mentioned, but also of other large-scale Polish plans, was quite clearly manifested in September 1939. But even then, the official Warsaw categorically refused to support the Polish anti-Nazi underground in the regions of Germany adjacent to Poland and in the "free city" of Danzig (Gdansk).
