Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#226

Post by Piotr Kapuscinski » 24 Dec 2015, 22:28

If "Żydek" was offensive already before the war, then perhaps "Murzynek" as well?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murzynek_Bambo
(...) The poem refers to Bambo as murzynek, the diminutive form of murzyn. Murzynek can be translated into English in a variety of ways, such as "black child" or "little Negro". The word "murzyn", which in the opinion of many Poles, including academics, is not offensive, is seen by some black people as discriminatory and derogatory.[1] Etymologically, "murzyn" comes from the same root as the English word Moor. (...)
There are words which carry the presage of defeat. Defence is such a word. What is the result of an even victorious defence? The next attempt of imposing it to that weaker, defender. The attacker, despite temporary setback, feels the master of situation.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#227

Post by 4thskorpion » 26 Dec 2015, 20:19

Below, Churchill and Stalin page 31:
There was a meeting between Churchill and the Polish Prime Minister in exile, Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, in March 1942, recounted by the lat- ter. Churchill admitted “that his own assessment of Russia did not differ much” from that of his Polish friend. “However, he underlined the reasons which made it necessary” to make certain agreements with Russia. “She was the only country that had fought against the Germans with success. She had destroyed millions of German soldiers and at present the aim of the war seemed not so much victory, as the death or survival of our allied nations. Should Russia come to an agreement with the Reich, all would be lost. It must not happen. If Russia was victorious she would decide on her frontiers without consulting Great Britain; should she lose the war, the agreement would lose all its importance.”* There is every reason to believe that this daunting and somber assessment was more than a realistic reminder to a minor, and occasionally troubling, ally.
Retinger was probably the only other Pole in the emigre political circle to fully appreciate what Churchill was saying to Sikorski and the need for an accommodation with the USSR before the Red Army entered former Polish territories and took de facto control of the entire country on their way to Nazi Germany.

Below, Churchill and Stalin page 38::
Churchill’s idea was to balance the geographic concession against a political one: to grant Stalin the Curzon Line, in exchange for his acceptance of an independent Poland, determinedly friendly to Russia, but with a government not dominated by Moscow’s chosen people, subservient Communists. He must not be criticized for having failed in this. The Polish government in London would not accept the Curzon Line till the very end—even though Churchill, with Stalin’s consent, proposed a very sizable compensation for Poland, with large territories to be acquired from Germany. Roosevelt and the Americans gave Churchill little or no support. More important: by 1944 Stalin, whose armies had begun to advance across Poland, knew that he would get both the Curzon Line and a satellite government in Warsaw, ruled by mostly Moscow- trained Communists. That the fate of Poland was not a minor concern for Churchill is obvious from the condition that, upon his insistence, Poland took up most of the time at Yalta as well as during his Moscow conference with Stalin in October 1944. During that conference he spoke rudely and at times brutally to the democratic Polish representatives who were still unwilling and unable to accept the Curzon Line; Churchill said that he would not allow them to threaten his wartime alliance with Stalin; he excoriated them for their stubbornness and unrealism, for missing (so he told them) their last and only chance to secure a decent and free Poland after the war. Stalin, after all, had allowed some of the Poles from London to come to Moscow, while Churchill showed nothing but contempt for the Communist or pro-Communist Poles whom Stalin had produced as the leaders of his Poland. (Churchill was impressed—though not assuaged—to see that Stalin, too, did not think much of the latter. With something like a twinkle in his eye, Stalin signaled his satisfaction to Churchill to the effect: “See how my puppets obey . . .”)
This was much more a failure of the Polish emigre government than it was of Churchill's efforts, at least Churchill was making some effort the Polish emigre government were doing nothing whilst their armed forces fought bravely, trusting their leaders to look after Poland's interests - which clearly they were not doing.


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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#228

Post by wm » 27 Dec 2015, 01:26

The problem is nobody asked Mr Churchill to balance anything. Especially to balance without authorization from the Polish Government.
That the fate of Poland was not a minor concern for Churchill is obvious from the condition that, upon his insistence, Poland took up most of the time at Yalta as well as during his Moscow conference with Stalin in October 1944. During that conference he spoke rudely and at times brutally to the democratic Polish representatives who were still unwilling and unable to accept the Curzon Line.
Does not compute.

It should be added his main concerned was not the borders (because it was obvious the borders would be decided by the Soviets) but forcing the representatives of the legitimate Polish Government into taking posts as figureheads in the created in Moscow puppet Polish government in his effort to legitimize that government.
Those figureheads lasted about two years before they were purged.
And additionally tens of thousands of lulled into a false sense of security Poles, those who returned to Poland from the West or could have fled Poland but didn't do it, paid with their lives.
So thank you Mr Churchill.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#229

Post by 4thskorpion » 27 Dec 2015, 09:54

wm wrote:The problem is nobody asked Mr Churchill to balance anything. Especially to balance without authorization from the Polish Government.
That the fate of Poland was not a minor concern for Churchill is obvious from the condition that, upon his insistence, Poland took up most of the time at Yalta as well as during his Moscow conference with Stalin in October 1944. During that conference he spoke rudely and at times brutally to the democratic Polish representatives who were still unwilling and unable to accept the Curzon Line.
Does not compute.

It should be added his main concerned was not the borders (because it was obvious the borders would be decided by the Soviets) but forcing the representatives of the legitimate Polish Government into taking posts as figureheads in the created in Moscow puppet Polish government in his effort to legitimize that government.
Those figureheads lasted about two years before they were purged.
And additionally tens of thousands of lulled into a false sense of security Poles, those who returned to Poland from the West or could have fled Poland but didn't do it, paid with their lives.
So thank you Mr Churchill.
The problem was what did the Polish emigre government actually govern? Answer: Nothing.

Events in the homeland were governed by first the Germans and the Soviet's, then by the Germans alone and then by the Soviet's along with the Poiish communists. A so called Polish underground state in command of an underground army of supposedly 400,000 strong and an emigre government in London all failed to stop the killing of 3 million Polish Jews, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, the deportation of more than a million conscripted Polish men, women and children to Germany in forced labour, and so on. In the Soviet annexed territories the emigre government failed to stop the forced deportation of several hundred thousand Poles to camps and settlements across the Soviet arctic regions, the arrest and murder of thousands of PoWs and so on. A government that governed nothing was not a government but a pretence especially because it could not and did not affect the outcome of the war to liberate the people it was supposed to represent.

However in reality, "they" did not represent the Polish people in any meaningful way, they were self-elected from those few lucky enough to have the contacts and resources to flee the homeland. Their knowledge of the suffering of Poles in the occupied territories was entirely second-hand and the dangers that those in the abandoned homeland faced every day was remote to the emigre politicians firmly ensconced in the comfort of the Hotel Rubin in London.

If as you say it was obvious that the borders of Poland would be decided by the Soviet's - and we know that PM Sikorski was thinking way back in November 1939 that the territories Poland lost in the east might not be recovered after the war - why did the Polish emigre government continue down the road to lamentable failure of its policies on both the political structure and territorial make-up of post-war Poland. Having recognised that the Polish borders would ultimately be decided by the USSR the emigre government should have being doing its best to make sure those in the homeland would get the best deal with the Soviets but it did not - they were still in their little Hotel Rubin dreamland. However - in spite of the emigre government intransigence and denial of reality - a deal was struck between the three allied powers which was described by Retinger as a fair one for Poland - given the realities of the Polish situation.

Did the emigre Poles not read the Times newspaper?
The Times, 1 August 1941: “Leadership in Eastern Europe can only fall to Germany or Russia. Neither Great Britain nor the United States can exercise, or will aspire to exercise, any predominant rule in these regions.”
Last edited by 4thskorpion on 27 Dec 2015, 15:33, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#230

Post by 4thskorpion » 27 Dec 2015, 14:04

Back to the issue of Polish territorial concessions in the east to the USSR, it is clear such proposals were made by the Poles to the British in 1940 - see below. But small wonder very few British politicians had much sympathy with or had any willingness to take seriously this group of fractious in-fighting Polish "leaders". I'll bet even Retinger must have had second thoughts about persuading Churchill to rescue Sikorski and the Poles from France!
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Britain and Poland 1939-1943: The Betrayed Ally
By Anita Prazmowska

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#231

Post by michael mills » 29 Dec 2015, 03:34

Sikorski was responding to a Soviet initiative.

When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in June 1940, it found there a number of Polish officers and soldiers who had been interned there in 1939 after retreating across the border from the advancing German forces. Those men were freed from internment and formed into a Polish unit within the Red Army.

Sikorski heard about that development, and gave it his support. He asked the British Government to support the Soviet move openly and officially, but it declined since it still suspected Soviet motives, given Soviet support for German actions.

It should be noted that although Sikorski was in favour of agreeing to the surrender of Polish eastern territory to the Soviet Union, he wanted to balance that by annexing German territory in the West, and he made the westward expansion of Poland to the Oder-Neisse Line the official policy of the Polish Government-in-Exile. He tried to get both Churchill and Roosevelt to endorse that policy as an Allied war aim, but neither did until the Tehran Conference, when Stalin threw his weight behind it.

Before the war, Sikorski had been an opponent of Pilsudski's Jagiellonian policy od eastward expansion and hostility toward the Russia and the Soviet Union, and instead had always supported the Piast policy of westward expansion and friendship with Russia.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#232

Post by wm » 29 Dec 2015, 14:35

michael mills wrote:When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in June 1940, it found there a number of Polish officers and soldiers who had been interned there in 1939 after retreating across the border from the advancing German forces. Those men were freed from internment and formed into a Polish unit within the Red Army.
There wasn't any unit. There were plans but Stalin vetoed them - he was afraid of Germans.
michael mills wrote:Sikorski heard about that development, and gave it his support. He asked the British Government to support the Soviet move openly and officially, but it declined since it still suspected Soviet motives, given Soviet support for German actions.
I'd would like to ask what is the source for this, because the plans were secret, and British-Soviet relations were at all time low anyway.
michael mills wrote:It should be noted that although Sikorski was in favour of agreeing to the surrender of Polish eastern territory to the Soviet Union, he wanted to balance that by annexing German territory in the West, and he made the westward expansion of Poland to the Oder-Neisse Line the official policy of the Polish Government-in-Exile.
Again, what is the source for this balancing - I've never seen any reliable one.
The westward expansion of Poland to the Oder-Neisse Line weren't at any time the official policy of the Polish Government-in-Exile.

4thskorpion wrote:However in reality, "they" did not represent the Polish people in any meaningful way
It's a baseless speculation. The presidential/governmental lines of succession was maintained according to the Polish Constitution.
4thskorpion wrote:If as you say it was obvious that the borders of Poland would be decided by the Soviet's - and we know that PM Sikorski was thinking way back in November 1939 that the territories Poland lost in the east might not be recovered after the war - why did the Polish emigre government continue down the road to lamentable failure of its policies on both the political structure and territorial make-up of post-war Poland.
Because they had no mandate to do so, and it was obvious the Poles themselves were against it.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#233

Post by henryk » 29 Dec 2015, 20:21

Story of Polish internees in Lithuania and Latvia:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... =lithuania
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... k#p1623600
Internees were taken by the NKVD and sent to prisons in USSR, released to Anders Army.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#234

Post by 4thskorpion » 29 Dec 2015, 20:37

wm wrote:
4thskorpion wrote:However in reality, "they" did not represent the Polish people in any meaningful way
It's a baseless speculation. The presidential/governmental lines of succession was maintained according to the Polish Constitution.
The Polish constitution meant nothing to Sikorsk's entourage when they staged what was a virtual coup to get him reinstated as PM, nor did the constitution count for much when Sikorski interned his opponents in a special Polish detention camp on British soil. The emigre government was a meaningless charade that did not represent in any way the wishes of the Poles in the German or Soviet occupied homeland. It had no democratic mandate, it was composed only of those fortunate to have been able to flee to safety in Great Britain.
wm wrote:
4thskorpion wrote:If as you say it was obvious that the borders of Poland would be decided by the Soviet's - and we know that PM Sikorski was thinking way back in November 1939 that the territories Poland lost in the east might not be recovered after the war - why did the Polish emigre government continue down the road to lamentable failure of its policies on both the political structure and territorial make-up of post-war Poland.
Because they had no mandate to do so, and it was obvious the Poles themselves were against it.
Who didn't have a mandate? The Red Army had given the USSR a definite mandate!

However, you have already agreed that emigre Polish government were cognisant to the obvious fact that the borders of Poland would be decided by the Soviet's - and it was. Given that the emigre Polish government recognised that the Soviet's were going to decide the Polish borders why did they not expend all their energies getting the best deal for Poland in view of the obvious? Because they were incessantly busy infighting to care about the suffering of those in the homeland so a deal was negotiated for them by the three powers along lines that were obvious to the emigre government. If there was any betrayal of Poles it lies within the Hotel Rubin rather than at Downing Street!

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#235

Post by 4thskorpion » 30 Dec 2015, 20:14

Neither the OW ZJ nor the ONR AB recognised the authority of the so-called Polish underground or secret state in the homeland or the Polish emigre government in London.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#236

Post by 4thskorpion » 31 Dec 2015, 10:08

wm wrote:
20wrzesnia.jpg
byb means a handwritten commentary
What is the full Polish term for "handwritten commentary" represented by the superscript "byb" ?

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#237

Post by wm » 06 Feb 2016, 13:14

Who knows, they use subsequent letters of the alphabet to denote various types of corrections, annotations, insertions. So a...a is as written, b...b - handwritten commentary, c...c handwritten insertion. byb is probably a mistake, it should be b...b.
4thskorpion wrote:The Polish constitution meant nothing to Sikorsk's entourage when they staged what was a virtual coup to get him reinstated as PM, nor did the constitution count for much when Sikorski interned his opponents in a special Polish detention camp on British soil.
A coup?, under the Polish constitution in time of war the president had dictatorial powers. A political maneuver nothing more. Technically Sikorski was nobody. The president ran the show.

Maybe they were his opponents, maybe they weren't. It was war, those people were expected to follow the orders of the Polish government or STFU. Actually many of them were lucky, those judged responsible for the defeat of 1939, many people wished them much worse than vacation in the middle-class holiday haven in the Isle of Bute.

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#238

Post by wm » 06 Feb 2016, 13:40

Graphic images at the end of this post. You've been warned.
A lot is made of Mr Józef Retinger's prowess as an adviser, of his knowledge, foresight, political dexterity.
This usually is contrasted with alleged intransigence, thoughtlessness, ignorance of Polish politicians and especially of their deep suspicions as to his motives. Among others it was claimed he was a communist sympathizer, fellow traveler or simply a Soviet agent. Were they mistaken or misled in their opinions? Who knows.

But it is known his practical experience was limited. He never was a politician, diplomat, businessman. Basically he traveled a lot around the world looking for a job, nothing more. Eventually he found one, for ten years he worked for Plutarco Elías Calles.
Calles was a self made man and hugely successful politician, a man who radically transformed his country. Retinger became his adviser, supported Calles, approved his politics.
So what Calles created and what Retinger supported is a good question. BTW, this is Plutarco Calles - and his Roman salute:
Image

Perfect Dictatorship
Calles was a Mexican general, populist president, a hardcore socialist and progressive. He founded the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), which under different names governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000. It was seventy years of particracy, one-party rule, not much different from the particracy in the Soviet dominated countries of the Eastern Bloc.
Similarly the long rule was only possible thanks to massive electoral fraud, support of a huge and loyal to the party governmental bureaucracy, and good old intimidation of any opponents.
PNR's grip on power was so complete it was called the perfect dictatorship.

Arrested Development
There was another similarity with the Eastern Bloc. The radical socialist ideas and solutions forced upon Mexico by Calles and his successors resulted in persistent low economic growth rate, so characteristic for the communist countries too.
Below the swimming in oil and other natural resources Mexico is compared with Austria - a landlocked, mountainous "worthless" piece of land, and the communist Poland. Striking similarities and differences we have here I would say. It seems the wages of socialism was universal poverty.
Per capita GDPs of Mexico, Poland, Austria:
APM.jpg
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Desirable de-Christianization
In 1926 only one serious obstacle remained on the path to the new brave future envisaged by Calles - religion, represented by the Catholic Church. And he removed it with brutality of a Red Guard fanatic. He seized Church property, expelled priests, closed monasteries, convents, and religious schools. All churches and religious groups were required to register and were strictly controlled. Wearing clerical garb in public was punishable by a huge fine, a priest who dared to criticize the government could be imprisoned for up to five years, public worship was forbidden. In the end only 334 Catholic priests were allowed to serve Mexico's 15 million people, in seventeen states there were no priests at all.
In his own words:
Catholic Church in Mexico is a political movement, and must be eliminated in order to proceed with a Socialist government free of religious hypnotism which fools the people . . . within one year without the sacraments, the people will forget the faith.
The predictable result was a massive, popular uprising - later called Cristero War. In desperation even women, about 25,000 of them organized in the so called Feminine Brigades took part in that war. Calles needed four long years to suppress the uprising, and he did it eventually - thanks to his army, police, mass arrests, expulsions, executions, tortures. About 90,000 people lost their lives.

Defeated cristeros:
Image

Some of the victims:
José Juárez, a Catholic priest executed without trial on direct orders from Callas. His crime was celebrating Mass clandestinely, without authorization from the Government. His brother was executed moments later - for the crime of being his brother.
Miguel Pro.jpg
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Father Francesco Vera, arrested during an illegal Mass, executed on the spot for the same crime.
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Father Gumersindo Sedano, tortured and executed, his last words were "come and see how Christians die":
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I total about 90 priests were executed, many of them were tortured to extract intelligence or just for fun. Some of them were declared saints later.

Józef Retinger worked for Calles for the entire length of his dictatorship. He claimed he was an adviser, probably an exaggeration but still the results of his "work" were nothing to be proud of.
There are claims that in the interwar period he worked for/supported radical leftist organizations in Europe, maintained contacts with communists. True or not but it's obvious such a person shouldn't have been allowed to work for General Sikorski, even if on moral grounds only.

Wikipedia says: Retinger was a founder of the European Movement that would lead to the founding of the European Union and was involved in founding the Bilderberg Group.
Probably another exaggeration based on his own book - lets hope it is a good guess, in light of his "achievements" in Mexico it's better this way.

sourced of these and a few other photos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

=======
Edit:

Please try to refrain from vaguely related subjects such as Calles and stay on topic, i.e. Churchill's Betrayal of Poland.
You might want to start a new thread about Retinger's life and his work for Calles, though.

/Peter K

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Re: Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

#239

Post by wm » 07 Feb 2016, 22:55

Well, the innocence of Mr Churchill was defended by presenting opinions, statements and actions of Retinger and his apologists. Which more or less is an argument from authority.
I wanted to show he wasn't any authority, that his morality, motives and allegiances were doubtful, judgments faulty.
By working for a brutal dictator, economic ignoramus and Socialist dogmatist who waged war on religion (Retinger claimed he was a catholic himself) I think he proved that.

I suppose it's like in computer games. To kill the boss you have to kill his minions first :)

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