Churchill's Betrayal of Poland

[Steve]

A popular view is that Chamberlain should have stood up to Hitler no matter what and that he betrayed the Czechs. How Churchill handled the Polish question is not generally considered a betrayal and various reasons are advanced as to why he could not stand up to Stalin. Prior to the Tehran conference at the end of 1943 the British had decided that there would have to be Polish frontier changes. What came out of the conference was much the same as what came out of the Munich conference in 1938.

At Tehran on the evening of the 28th of November Stalin in the presence of Roosevelt and Churchill said that the Polish German frontier should be moved west to the Oder. Roosevelt shortly left and the conversation continued. Churchill said that the USA and the UK agreed that the Curzon line should be Poland’s frontier in the east with territorial compensation from Germany. Later Churchill said that Britain had gone to war to preserve Polish independence not any particular frontiers. He used three matches to illustrate how the borders could move west, one match for the USSR one for Poland and one for Germany.

On December 1st Poland was discussed by the three men. Churchill said that Britain had obligations to Poland and brought up the subject of frontiers. He reminded Stalin about moving the Polish frontier to the Oder. There then followed a discussion about the London Poles and what they would accept. Churchill said that he was prepared to take back what they decided at Tehran and tell the London Poles that this was the best they could expect. If they turned it down he would still support it. Stalin said that it must be made clear to the London Poles that they had to accept the 1939 frontier imposed by Russia after Poland’s defeat.

Premier Micolajczyk had a conversation with Churchill in Moscow at the British Embassy October 14 1944. Churchill – Unless you accept the frontier you are out of business forever. The Russians will sweep through your country and your people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihilation…………………Micolajczyk – must we sign this if we are going to lose our independence. Churchill – You have only one thing to do. It would make the greatest difference if you agreed. There was more to the exchange than this but it clearly comes across that Churchill was siding with Stalin against the London Poles.

Churchill did no more to support the Poles against Stalin than Chamberlain did to support the Czechs against Hitler though Poland was an ally while Czechoslovakia was not. An excuse for Chamberlain is that in 1938 he did no know what Hitler was capable of. In late 1943 Churchill should have known that Katyn was the work of Stalin and he would certainly have known about the mass deportation of Poles to Siberia in 1940/41. Not only was Churchill taken in by Stalin he betrayed an ally for him.

On December 15 1944 Churchill made a speech in the House of Commons. With hindsight it is clear that Stalin cleverly took advantage of his gullibility. It can be read in Hansard.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/comm ... /15/poland

Sources. The Turning Point by Keith Sainsbury – Nemesis At Potsdam by Alfred M de Zayas - The Eagle Unbowed by Halik Kochanski

[henryk]

It was a British betrayal. Just like after WWI Britain consistently opposed Polish interests.
http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/hist557/lect11.htm
The following contain mainly only the text in the reference that relate to British behavior and sentiment on the setting up of Poland's post WWI borders.

Anna M. Cienciala ([email protected])
History 557 Lecture Notes Spring 2002 (Revised Fall 2007. spring 2012
hist557 by anna m.cienciala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at web.ku.edu.
Lecture Notes 11
  THE REBIRTH OF POLAND
The Paris Peace Conference could not establish the eastern frontier of Poland because Russia was in the midst of a Civil War (summer 1918 - early 1921), and therefore could not be represented in Paris by an agreed Russian delegation. However, allied statesmen did consult "white" (anti-Bolshevik) Russian emigre politicians on the future western borders of Russia. These politicians routinely demanded that Russia keep the Baltic Provinces and old eastern Poland, that is, western Belorussia, Volhynia and East Galicia (western Ukraine); the latter was conquered and briefly held by the Russians in WWI.
1. France wanted a large Poland as an ally against Germany, but did not want to alienate a future friendly, non-Bolshevik Russia, which was expected to emerge out of the Civil War, and which France hoped to have as an anti-German ally again. Therefore, French statesmen wanted Poland to gain as much territory as possible from Germany, but with an eastern frontier not very different from that of Congress Poland, (1815-30).
2. Britain opposed a large Poland. Br. statesmen wanted to minimize German territorial losses to Poland so as to facilitate reconciliation with Germany, and they opposed Polish demands in the east in order to keep open the possibility of good relations with a future, non-Bolshevik Russia, seen as a major market for British goods.
NOTE. During the Russian Civil War  the allies supported the Whites (anti-Bolshevik) against the Reds (Bolsheviks), and the Whites would at most tolerate Congress Poland, either within the Russian Empire or bound to it by an alliance. Indeed, in recognizing Polish independence in 1917, the Provisional Government had left the border settlement for later and envisaged a mandatory Polish-Russian alliance. Therefore, Western statesmen were unwilling to alienate the White Russians by supporting Polish claims in the east.
In any case, the Paris Peace Conference was chiefly concerned with working out a peace treaty with Germany. With regard to Poland, the key dispute among Western statesmen was over Danzig and Polish Pomerania [Polish: Pomorze, pron. Pohmorzhe]; the German name, later accepted in the West, was the "Polish Corridor". The Poles claimed Pomorze on grounds of self-determination, and Danzig as the natural seaport for Poland; both had been part of pre-partition Poland. They wanted the city to be part of the Polish state, but with its own elected administration and guarantees of [German] cultural freedom.
The French government wanted the city and the Corridor to go to Poland, while the British government and most of the British delegation wanted them to stay in Germany. President Wilson stood on the principle of self-determination, so he wanted the Corrridor to go to Poland and Danzig to stay with Germany, though most American, and even some British delegates, thought Danzig should go to Poland for economic reasons.
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1863-1945, Prime Minister 1916-22), definitely favored leaving both areas in Germany, but wanted to do it in a way acceptable to France and the U.S. He asked a Foreign Office expert on Germany, the historian W. James Headlam-Morley, to work out a compromise. Headlam-Morley suggested making Danzig a Free City - as it had been in the past - with special economic rights for Poland. Headlam-Morley worked out the project with a key American adviser to Woodrow Wilson, Dr. Sidney E. Mezes.
Woodrow Wilson accepted the project because the city was to be under the protection of the League of Nations, and the League was his great project. Also, he did not want to give the Italian-populated city of Fiume, with its South Slav hinterland, to the Italians, so he thought the Free City of Danzig would be a precedent for a Free City there. It did, in fact exist for a couple of years before it was annexed by Italy.
Thus the Danzig Articles of the Versailles Treaty (100-108) stipulated that it would be a Free City with its own constitution and administration, while Poland was to have free use of the port and other economic rights, also rights for the Polish minority. The City was to be under the protection of the League of Nations - though this body was still on the drawing boards.
Pomorze or the "Corridor" with its predominantly Polish population, was to go to Poland. Most British statesmen, aware of German resentment against the separation of East Prussia from Germany, looked on the Danzig-Pomorze compromise as a temporary arrangement, expecting a revision in Germany’s favor within 10 years or so.
In southern East Prussia, where most of the people spoke a Slavic dialect called Mazurian, the Peace Conference mandated a plebiscite (referendum).

In Upper Silesia, most western statesmen accepted the Polish claim that the majority of the population east of the Oder river spoke Polish. In fact, unlike the Polish-speaking workers who came into the region from Galicia, most natives spoke a local language based on Polish and German. They called themselves Szlonzoks (pron. Schlonzohks, see Kamusella book cited under the Upper Silesian Plebiscite below),but they were not recognized as a nation. President Wilson thought it should go to Poland on the basis of self-determination. However, Lloyd George forced through a decision to hold a plebiscite  there, threatening that otherwise Britain would not be willing to enforce the treaty. He did so because of loud German protests that without Upper Silesian coal and steel Germany would not be able to pay reparations to the victorious Allies. In fact, most of the region's coal had been experted to Polish territories before WWl, while the industry had been important for German production during the war.
III. WORKING OUT THE POLISH-GERMAN SETTLEMENT.
A. Danzig [Gdansk]: The British and French governments agreed that Br. troops were to form the majority of the garrison in Danzig, as part of the Br. occcupation force in East Prussia pending the plebiscite there. Also, the First High Commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig was to be British. This last arrangement was made in a secret deal concluded by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Premier Georges Clemenceau in July 1919:  there was to be a Br. High Commissioner in Danzig and a French chairman of the League Governing Commission in the Saar, whose coal production France needed to offset the loss of the mines destroyed in the war. There would also be a French High Commissioner in Memel (Lith. name: Klaipeda), the predominantly German-speaking port city of Lithuania.
The British were interested at this time in using Danzig as a possible base for sending supplies to their troops in Russia (Civil War), also as a future way station for trade with Russia. Finally, they did not want Danzig to fall into Polish hands, believing that after a while the city was bound to return to Germany

THE PLEBISCIE IN UPPER SILESIA, March 20, 1921.
The plebiscite results are still interpreted differently by Polish and German historians today.
The Versailles Treaty mandated a plebiscite within two years in the whole of Silesia, although the Polish government claimed only the Polish-inhabited part, so it wanted to exclude predominantly German districts west of the Oder river. Meanwhile, the German administration and police were left in place, although either Poles or Szlonzoks governed in many villages east of the Oder river.
Both Poland and Germany used the intervening period for intensive propaganda. The Germans told the workers that they would lose their jobs and old age pensions if they voted for Poland, while Polish leaders allegedly promised a cow for each vote for Poland. (Only men had the vote.) Polish newpapers claimed that the German "Freikorps" (Free Corps), made up of veterans of the former German army, terrorized those Silesians who favored voting for Poland, while German newspapers accused Poles of terrorizing Silesians who favored Germany. In fact, acts of terror were committed by both sides. Polish propaganda stressed that if Poland won the plebiscite, Silesian Poles would no longer be oppressed or treated as second class citizens as they had been in Germany, they would not lose their old age pensions, and Silesia would have autonomous status in Poland. German propaganda claimed that Silesians would lose their retirement pensions and have a lower standard of living under Polish rule.
In August 1919,  the Silesian Poles revolted, demanding that the police and local government authorities be both German and Polish.
In February 1920, an Allied Plebiscite Commission arrived in Upper Silesia. It was made up of British, French, and Italian forces with the French being most numerous, but was too small to maintain order. Moreover, the British and Italians favored the Germans, while the French favored the Poles.

The British and French governments disagreed on the interpretation of the plebiscite. The main bone of contention was the "Industrial Triangle," that is the coal and steel producing district east of the Oder river bounded by the cities of Beuthen (Polish: Bytom), Gleiwitz (Polish: Gliwice) and Kattowitz (Polish: Katowice). The French wanted the Triangle to go to Poland, to give the latter an industrial base and weaken Germany; the British, supported by the Italians, wanted it to stay in Germany because the Germans claimed they could not pay war reparations without having all of Upper Silesia. Some British politicians, expecting the area to go to Germany, bought shares in German coal mines and steel mills at very low prices.
However, the German need for Upper Silesian coal and steel was not as great as it appeared at the time. Before 1914, 50% of the coal and industrial production of the region had been exported abroad, mostly to Russian Poland. Indeed, during the World War I, German industrialists had proposed the German annexation of Russian Poland to secure it as a market for Upper Silesian coal and industry. [By the mid-1930s, when Nazi rearmament went into full swing, the smaller fragment of the industrial region that stayed under German rule, was outproducing the larger, Polish part.]
In late April 1921, rumors flew that the British and Italians would prevail over the French, so Upper Silesia would stay in Germany. This led to theThird Polish Uprising in May-July 1921. The Silesian Poles and the Szlonzaks favoring Poland - aided by Polish officers, soldiers, and arms supplies- occupied most of the region east of the Oder river. About 50,000 men fought on each side, German and Polish.
The French and British still could not agree, so British Prime Minister Lloyd George proposed to French Premier Clemenceau that the issue be decided by the League of Nations, expecting it to award the Industrial Triangle to Germany. Clemenceau agreed, hoping for the best. As it turned out, the League appointed its own commission of inquiry which gathered its own data, interviewed Poles and Germans from the region, and made its decision on the basis of self-determination. Since most of the country districts had voted for Poland, the decision was to award it to Poland. Therefore, in October 1921, the League of Nations awarded most of eastern Upper Silesia, including the Industrial Triangle to Poland, to great dismay in both Germany and Britain. Nevertheless, about half a million Poles and Szlonzaks were left in German Silesia, most of them in the Oppeln region [Polish: Opole]. Therefore, about 100,000 people from the German part moved to the Polish one, and vice versa..
German propaganda claimed that there would be no lasting peace in Europe unless Germany recovered Danzig, the Corridor, and Upper Silesia, claiming that all these territories were preponderantly German. This was belied by the Prussian Census of 1910 (although it did not include Szlonzoks), but hardly anyone bothered to look at it. German propaganda reinforced the opinion of British and American elites that these territories should return peacefully to Germany. British sympathy for Germany fitted the traditional British view that Central Europe was the natural sphere of German influence. This view, in turn, was to underpin the British-led appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.
 
LECTURE NOTES 11 B.
  POLAND AND SOVIET RUSSIA: 1917-1921.
THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, THE POLISH-SOVIET WAR, AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE POLISH-SOVIET FRONTIER .
C. The Polish-Soviet War.
This war began in 1919, but most of the fighting occurred in 1920.
As German troops pulled out of Belarus in late 1918 and early 1919, Red Army troops began to seep in. Polish troops advanced east and clashed with them at Bereza Kartuska in February 1919. In April, the Polish army drove the Litbel government out of Wilno/Vilnius, which then had a predominantly Polish and Jewish population (about 50-50), some Belarusians and only about 2% Lithuanians.
The French and British governments, which supported the Whites (anti-communists) in the Russian Civil War, tried to persuade Pilsudski to go on fighting the Red Army, but to keep recovered eastern territories "in trust" for Russia. He refused and proposed that a plebiscite be held in the borderlands under League of Nations auspices, but the western powers ignored this offer. Therefore, Pilsudski adopted a passive stance toward the Russian Civil War, not helping either the Whites or Reds, but objectively helping the Reds because he did not attack them.
In December 1919, the Red Army was clearly winning the Civil War and the Soviet government sent peace proposals to the Polish government. Pilsudski rejected negotiations, suspecting the Soviets only wanted a breather before attacking Poland. At this time, the French and British were pulling their troops out of Russia and wanted to avert a Polish-Soviet war.
On 8 December 1919, the Allied Supreme Council in Paris proposed a demarcation line between the Polish and Russian "administrations." This line, which was specifically stated not to be the frontier, was roughly equivalent to the eastern border of Russian Poland, which was ethnically Polish, but it had two possible variations in East Galicia (formerly part of Austrian Poland): one of which left Lwow [Ukr L’viv, Rus. Lvov] then predominantly Polish, and the neighboring oil fields, on the Russian side (Line A), while the other left them on the Polish side (Line B). Pilsudski ignored this proposal. His goal was a federation between Poland, Lithuania and Belorussia, and alliance with an independent Ukraine.
In June 1920, a Red Army offensive drove out the Poles who retreated westward, and was approaching Warsaw in late June. On July 2, the Soviet commander, Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky (1893-1937), issued an "Order of the Day" to his troops calling them to press "onward to Berlin over the corpse of Poland!" A group of Polish communists headed by Felix Dzerzhynsky (P. Feliks Dzierzynski), head of the Cheka (Soviet Secret Police), set up a Polish Revolutionary Committee in Bialystok, It was clearly the embryo of a communist government for Poland.
In this situation, the Polish government sent a delegation to Spa, Belgium - where the French and British prime ministers were meeting to discuss German reparations - to ask them for help. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was furious with the Poles for marching into Ukraine because he was negotiating a trade agreement with a Bolshevik delegation in London; also, he feared a German revolution if the Red Army reached Germany. Therefore, the British government proposed a demarcation line based on the Supreme Council Line of December 8, 1919, but this was now called the "Curzon Line" after British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon (who did not draw it up).  The Polish delegation at Spa had agreed to negotiate with the Soviets on the basis of the current Polish-Soviet frontline in East Galicia-- but the British extended the Curzon Line into East Galicia without telling them, leaving the then predominantly Polish city of Lwow (Lviv) and the oil fields on the Soviet side,
However, the Bolshevik government. sure of victory, refused this British offer. Meanwhile, an Anglo-French diplomatic mission and a military mission were sent to Poland as a sign of allied support for her independence. The French General Maxime Weygand (1867-1965) was to take over command of the Polish army. He arrived with some French officers, including captain Charles De Gaulle (1890-1970, leader of the Free French in World War II, head of French governments 1945-46, President 1958-69).
The Poles were in a very difficult position. Germany proclaimed neutrality and refused passage to French arms and munitions for Poland. In Czechoslovakia, railway workers refused to let trains with military supplies go through to Poland.
British dock workers sympathized with the Bolsheviks, so they threatened to strike if ordered to load ships for the Poles.
The only way French supplies could reach Poland was through Danzig.[P. Gdansk], but Lloyd George, who was negotiating a trade treaty with Bolshevik delegates in London, ordered the British League High Commissioner Sir Reginald Tower,  to refuse permission for unloading French ships, and the German Danzig dockers threatened to strike if they were ordered to unload them.
Nevertheless, the Poles unloaded some supplies in the fishing port of Gdynia, about 20 miles west of Danzig in the "Polish Corridor." (This experience led to the developmnt of Gdynia into a Polish port city; work began there in 1924). They also unloaded supplies from French ships, standing off Danzig, onto barges which proceeded directly to Tczew (German: Dirschau), whence they were loaded on trains to Warsaw, and then to the front.
As mentioned earlier, in early July the Soviet government refused the British offer of the Curzon Line. In the official answer, given by the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Georgii V. Chicherin (1872-1936), the Bolshevik government said it desired direct negotiations with the Poles to whom it would offer far more territory than the Curzon Line. Encouraged by the British, the Poles agreed to negotiate.
However, the Soviet demands put to the Polish delegation in August in Minsk were draconian. They involved not only loss of territory --basically the Curzon Line with East Galicia, thus leaving Lwow/L’viv and the oil fields to the Soviets, though with modifications in Poland’s favor in the Bialystok and Chelm [Russian: Kholm] regions --but also the following: disarmament, the establishment of a "workers’ militia," and the Soviet right of free transit of passengers and goods through Poland along the Volkovysk-Grayevo railway, which was to be in Soviet possession. The acceptance of these terms would have made Poland a Soviet satellite. The Poles refused, though Lloyd George had urged them to accept. (The French did not).

Significance of the Polish victory.
(i) It saved not only Poland but also the Baltic States, and perhaps the rest of Central Europe, as well from Soviet conquest thus allowing the development of independent states in this region.
(ii) It forced the Soviet government to focus on rebuilding the Russian economy by introducing the "New Economic Policy" (NEP), a mixture of socialism and capitalism (1921-28).
However, neither the factors leading to the Polish-Soviet war, nor the significance of its outcome were understood by most observers in the West. On the contrary, many western politicians and journalists accused Poland of having started an "imperialist war" against Soviet Russia and of annexing "Russian" lands --though these were, in fact, inhabited mostly by Belarusians and Ukrainians with signifcant Polish minorities. At the time,the Belarusians and Ukrainians were not strong enough to become independent. As it turned out, they were to suffer much less under Polish rule than their brothers in the USSR who came under the iron fist of Joseph V. Stalin. Soviet propaganda constantly accused the Poles of oppressing the Ukrainians and Belorussians, and demanded their "self-determination," which meant annexing Western Belarus and Ukraine to the Soviet Belarussian and Ukrainian Republics. In the early 1930s, millions or Soviet citizens were to starve, especially in Ukraine, as the result of Stalin's policy of forced collectivization.

[steverodgers801]

The only way the Poles could have been saved was to fight ww3 and Britain was not capable and the US wanted to finish the war against Japan

[4thskorpion]

Poland was saved it was saved from German occupation by the Red Army and the Polish First Army!

It has always been easier for some Poles to blame Churchill, or Roosevelt, or Stalin than to ask why did the London based Polish government-in-exile fail so lamentably in achieving its own political agenda within the allied camp.

VE Day 70th anniversary: We should never forget - the Soviets won World War II in Europe

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 39369.html

Maybe Retinger should not have persuaded Churchill to allow Sikorski and the remnants of the escaping Polish forces into Great Britain from France and instead let the Poles fight their way back into Poland from there!

[wm]

To be a saviour the person have to act with the intent to save/help.
Stalin didn't intent to help, he wanted to reduce Poland to a client state and to sovietize her people - committing cultural genocide in the process.
If Stalin were a saviour then Hitler were too - by saving the thousands and thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians from execution or deportation by the Soviets in 1941.

[4thskorpion]

"Committing cultural genocide"???? Totally meaningless and wm you already posted elsewhere that for most, life in communist Poland wasn't that bad really...much to my surprise.

The inescapable reality was, if not the Red Army and Polish First Army, who else was going to save Poland... The US and Britain? Never on the cards, the "Big Three" had agreed that Eastern Europe was to be liberated by the USSR and would be part of the Soviet sphere. The Normandy invasion would not have happened without the Red Army advancing from the East into Poland AND THEN TO Berlin. Poland was never going to be able to save itself, it couldn't even liberate its capital city Warsaw after 5 years of German occupation without needing the help of the USSR which was not ever going to be forthcoming. The Polish government in London were busy doing what Churchill counselled against when he said; "There is no use prowling morbidly round the three year old graves at Smolensk."

Was there any Polish territory liberated from German occupation by the Poles without the Red Army?

So I guess for some the lesser evil for Poland was continued German occupation and the murder of three million Polish Jews with a similar number of non-Jews, the forced labour of (how many million?) Poles in Germany, no higher education for Poles, German only residential districts, etc. meanwhile in the relative safety of exile in London the Polish government failed miserably to have any influence with its allies on the fate of the homeland.

[wm]

To win the war Stalin had to remove the Nazis from Poland. He had no other choice. So he did it for himself not for the Poles.

The term cultural genocide is sufficiently real to have its own Wikipedia article. Seems as real as the Polish Jew who invented the concepts "cultural genocide" and "genocide".

[Steve]

Prior to General Sikorski signing an agreement with the USSR in July 1941 he received a note from the British Government. The wording of the note had been agreed by Churchill and the Cabinet. It said that "The British Government did not recognize territorial changes affecting Poland made since August 1939". It is clear that in the negotiations between Churchill and Stalin Churchill did recognize the Molotov Ribbentrop line as the basis for the border between the USSR and Poland. The note given to Sikorski would appear to be a lie. Unfortunately for Poland Churchill seems to have enjoyed the company of Stalin.

[4thskorpion]

To win the war Stalin had to remove the Nazis from Poland. He had no other choice. So he did it for himself not for the Poles.

The term cultural genocide is sufficiently real to have its own Wikipedia article. Seems as real as the Polish Jew who invented the concepts "cultural genocide" and "genocide".

Your wiki reference also states the meaning of the term remains "undefined" which in my book renders the term meaningless:

The drafters of the 1948 Genocide Convention considered the use of the term, but dropped it from their consideration.[4][5][6] The legal definition of genocide is unspecific about the exact way in which genocide is committed, only stating that it is destruction with the intent to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or national group as such.[7]

Article 7 of a 1994 draft of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples used the phrase "cultural genocide" but did not define what it meant.

Furthermore in the context of your use of the term vis-à-vis communist Poland I remind you of your previous statement below:

I have to agree, however, that pre-war Poland ceased to be in September 1939 - destroyed by Germany and the USSR. What was created afterwards was a different entity which would, aside from the official language, have hardly been recognised by my parents or grandparents.

The lives of most of the people - the peasants, the middle class changed very little. Polish psychological or dramatical movies, or even comedies from the fifties and sixties show quite nicely that the customs, the people were as they were before - despite all the efforts of the communist regime. IN fact the pre-war Polish traditions and the way of life survive even today, they weren't eradicated as it happened for example in the Stalinist Russia.

[4thskorpion]

Prior to General Sikorski signing an agreement with the USSR in July 1941 he received a note from the British Government. The wording of the note had been agreed by Churchill and the Cabinet. It said that "The British Government did not recognize territorial changes affecting Poland made since August 1939". It is clear that in the negotiations between Churchill and Stalin Churchill did recognize the Molotov Ribbentrop line as the basis for the border between the USSR and Poland. The note given to Sikorski would appear to be a lie. Unfortunately for Poland Churchill seems to have enjoyed the company of Stalin.

Unlike the fractious Polish government-in-exile Churchill accepted that without Stalin and the Red Army (supported with the industrial resources of the US) there would be no defeat of Nazi Germany. The pre-war British-Polish agreements precluded any guarantee of Polish borders and only committed Great Britian to act specifically against German aggression - not aggression by USSR or any other power.

It was up to the Poles to reach agreement with the USSR which they failed to do and that continued failure was not Churchill's it was the Polish government-in-exile's responsibility. It is easier to blame someone else for one's own shortcomings. Unfortunately the plans offered by Retinger and Sikorski came to naught...another case of "what if".

Churchill speech in House of Commons (Hansard Dec 15 December 1944) :

I have the greatest respect for M. Mikolajczyk, and for his able colleagues who joined us at Moscow, Mr. Romer and Mr. Grabski. I am sure they are more qualified to fill the place of the late General Sikorski than any other of the Polish leaders. After endless discussions, into some of which we were drawn, on Mr. Mikolajczyk's return from Moscow the Poles utterly failed to obtain agreement. In consequence, on 24th November, Mr. Mikolajczyk, Mr. Romer and a number of other Polish Ministers resigned from the Polish Government, which has been almost entirely reconstituted in a form which in some respects I certainly am not able to applaud. Mr. Mikolajczyk and his friends remain, in the view of His Majesty's Government, the only light which burns for Poland in the immediate future.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Just as I said that if the Polish Government had agreed, in the early part of this year, upon the frontier there never would have been any Lublin Committee to which Soviet Russia had committed herself, so I now say that if Mr. Mikolajczyk could swiftly have returned to Moscow early in November, as he hoped and expected to do, with the power to conclude an agreement on the frontier line, Poland might now have taken her full place in the ranks of the nations contending against Germany, and would have had the full support and friendship of Marshal Stalin and the Soviet Government. That opportunity, too, has been, for the time being, suspended. This prospect has vanished like the last.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The consequences of this rescission of hopes of a working agreement between Russia and the Poles have been masked to British eyes by the fact that the Russian Armies on the long Vistula front have been motionless, but when they move forward, as move forward they surely will, and the Germans are expelled from large new tracts of Poland, the area administered by the Lublin Committee will grow, and its contacts with the Soviet Government will become more intimate and strong. I do not know what misfortunes will attend such a development. The absence of an agreement may well be grievous for Poland, and the relationship and misunderstandings between the advancing Russian Armies and the Polish underground movement may take forms which will be most painful to all who have the permanent well-being of Poland and her relationship with Russia at heart.

Mr. Price (MP Forest of Dean) in response to Churchill speech in House of Commons (Hansard Dec 15 December 1944):

But it is as well occasionally to speak a little frankly, as the Prime Minister has rightly done to-day. In regard to the meeting of the three great Powers, to which he referred in his closing remarks, I hope that the Prime Minister will not risk his health in going abroad again, as he did last year. I hope that it will be possible to induce Marshal Stalin, or some nominee of his, to come out of Russia and meet, if possible, in this country. When we last discussed the Russo-Polish situation in September we hoped that the elements in Poland friendly to Russia would be able to bring about a reconciliation on these important matters. But, alas, I fear that the spirit of Pilsudski still broods over the Council Chamber of the Polish Government in London. There are two great national characteristics which the Poles have; the first is unexampled bravery, and the second is complete inability to get out of the world of make-believe in which they love to live. It was their undoing in the 18th century, and it led to the partition which bedevilled European politics for over a century. This is the world of make-believe in which some Poles, I do not say all, are living to-day. They think they can perpetuate that highly artificial and quite temporary predominance, both military and diplomatic, which they enjoyed in Eastern Europebetween the two wars.

[fuser]

Are we talking about people who drafted Atlantic Charter and in mere months declared that all these "freedom" "self-determination" shit only applies to nations occupied by Germany.

[wm]

There is a huge difference between accepting necessary evil, legitimizing evil and creating evil for own political benefits.
Churchill and Roosevelt not only legitimized illegal regimes and annexations of entire nations making the fight for freedom much harder for the people living there.
They sold them for tangible political benefits like Stalin's participation in the war with Japan, and Stalin's participation in the postwar new world order - including global power sharing agreements (like the Four Policemen plan).

Even more, it wasn't a mere sell-out, it was a naive and counterproductive sell-out, because they gained nothing in the process. One might say: They were given the choice between cold war and dishonor. They chose dishonor, and they had cold war.

In Poland a cultural genocide was going on till the death of Stalin. Later the regime became more mellow and accommodating mainly because of the strength of Polish culture not because they abandoned their sovietisation efforts.
Still millions of Poles were forced to emigrate and from the economical point of view the country suffered more than under the Nazi occupation.
The life was as before, but in the sixties and seventies it shouldn't be like before, in the thirties. The world changed enormously in that period. The life was reasonably nice by the standards of the pre-war Poland.

The words:

When we last discussed the Russo-Polish situation in September we hoped that the elements in Poland friendly to Russia would be able to bring about a reconciliation on these important matters.

don't sound so harmless when we replace a single word there and assume it was 1939:

When we last discussed the German-Polish situation in September we hoped that the elements in Poland friendly to Germany would be able to bring about a reconciliation on these important matters.

[4thskorpion]

Are we talking about people who drafted Atlantic Charter and in mere months declared that all these "freedom" "self-determination" shit only applies to nations occupied by Germany.

In relation to Poland:

Churchill was unhappy with the inclusion of references to peoples' right to "self-determination" and stated that he considered the Charter an "interim and partial statement of war aims designed to reassure all countries of our righteous purpose and not the complete structure which we should build after the victory." An office of the Polish Government in Exile wrote to warn Władysław Sikorski that if the Charter was implemented with regards to national self-determination, it would make the desired Polish annexation of Danzig, East Prussia and parts of German Silesia impossible, which led the Poles to approach Britain asking for a flexible interpretation of the Charter.

So it seems not even the Polish government-in-exile were happy with the potential negative affect of the Charter on their own desire for territorial aggrandizement at the expense of post-war Germany.

What role did the USSR play in the drafting of the Atlantic Charter?

[4thskorpion]

...from the economical point of view the country suffered more than under the Nazi occupation.

Really?

[wm]

Of course, below the GDP per capita of Spain and the Soviet block, before the war Spain and the Eastern Europe were equally poor, rural and backward:


another, this time GDPs:



"Self-dermination" never was,and even today isn't a valid and accepted rule in international law, but the principle of inviolability of borders was/is. It was just a rule of thumb for the victorious allies as they were redrawing the borders of Europe.
The Poles pointed out to the Allies the naivety and contradictions inherent in the concept of self-determination, nothing more.