What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

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What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#1

Post by Futurist » 17 Aug 2018, 04:09

I've previously heard Michael Mills say that, even after he decided on an invasion of Poland, Hitler wanted to set up a Polish puppet state but Stalin vetoed the idea.

What was the territories that Hitler wanted to include in his Polish puppet state? Were it the exact same territories of the General Government? :

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Steve
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#2

Post by Steve » 22 Aug 2018, 02:49

A Swedish businessman named Dahlerus met Hitler and Goering on September 27 1939 in Berlin and he arrived in London September 29 with Hitler’s proposals for peace. He met Chamberlain, Halifax and Alexander Cadogan a civil servant who was the Under Secretary of State. In 1972 which from when my source dates there was apparently no mention of this meeting in published Government documents. However, Cadogan kept notes and we are told that with regard to Poland his notes dated October 4 say the following.

Poland in economic vassalage to Germany and military restrictions to prevent the country ever being a threat to Germany. Germany would occupy the old Reich border. Frontier rectification would take place in Slovakia particularly the region Poland had occupied. Germany would say nothing about the other side of the demarcation line- she was not interested in that. Settlement of Jewish question by using Poland “as a sink in which to empty the Jews”.

Presumably the old Reich border is the 1914 German Russian border so seemingly the area between that and the new demarcation line with the Soviets is what Hitler had in mind for a possible Polish state.

Mussolini was an advocate for a Polish state to remain in being. On September 9 Mussolini told the German ambassador that Hitler should agree to a “generous settlement” with a new Polish government. On September 15 the Italian ambassador to Germany told State Secretary Weizsacker that the Duce “desired a really magnanimous offer of peace” On October 1 Ciano the Italian Foreign Minister met Hitler and pressed him for details about a Polish rump state that would be set up as a condition of peace. Ciano did not know that six days previously Stalin had objected to any residual Polish state.
Source -The War Hitler Won by Nicolas Bethel


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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#3

Post by Futurist » 02 Sep 2018, 07:29

Very interesting information! Thanks for sharing, Steve!

Also, I wonder if, had a pro-Nazi Polish puppet state been created, this state would have been interested in pursuing the Holocaust together with Hitler. I mean, various Nazi allies had a smaller Holocaust death toll percentage than Nazi Germany had--though obviously still crazy high in many cases.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#4

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 04 Sep 2018, 11:56

I wonder what sort of state this would have been. By the 27th September Polish leaders, the educated, business men, including Jews were being arrested and confined pending transport to permanent confinement.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#5

Post by Futurist » 05 Sep 2018, 02:50

Carl Schwamberger wrote:
04 Sep 2018, 11:56
I wonder what sort of state this would have been. By the 27th September Polish leaders, the educated, business men, including Jews were being arrested and confined pending transport to permanent confinement.
Presumably it would have been a German satellite state whose job would be to make it easier (as in, requiring less German resources for this purpose) for Germany to handle Poland and also to serve as cannon fodder for Germany in a future war with the Soviet Union.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#6

Post by Sid Guttridge » 06 Sep 2018, 09:33

Hi Guys,

I would suggest that Hitler never wanted any sort of Polish puppet state once the country was in his possession, though he may have seen it as a temporary diplomatic expedient.

Poland was unique amongst Nazi occupied territories in that they never recognized any sort of successor Polish administration. From the moment Poland was in their possession they began to Germanize it. The creation of Himmlerstadt in 1943 shows that they intended to settle land far to the east of Warsaw. This left no scope for any notional Polish puppet state.

Besides, if Hitler wanted the Ukraine as lebensraum for the German people, he was hardly likely to welcome or want an intervening Polish state, however subservient. He couldn't even put up with a narrow corridor to East Prussia - and this was easily accessible by sea!

Cheers,

Sid.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#7

Post by Steve » 06 Sep 2018, 18:45

In article 2 of the secret protocol to the German Soviet Non-Aggression Pact it says:-

“The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish State and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments”.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#8

Post by Sid Guttridge » 06 Sep 2018, 20:35

Hi Steve,

.....and in little more than a month those "further political developments" had led to the complete extinction of the Polish state - again.

Sid.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#9

Post by Steve » 07 Sep 2018, 06:17

Hi, the wording in the secret protocol is rather odd but the historian Ian Kershaw in his book Hitler 1936-1945 p.237/8 has an explanation. To quote Kershaw “Territorial and political plans for Poland had not been finalised before the invasion . . . . . . . . . . . . On 7 September Hitler had been ready to negotiate with the Poles recognising a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France) together with an independent western Ukraine”.

In a speech in Danzig on September 19 Hitler said “So, we have beaten Poland within eighteen days and thus created a situation which perhaps makes it possible one day to speak to representatives of the Polish people calmly and reasonably” Was he thinking of setting up a vassal Polish state sometime in the future?

On October 6 in a speech to the Reichstag offering peace he said “Final re-organization of this territory and the question of re-establishment of the Polish State are problems which will not be solved by a war in the West but exclusively by Russia on the one hand and Germany on the other” Later on in the speech “formation of a Polish State so constituted and governed as to prevent its becoming once again either a hotbed of anti-German activity or a centre of intrigue against Germany and Russia.”

Hitler may have played with the idea but was probably never serious about it.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#10

Post by Futurist » 08 Sep 2018, 00:54

Steve wrote:
07 Sep 2018, 06:17
Hi, the wording in the secret protocol is rather odd but the historian Ian Kershaw in his book Hitler 1936-1945 p.237/8 has an explanation. To quote Kershaw “Territorial and political plans for Poland had not been finalised before the invasion . . . . . . . . . . . . On 7 September Hitler had been ready to negotiate with the Poles recognising a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France) together with an independent western Ukraine”.

In a speech in Danzig on September 19 Hitler said “So, we have beaten Poland within eighteen days and thus created a situation which perhaps makes it possible one day to speak to representatives of the Polish people calmly and reasonably” Was he thinking of setting up a vassal Polish state sometime in the future?

On October 6 in a speech to the Reichstag offering peace he said “Final re-organization of this territory and the question of re-establishment of the Polish State are problems which will not be solved by a war in the West but exclusively by Russia on the one hand and Germany on the other” Later on in the speech “formation of a Polish State so constituted and governed as to prevent its becoming once again either a hotbed of anti-German activity or a centre of intrigue against Germany and Russia.”

Hitler may have played with the idea but was probably never serious about it.
The part about an independent western Ukraine is certainly interesting. Given that this was after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was Hitler trying to make it easier for the Soviet Union to annex western Ukraine and western Belarus? I mean, if they voluntarily seceded from Poland and then joined the Soviet Union, it could look better in terms of public relations than if the Soviet Union would have simply annexed them.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#11

Post by Steve » 08 Sep 2018, 04:04

Hi, that Hitler was thinking of an independent West Ukraine does not seem to make sense but Kershaw knows his stuff. He also says that Ribbentrop proposed a division of Poland between Germany and Russia with the creation of an autonomous Galicia and West Ukraine.

The only explanation I can think of is that Hitler did not regard the boundary between Germany and Russia as definitively settled in the Pact signed in Moscow on August 23. It was though definitively settled in the German Soviet Boundary and Friendship treaty of September 28.

Perhaps Hitler thought that an independent West Ukraine (in name only) would make it easier to invade the Soviet Ukraine in the future.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#12

Post by Sid Guttridge » 08 Sep 2018, 11:11

Hi Guys,

Hitler harboured Ukrainian nationalists in Germany during the 1930s and encouraged their interference in largely Ukrainian-populated Ruthenia in the late 1930s as part of his plan to break up Czechoslovakia. He then betrayed them by allowing the Hungarians to take over Ruthenia at the very moment its Ukrainian population declared independence.

I would suggest that Hitler had no interest in creating a Ukrainian state, but was happy to use Ukrainian nationalists to destabilize Czechoslovakia, Poland and the USSR.

Cheers,

Sid.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#13

Post by Futurist » 09 Sep 2018, 01:15

Steve wrote:
08 Sep 2018, 04:04
Perhaps Hitler thought that an independent West Ukraine (in name only) would make it easier to invade the Soviet Ukraine in the future.
Why exactly would this be the case, though? Because Hitler could then claim that he was fighting for (among other things) the unification of the Ukrainian nation?

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#14

Post by Futurist » 09 Sep 2018, 01:15

Sid Guttridge wrote:
08 Sep 2018, 11:11
Hi Guys,

Hitler harboured Ukrainian nationalists in Germany during the 1930s and encouraged their interference in largely Ukrainian-populated Ruthenia in the late 1930s as part of his plan to break up Czechoslovakia. He then betrayed them by allowing the Hungarians to take over Ruthenia at the very moment its Ukrainian population declared independence.

I would suggest that Hitler had no interest in creating a Ukrainian state, but was happy to use Ukrainian nationalists to destabilize Czechoslovakia, Poland and the USSR.

Cheers,

Sid.
Yes, this certainly makes sense.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#15

Post by Steve » 14 Sep 2018, 04:50

Hi, If a puppet west Ukrainian state had been set up then the start line for the invasion of the Ukraine in 1941 would have been about 160 miles (as the crow flies) further east. Also obtaining the areas oil fields in 1939 would no doubt have come in handy.

The Czechs supported Ukrainian nationalists perhaps because of territorial disputes with Poland. In the 1930s they provided military training. The Germans supported Ukrainian organisations such as the O.U.N maybe seeing them as a way of destabilising the Polish state. In 1939 a force of about 600 Ukrainians put together in Germany under the command of a Colonel Roman Sushko took part in the September campaign. I don’t think that Hitler prior to Munich or later ever expressed support for an independent Ruthenia also called Carpatho-Ukraine.

The Ukrainian population in German occupied Poland were allowed their own language schools and cultural organisation something the Polish state had not allowed. Two Ukrainian units named Nightingale and Roland apparently recruited mainly in Poland and therefore presumably Polish citizens took part in the invasion of the USSR.

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