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Encyclopedia of Invasions & Conquests, Fourth Edition

Poland, Nazi Conquest of

Hitler’s armies occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, in the wake of a promise that he had no more territorial ambitions in Europe after acquiring the Czech province of the Sudetenland. European leaders finally stiffened their resolve to resist further German expansion. Hitler, of course, assured them that he wanted nothing else after he gained the small Baltic port of Memel in late March from the Lithuanians, who had received the city as part of the Versailles Treaty. Control of Memel extended the coast of East Prussia farther north and gave Germany a port on the Baltic.

Both Britain and France alerted Poland in April 1939 that they would honor their defense treaty, unlike their actions concerning Czechoslovakia. This guarantee of Polish sovereignty created a huge amount of tension through the spring and summer of 1939, because to protect Poland, the Western democracies had to have the support of the Soviet Union; what form that support would take was the overriding question. Britain wanted Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to announce a similar guarantee of Polish sovereignty, but Stalin wanted more: an alliance with the West—a 10-year mutual-defense agreement. The British government thought this would be too provocative to Germany, making war more likely, and the British still wanted to deal with Hitler through diplomacy. The Soviets saw Britain’s hesitation as a rejection of their country as a serious power. Further, Britain and France sought to guarantee the sovereignty of Rumania as well, and Stalin saw this as a Western ploy to gain control over eastern Europe, which Stalin considered his sphere of influence. When he could not gain the agreement he desired from the Western powers, Stalin began to look to Germany for common ground.

Hitler watching German soldiers march into Poland in September 1939.

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Photo by Bundesarchiv, via Wikimedia Commons.

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In the 1920s Germany had fairly close ties to the new Soviet Union. The German military had trained at Russian bases and cooperated in producing poison gas. That relationship had come to an end when Hitler came to power in 1933 and signed a nonaggression pact with Poland. By the spring of 1939, however, it looked as if those ties might be renewed. If the Western powers would not guarantee Soviet dominance over eastern Europe, perhaps Hitler would. After all, Germany’s military alliance with Italy, the “Pact of Steel” signed in late May, was clearly directed against Britain and France; certainly Hitler would not be interested in eastern Europe anytime soon. As Soviet relations with the Western powers deteriorated, relations with Germany reopened.

If Hitler had to fight Britain and France, the last thing he wanted was a two-front war. Therefore, Germany started the process by having Foreign Minister Ribbentrop send out feelers to new Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov. The two conducted secret negotiations throughout the summer as Anglo-Soviet relations deteriorated.

In the meantime, Hitler prepared for aggression against Poland. In creating an independent Poland, the Versailles Treaty gave the country a seaport on the Baltic at Danzig. While termed a “free city,” Danzig was totally German in its population. Further, Poland was granted land on either side of the city, the so-called Danzig Corridor, an action that created a detached German state, East Prussia. Using the same rationale he had used in overtaking Austria and the Sudetenland, Hitler began agitating for all German-speaking people to be under one government. In this case, that meant Danzig and the corridor. If Poland would merely cede the city and area to Germany, Hitler claimed that he had no more territorial demands in Europe. Such an action would make Poland landlocked.

This demand brought the British and French guarantees to Poland; they had no desire to look the fools again after the Sudetenland debacle. The only problems were: Hitler did not believe the Western democracies now any more than he had earlier; and Poland was so isolated that direct British and French intervention would be nearly impossible. Hence, Soviet aid was vital, but the Western powers would not give Stalin what he wanted. The Soviets continued to play both ends against the middle, waiting for the best offer from either side. They finally signed a nonaggression pact with Germany on 23 August, an agreement that shocked the world. Ever since Hitler had entered politics, he had been virulently anti-Communist, and Stalin had never expressed any love for Nazism. The Polish government was in a state of panic; it had assumed that Stalin would never allow Nazis on his doorstep, and now Poland was stuck in the middle of these strange bedfellows. With this agreement in hand, Hitler ordered Nazis in Danzig to provoke an incident with Poland.

There was no formal declaration of war. Early on the morning of 1 September, German aircraft flew into Polish airspace and attacked airfields, road junctions, troop concentrations, and command centers. Fast-moving armored columns with close infantry support crossed the border just before dawn. The Poles were the first to be on the receiving end of the blitzkrieg, or lightning war. This strategy of using rapid thrusts to surround and cut off troop formations or defensive strong points, then letting them starve or be mopped up by infantry, had been theorized by British military thinkers between wars, but German theorists perfected it. The close air support, which assisted the attacking columns once the strategic targets were destroyed, was highly successful because most German air crews had had on-the-job training in close support operations while assisting Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War.

The Polish army, though three million strong, was unprepared for this style of warfare. Because the Polish forces were called to protect the capital city of Warsaw, the defenseless countryside gave Soviet troops an easy opening to come pouring in from the east on 17 September. Unknown until that moment was a secret clause in the nonaggression pact Hitler and Stalin had just signed that called for Poland to be divided between the two countries so that each could have a buffer zone from the other. Attacked from two sides and hopelessly outclassed, Polish authorities were obliged to surrender. Warsaw fell on 28 September, and all fighting ended by 1 October.

Britain reluctantly fulfilled its obligations to Poland, in a manner of speaking. The British government declared war on 3 September, with the French government following suit soon thereafter, but did nothing to help the Poles. The Poles did not see one British or French soldier, aircraft, or ship. All they got from the alliance was the knowledge that the world was going to war over them.

The German occupation was a harsh one because Hitler soon began implementing his “final solution” for European Jews. Occupied Poland was the site of most of the Nazi death camps, including the infamous Auschwitz and Treblinka camps. Poland was also the staging ground for later German aggression. When Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Poland provided the base for German army groups heading for Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and the Caucasus. When the tide turned and Soviet troops entered Poland in 1944, the German occupation forces in Warsaw put down a massive uprising in the Jewish ghetto by destroying virtually every building and killing every person in that area. Classed asuntermensch (subhumans), according to Hitler’s racial theories, all Poles, Jewish or not, suffered simply because of their heritage. A nation crisscrossed by armies since the time of the Roman Empire endured yet another brutal experience at the hands of foreign soldiers.

See also: Czechoslovakia, Nazi Occupation of; Germany, Soviet Invasion of.

References:

1 

Guderian, Heinz, Pander Leader (New York: Dutton, 1957); Liddell Hart, Basil, History of the Second World War (New York: Putnam, 1970); Shirer, William, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960).

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MLA 9th
, . "Poland, Nazi Conquest Of." Encyclopedia of Invasions & Conquests, Fourth Edition, edited by Paul K. Davis, Salem Press, 2023. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GHInv4e_0240.
APA 7th
, . (2023). Poland, Nazi Conquest of. In P. K. Davis (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Invasions & Conquests, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
,. "Poland, Nazi Conquest Of." Edited by Paul K. Davis. Encyclopedia of Invasions & Conquests, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2023. Accessed October 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.