Myths and Lies of German Aggression on Poland

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The German and Soviet aggression on Poland in 1939 begun World War 2.
We all know the rest... or do we?

Poland in 1939 had:

• almost 36 million people
• almost 400,000 sq. km area
• almost $900 nominal GDP per capita (equal to $16,500 in 2019) [calculator]

Poland after 1946:
After the German and Russian invasion, 6 years of war, and the highest treason ever experienced by Poland in history, which happened in Tehran 1943 by the signatures of the Prime Minister of UK (the fat pig called Winston Churchill) and the President of USA (the paralytic communism-loving nitwit called Franklin Delano Roosevelt):

• barely 24 million people in 1946 (it took 40 years to reach 1939's population of 36 millions again)
• barely 312,000 sq. km area
• half a century of communist occupation and a quarter century of fake democracy governments run by the children of the commie bastards and their thieving friends, thanks to whom the nominal GDP per capita 80 years later - in the year 2019 - still has NOT reached the level from the year 1939 from before German-Soviet attack! [source] - although (if the prognosis is correct) it looks as it may finally happen in the middle of the year 2020, some 81 years since WW2 ...

MY FELLOW POLES:

DO NOT EVER FORGET THE NATIONS RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR COUNTRY'S LOSS OF A THIRD OF OUR POPULATION AND THE LOSS OF A THIRD OF OUR LANDS. MOREOVER, LET'S NOT FORGET THAT YOURS AND ALL OTHER POLISH FAMILIES' PROGRESS HAVE BEEN STOPPED AND TURNED INTO MISERY FOR THREE GENERATIONS SINCE.

ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE STILL PAYING FOR THE GERMAN AND SOVIET AGGRESSION AND THE ALLIES' TREASON FORGED IN TEHRAN. YOU'VE PAID AND STILL ARE PAYING FOR IT WITH YOUR SIGNIFICANTLY LOWERED STANDARD OF LIVING AND YEARS WASTED UNDER COMMUNIST OCCUPATION, WHILE THEIR CHILDREN ARE STILL REAPING THE REWARDS FROM THEIR ANCESTORS' AGGRESSION AND TREASON FOR 75 YEARS ALREADY.

While your great-grandparents in 1939 were living in a country with GDP higher than most European countries and almost the same as Japan, YOU NOW LIVE in a country where - 75 years later - the nominal GDP per capita still HAS NOT reached the GDP from the year 1939, and is still one of the lowest among civilized countries since WW2. It is so thanks to Germans, Russians, and the treason from our "friends" in UK and USA, who in 1943 sold us out to Soviet communists in exchange for Soviet promise of continued fight with Germany...
Always remember this, because those who don't remember their own history always repeat the same mistakes in the future.

© DeS
(Digitale Scriptor)
Originally written in 2004 as a comment on a forum, expanded in 2006;
updated with GDP stats in August 2009, July 2014, and again in 2019

This article is free to copy and distribute under Creative Commons Licence:
(CC-BY-NC-ND - By Attribution, No Commercial Use, No Derivatives - polskie tłumaczenie tutaj)

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Short address to this article: tiny.cc/1939

September 1, 1939, 4:45AM
German dreadnaught "Schleswig Holstein" shelling Polish Depot at Westerplatte from its 240mm canons.

Advancing German soldiers were burning, raping and murdering civilians everywhere.
The atrocities committed by vicious German hordes in 1939 Poland can be matched only by Russian and Japanese beasts during WW2, or the barbaric Mongol hordes of the Medieval times before them.

According to German propaganda (which continues even now!), on Septmeber 1st, 1939, the German "people" have "spontaneously liberated" the Polish Post Office in Free City Gdańsk from the "bandits".
Polish Post Office was defended by few postal workers with pistols and a carbine; you can see clearly the "peace-loving German people" in their own photographs taken during their attack on the Polish Post Office...

Literally millions of Poles have been executed by German Forces and ordinary Germans (and not by some mythical "nazis" as modern German propaganda want you to believe it nowadays)

German Luftwaffe's "knighthood" myth: when the Polish Air Force was wiped-out...
...they were "chivalrously" raining bullets on cities, villages, and hunting down the escaping civilians from the air...

One of many child victims of the "chivalrous" Luftwaffe.
(Photos taken by American reporter in the very first days of the German attack and published in USA)

More Polish civilian victims killed by the "chivalrous" Luftwaffe.
Many thousands of similar photos still exist in the archives. They all are documenting Luftwaffe's barbaric attacks on Polish civilians in every part of Poland in September of 1939 (which wasn't the first atrocity committed by Luftwaffe; their "Condor Legion" did exactly the same to Spanish civilians during Spanish Civil War few years earlier)
How many more of the very same (just not documented with photos) cases of German Luftwaffe's "chivalry" were actually there? Only God knows...

German hordes advancing on another Polish town.
Note the destruction of cities usually left after they passed through. It was like this everywhere!
And with so much destruction obviously indicating heavy fight... does it look like any "Blitzkrieg" to you?
(but more on the subject of "Blitzkrieg below)

Luftwaffe indiscriminately bombing Warsaw - in their own pictures published in 1939 German magazine
(very much the same as they did couple years later when they were bombing London, albeit they did not take as many pictures from bombing London as they did during bombing Poland in 1939)

German Navy's first salvo on Polish Depot in Westerplatte (Gdańsk) at 4:45AM is what is officially considered the beginning of WW2 nowadays. However, Germans have been already attacking in almost 100 other places along the Polish-German borders as early as 2:00AM. What most people don't know nowadays, is that they started the war already few days earlier with carefully planned and executed terrorist attacks in several Polish cities (i.e. planting bombs at the trains stations, destroying electrical grids, and such)

Polish Depot in Westerplatte (Gdansk) on fire, September 1st, 1939. It burnt like this for next 7 days.
Polish defenders of the Depot were prepared for, and supposed to hold there for 12hrs at most...

...yet they valiantly fought for 14 times longer!
Only the lack of drinking water forced them to surrender after a week-long battle.

Polish Depot at Westerplatte in Gdańsk after surrender.

Hitler had to see it for himself and visited the remains of the Polish Depot at Westerplatte.
It was very hard to believe that less than 200 Polish soldiers (majority of them just new conscripts) could have lasted that long against a force TEN times it's own size and consisting of the finest German SS-Infantry and German Marines, without any heavy weaponry at all - but under heavy shelling from German Navy and bombardment from the German Air Force. Only the complete lack of source of drinking water and depletion of their water reserves (prepared for at most 12 hrs of fighting) have forced the Poles to surrender the Depot after a week-long battle, during which they inflicted huge losses to Germans while losing very few of their own troops. Although most of Polish defenders of the Depot have survived the battle onslaught, most of them were executed by Germans after they surrendered.
No one else has fought so valiantly in past 2500 years since the 300 Spartans defended the pass at Thermopylae... Wikipedia: Battle of Westerplatte

Polish 7TP tanks in 1939 were BETTER in every way from any tanks used by Germans at that time.
They were also the first mass-produced tanks to use Diesel fuel (which is much safer than gasoline) and the first in the world to utilize a periscope optical viewing system designed by the Polish engineer, Rudolf Gundlach. His design had been quickly copied from captured Polish tanks almost immediately by Germans and Russians, and later by British and Americans (thinking they are copying German design!). By 1941 almost every tank in the world had been equipped with Gundlach's periscope optical viewing system, and it remains in use until today.

In spite of post-war communist propaganda trying to discredit the Second Polish Republic (as being backward), the Polish Army in 1939 was strong, relatively modern, and not that badly equipped (better than i.e. U.S. Army as of 1938!).
However, Polish Forces were obviously not strong enough to fight with TWO INVADING COUNTRIES AT ONCE.
In spite of German propaganda, Poland obviously did NOT lose in 1939 due to the so-called German "blitzkrieg" tactic.
FACTS: After weeks of fighting with Poles, Germans still haven't defeated them, and possibly they wouldn't do so at all. In the middle of September the German Army's HQ was alarming Hitler that their ammunition's reserves have been mostly depleted and will last for no more than a week of continued fight... while Poles still had another Army in the reserves on the Eastern borders!
By the September 17th, 1939 (the day the Russians joined the German invasion and attacked Poland from the East) the German advances in Poland came almost to stall along the line of Vistula river; it means they haven't captured even a third of Polish territories yet. Obviously it was only the helping hand from Russians (Soviets) with their massive Red Army invasion - a stab in the back - that have finally defeated Poland. Yet the myth of German "Blitzkrieg in Poland" continues even nowadays!
The best example of this false "blitzkrieg" propaganda is the simple fact, that the combined German-Soviet attack on Poland took just a week less to defeat Poles than what it took Germans alone to defeat the mighty France with her many-many-times larger than Polish forces...

Typical Polish AA Gun crew.
Because the Polish Air Force had only begun to be modernized just before the WWII, the PAF was no match for the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) and it was wiped-out in the first few days of the war.
Therefore such AA Gun units were the ones on which Poles had to rely on (to repel German Luftwaffe) and they were mainly the ones to cause the German Air Force to lose almost HALF of their fleet. Despite the air supremacy, the Luftwaffe lost 534 out of 1300 aircrafts in their attack on Poland in September 1939.
Again, such an incredibly high loss - despite total and uncontested German air supremacy - doesn't fit to German claims of "victorious blitzkrieg" at all, yet this outright lie from Nazi Germany's propaganda is being repeated even today!

Polish anti-tank carbines (Karabiny przeciwpancerne wz.35) and Polish high-velocity 36mm canons (below) simply MUST HAVE wreaked havoc on German tanks, since Germans - despite their 15 times larger tank force - have lost 1/3 of all the tanks during their so-called "blitzkrieg" in Poland.[sources]
And again, such high and heavy losses don't fit the definition of a "blitzkrieg" trumped by German propaganda back then and now... Yet this lie is still being repeated by many people today!

Designed by the Polish engineer Maroszek in 1934, the top-secret AT-rifles of the Polish Forces were the first armor-piercing weapons in the world to use very high velocity to penetrate any existing armor at that time.
Captured guns were later used by Germans and Italians until the end of WW2 (while supplies from conquered Polish Forces lasted), because even when the armor of later generation tanks had been thickened and composite materials had been used, these rifles were still very effective. Without any modifications it could penetrate every existing tank's armor until 1942, and even the newest and latest tanks of WWII were still penetrable by these rifles when hit from closer distances or sides.

Russians, who also captured small number of these Polish AT rifles, have tried copying them as well. However, no one was able to understand the nature of these guns and they couldn't figure out that the "secret" to their effectiveness was in the specially designed bullets and muzzle, not in the gun or it's caliber. When they finally came up with their copy of AT gun's design based on this Polish AT rifle (called "PTRD") in the 1940, it was twice the size and used twice the caliber - and yet it still couldn't penetrate the same armor as Polish 1930's-design AT rifle could...
It was in the 1960's when the Americans had finally started to use similar high velocity principles in their weapons, yes - almost 30 years later after Polish engineer Maroszek's kb. ppanc wz.35

Polish re-designed anti-tank "Bofors" canons.
An ancestor of the author of this article was a commander of such unit. His unit destroyed quite a few of the German tanks and armored vehicles in September of 1939.

Superior Polish tanks 7TP on parade in Bydgoszcz city before war, September 1937.
Poland was one of only a handful of countries in the world to manufacture their own tanks.
Unfortunately, after 100+ years of partition of the country and occupation by Germany, Russia and Austria, and the country's total destruction of most of the industry during World War 1, in the very short time of 20 years of existence of Polish Second Republic (1919-1939) Poles didn't have enough time and resources to build as much industry (and weapons) as the German Third Reich and Russian Soviet Union did. But Polish designs in the second half of 1930's had become top class in the world (not just weapons - i.e. shortly before war, in August of 1939, Poles were among the first few nations in the world to introduce daily TV broadcast!)

In September of 1939, if it weren't for simultaneous German and Soviet attacks, it is obvious that Poland would NOT have fallen, and the outcome of WW2 would have been drastically different. It is only the Soviet Union's alliance with Nazi Germany and the Soviet attack from the East (while Germany attacked from the West) was what brought the Second Polish Republic to collapse (and - subsequently - later brought so many European countries under Soviet occupation for the next half a century, but that's another story...)

And finally the worst lie of them all:
Polish Cavalry charging German tanks with sabers.

It was first created by one of the nazi reporters in 1939 and repeated by German propaganda during the WW2, but it wasn't until 1959 when famous Polish film director Andrzej Wajda added such fictitious scene in his 1959 film "Lotna". Why would he do it? Because at that time he was this young, not famous yet, communism-sympathizing and ambitious movie director trying to advance his career in communists-occupied Poland. Hence he try to suck it up to the communist rulers of Poland by showing in his film the soldiers of Second Polish Republic as being backward, under-equipped, disorganized, commanded by idiots, and - simply put - as "the loosers" fighting for the "wrong cause" (obviously the Soviet communism was the unspoken and looming in the background "right" cause that the Poles should have been fighting for). It was exactly along the official narration of the Polish communists propaganda on the reasons of why the Second Polish Republic had fallen in 1939 within a month (for political reasons the communists have always omitted the fact of simultaneous Soviet Union attack on Poland and their alliance with nazis during the first years of WW2).
Unfortunately this fictitious scene from Wajda's film had been picked up and used by many televisions in the world since, usually to illustrate the beginning of WW2, which obviously have helped to spread this lie.
That's the short story behind this most outrageous myth, and may I remind you why I say it is outrageous lie: because Poles have valiantly fought Germans for 6 long years (longer than any other nation) and even though their country had been again split and occupied by Germans and Russians, they have actually never surrendered (the Government of Poland moved to U.K. and remained there in exile long after the communists took over and occupied Poland for next half a century, until the collapse of communism in Poland, when it returned - albeit only symbolically - in 1990).
Throughout entire WW2 Poles kept fighting on all fronts of WW2 in Polish Forces in the West, and when the Soviet-Nazi alliance fell apart in 1941 they even fought in Polish "People's" Forces in the East (under Soviet communists command). And most importantly, Poles kept fighting a partisan, guerilla-style war in their occupied homeland (the underground Homeland Army was largest underground force in the entire WW2), many of which kept fighting communist occupiers long after the end of WW2... but that is yet another story.

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