Warsaw Uprising

Before a country was placed on two empires’ map

To understand 23 August 1939, one must first see what kind of Poland was placed on the negotiating table. The Second Polish Republic had been rebuilt from the partitions of the empires in 1918, then fixed between Germany and Soviet Russia through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the border wars of 1919–1921. Its population stood at about 35.1 million in 1939, but it was not a state of Poles alone. Ukrainians made up 13.9 percent, Ashkenazi Jews 10 percent, Belarusians 3.1 percent, and Germans 2.3 percent. The eastern countryside and western industrial districts were sharply unequal, while the state had to bind together different imperial legacies and borders through one army and administration. The Home Army that would later fight in Warsaw grew out of the effort to preserve these state institutions underground during the war.

Politically, the republic began as a parliamentary state but changed after Józef Piłsudski’s May 1926 coup into the authoritarian Sanacja, or “healing,” regime. After the 1935 constitution, the country was directed by President Ignacy Mościcki, Foreign Minister Józef Beck, and Commander-in-Chief Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The government imprisoned opponents and manipulated elections, while discrimination against Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews also intensified. The Polish ruling group of 1939 therefore cannot be turned into uncomplicated defenders of democracy. Yet its defence of sovereignty was not merely rhetoric. Germany sought to overturn the Versailles settlement and demanded Danzig and the Polish Corridor, while the Soviet state carried memories of the 1920 war and its own claims concerning the eastern frontier. Becoming a protectorate of either neighbour meant the disappearance of an independent state.

The crisis acquired a military shape when Britain and France guaranteed Polish independence in March 1939 and Adolf Hitler repudiated the 1934 German-Polish declaration of non-aggression in April. Warsaw expected Western assistance, but it also refused to accept Soviet troops entering or crossing Polish territory to fight Germany. Moscow believed the West wanted to divert German aggression eastward, while London and Paris distrusted Soviet military power. In that deadlock, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August. The public treaty promised ten years of mutual non-aggression, but its Secret Additional Protocol divided Poland into German and Soviet spheres. The frontier was not yet fixed by battle, but the right to decide Poland’s existence had already been exercised outside Poland. The dual occupation of September, and the exile government, underground state, and Home Army that followed, began under conditions created by that document.