'On the Plains of Poland'

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans invaded Poland from the west nine days later, on September 1, 1939. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. 

In one of those curious historical coincidences, on September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, then working as a writer-editor for Time magazine, met with assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle at his home in Washington, D.C. Chambers revealed his own background as part of the Soviet spy network, which included officials within the Roosevelt administration. He named names: Alger Hiss, among others. Berle was skeptical. He reported Chambers’ revelations to the president, who dismissed them. Berle then shared what he had heard with the FBI, who interviewed Chambers in March 1940, and again in 1942 and 1945. The FBI took no action. In Witness (1952), called by Hilton Kramer "one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American -- and one of the best written, too," Chambers describes what happened next:

 

“I had had to hurry from my office at Time magazine to the airport to catch the six o’clock flight for Washington. I fastened my safety belt, chewed my gum, lay back and closed my eyes. The great plane took off into the serene evening sky of September 2, 1939.

 

“On the plains of Poland, at the same moment, a new day was awakening the Polish nation to terror and insane distress as cavalry tried to turn back, with lance and rifle, a new force in the history of war and men—the German Panzer divisions.

 

“In Moscow, a few days before, Stalin, with a tigerish grin, and a more reserved Ribbentrop, had signed the pact that made Nazism and Communism allies. By the same scratch of the pen, Stalin had unloosed upon mankind, for the second time in two decades, the horror of world war."

    

Chambers had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union from 1932 until 1938, when he broke with communism. On August 3, 1948, Chambers testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He described the spy network at work in the late 1930s, including Hiss’ role. Though the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, in his second trial Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms in federal prison and eventually served three and a half years.

 

For further context, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation. Poland stands out:

 

“[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.”

 

Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between September 1 and October 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues:

 

“Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.”

 

In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”