On the brink of 1939 once again
Władysław Teofil BARTOSZEWSKI
‘If we let Putin win the war in Ukraine, we let him cross the Rubicon. In a few years it will lead to war with one or more NATO members and a conflict in the Far East’, says Władysław Teofil BARTOSZEWSKI
.Historical analogies are often highly contentious and frequently entirely misplaced. But it seems fair to compare the past ten years to the 1930s to prevent history from repeating itself. ‘We live in a pre-war era’, Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared a short while ago. ‘We must accept that new times are here. Everything hinges on the next two years.’ Whenever I have talked to allied defence ministers recently, there has been speculation about a potential armed conflict between NATO members and the Russian Federation in three, five, or eight years. None claimed it was absolutely impossible. According to historian Timothy Snyder, the current international situation resembles the circumstances of 1938, when democratic nations had the opportunity to make choices that would have prevented the war. Their failure to seize that chance resulted in the outbreak of the Second World War, causing the loss of at least 60 million lives and the devastating genocide of 6 million European Jews and around 50 per cent of Romani and Sinti. It also inflicted unbelievable devastation on Poland. No other country suffered as many casualties per 1,000 inhabitants or experienced comparable material losses.
In 1927, Adolf Hitler published the second part of his tirade, Mein Kampf, detailing his vision of the world and his political and military ambitions. After seizing power in Germany in 1933, he swiftly established himself as a dictator and began preparing to carry out his criminal plans. The international community, including England, France, and the League of Nations – an organisation supposedly established to prevent wars – did nothing. The English Labour Party was firmly against rearming the country until 1939. The Tories ignored the persecution of German Jews and the opposition, blaming it on the Treaty of Versailles. Extremist public statements by Hitler were dismissed by the establishment as ‘domestic rhetoric’ (The Times, 10 July 1934). The militarization of the Rhineland in 1936 – which could have easily been prevented by France alone, had it possessed the will to fight – became a reality. Hitler later confessed that Germany would have been forced to withdraw if the French had employed military action. In England, fear of war (the memory of losses in the First World War and horror at the prospect of bombing) coupled with a widespread policy of appeasement (‘this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country’) led to mass pacifism. Germany’s violation of treaties was acknowledged, yet no real action was taken. With a clear path ahead of him, Hitler continued to rearm and formed the Rome–Berlin Axis with Italy and Japan (while the latter engaged in an unchecked attack against China and Ethiopia). Given the lack of response from England and France (the United States had an isolationist policy, far removed from President Wilson’s actions), Hitler decided in 1937 that he could and would occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia.
In March, he took Austria without facing any resistance. In September 1938, Prime Ministers Chamberlain and Daladier effectively compelled Czech President Edvard Beneš to cede the Sudetenland to Germany, claiming they were thus saving peace in Europe. In reality, they caused the outbreak of the Second World War. Timothy Snyder recently stated clearly that this was the last moment to stop Hitler.
The Munich Conference in September 1938 was not only a diplomatic humiliation for France and England but also a military disaster. All the fortifications defending Czechoslovakia against Germany were located in the mountainous Sudetenland. After losing these military installations, Czechoslovakia had no means to defend itself against an attack from the north. In March 1939, Germany marched into Prague and took control of 40 well-armed and well-trained Czech divisions. They also seized the best arms industry in Europe. In addition to the Austrian forces (12 divisions) and their own units that no longer had to be led south, the Germans gained an extra 80 divisions that could be used against other countries! England and France looked the other way, letting Hitler take over Europe.
At the turn of the years 1938-1939, the British finally understood that war was inevitable and rushed to rearm. The French believed in the strength of their army (the largest in Europe) and in the Maginot Line, supposedly impregnable. Hitler planned to invade his longstanding enemy, Poland, and denounced the non-aggression pact of 1934. In March and April 1939, the British offered Poland guarantees of military assistance in the event of aggression. In May, the Franco-Polish Warrant Agreement was renewed in the same spirit. Hitler ignored the treaties, correctly assuming that if England and France had not fought for Czechoslovakia, which would have been a very sensible military move, they would not fight for Poland. ‘I saw my enemies in Munich, and they are worms’, he told his general staff. An Anglo-French delegation travelled to Moscow in the hope of negotiating a military pact. Stalin, however, wanted a deal that would allow Soviet troops to enter Polish territory, leading to a prolonged occupation and the consequent takeover of our lands. Hitler was ready to make this concession in order to avoid a possible two-front war, which Germany dreaded after the experience of the First World War. On 23 August 1939, the agreement was made, and the Soviet Union was set to invade eastern Poland.
Two days later, Poland and Great Britain signed a treaty of alliance, soon joined by France. Poland received guarantees of military assistance that its allies had no intention of fulfilling. It was a bluff that delayed the outbreak of war by only six days, from the scheduled 26 August to the 1 September, when Germany attacked Poland. The Soviets struck on 17 September to ensure that Germany would not breach the agreed demarcation line.
On 3 September, England and France declared war on Germany. The British carried out several air raids on German naval bases and attempted a brief blockade. The French army made a timid attempt to enter the Saar Basin but ultimately withdrew. The local population shouted that they ‘would not die for Gdańsk’.
The Anschluss of Austria, the occupation of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia and the attack on Poland taught the French nothing. They believed that they could save their skins by letting Gdańsk fall. And so Europe’s biggest army fought less than a month, from 10 May to 22 June 1940. France had a vast and well-armed force, but it was poorly commanded, with old generals who remembered the horrors of trench warfare, which had broken their moral spines. They did not want to die for Paris. The few exceptions, such as General Charles de Gaulle, sought refuge in England, where he continued the fight.
The British at least made use of the time during the so-called Phoney War to produce combat aircraft and develop radar systems. When it came to the fight in the Battle of Britain, that foresight, combined with the skills and tenacity of pilots from Canada, Poland and Czechoslovakia, culminated in a spectacular victory. It paved the way for the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Had England surrendered in 1940, Hitler would have won the war.
History is a great teacher, but few learn from it. Eighty years after the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference in which he criticised the rules of international law adopted at the 1945 United Nations conference in San Francisco and attacked the United States and NATO. Apart from criticising the speech as provocative and reminiscent of the Cold War, the West didn’t pay much attention to it. It wasn’t until 15 years later that Andrew A. Michta, a prominent American analyst, wrote about Western leaders’ failure to comprehend it as a declaration of war against the West.
At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Poland, the Baltic states and the United States proposed admitting Ukraine and Georgia to NATO, but the motion was rejected by France and Germany. The summit concluded that these countries would become part of NATO, but they were not granted a Membership Action Plan. Less than six months later, the Russian Federation invaded Georgia and seized 20 per cent of its territory, which it continues to control through mercenaries to this day. This aggression was ignored, and soon after President Barack Obama proposed Putting a reset (ironically, no one in the State Department could correctly translate the symbolic meaning of this word into Russian, so Hillary Clinton used the term ‘overload’, which was actually more accurate). The policy of appeasement continued. President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed that ‘the Cold War is over’ and sought to sell modern landing ships to Russia. Germany became completely dependent on Russian gas supplies and, on both sides of its political spectrum, entangled itself economically and politically in relations with the Russian Federation. The Germans promoted the construction of Nord Stream I, which posed a threat not only to Poland and Ukraine but to a large part of Europe, including their own country. Anyone who criticised this policy was labelled a Russophobe, a detached, naive romantic or a madman. It was a repeat of Kaiser Wilhelm I’s policies and the delusions of Ostpolitik, or red wilhelminism.
In 2014, Russia illegally seized and annexed Crimea. An invasion of Donbas and Luhansk began. A small group of Polish writers and intellectuals wrote a letter that was published in several newspapers, including Gazeta Wyborcza, Le Monde, Die Welt, La Libre Belgique and The Economist, on 1 September, an important day for us. They wrote (after Maidan): ‘For the first time in history, citizens of a country were dying from bullets with the European flag in hand. If Europe does not act in solidarity with the Ukrainians now it will mean that it no longer believes in the values of the Revolution of 1789 – the values of freedom and brotherhood. Ukraine has the right to defend its territory and its citizens against outside aggression, also with the use of the police and the military, and also in regions bordering Russia. Over there, in the Donetsk Region as well as across the country, peace has reigned since Ukraine became independent in 1991: there has not been a single violent conflict, either against the background of minority rights or otherwise. By unleashing the dogs of war and by testing a new kind of aggression, Vladimir Putin has transformed Ukraine into a firing ground similar to Spain during the civil war, when fascist units, assisted by Nazi Germany, attacked the republic. Anyone who will not say “no pasarán” to Putin today places the European Union and its presumed values in a position of ridicule and consents to the destruction of international order.
No one knows who will rule Russia, say, three years from now. We do not know what will happen with the current Russian power elite which engages in rowdy politics inconsistent with the interests of its own people. But we know one thing: whoever follows today the policy of “business as usual” with respect to the Russian/Ukrainian conflict is turning a blind eye on successive thousands of Ukrainians and Russians dying, on successive hundreds of thousands of refugees and on attacks by Putin’s imperialist forces on successive countries. Yesterday it was Danzig, today it is Donetsk: we cannot allow a situation where Europe will be living again for many decades with an open and bleeding wound.’
No one reacted to that letter at the time. My father was one of the signatories. He passed away seven months later, having been spared the sight of the construction of Nord Stream II, the Russo-German ‘purely business project’ of useful idiots who spoke of Russlandversteher without knowing the country or the language, or who were agents of influence. He didn’t have to listen to opinions suggesting that the US and Russia were equally dangerous to world peace or other equally misguided statements purporting to be the ultimate truth.
.The lack of a decisive policy against Hitler, especially during the Munich Conference, reinforced his view that the large European countries would not fight and that the smaller ones could easily be defeated. Timothy Snyder is right that if Czechoslovakia had defended itself – which was possible before Munich but was no longer an option after the Anglo-French betrayal – there might have been a local war in Europe, but not a Second World War.
Had Europe firmly resisted Putin in 2014, there would have been no full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022. In 2021, Putin concluded that the West was weak, dependent on Russian resources and divided. Furthermore, the disorderly nature of the American military retreat from Afghanistan showed neither resolve nor a desire to combat. Putin decided to act. He has made a great error, as Western democracies demonstrated their commitment to essential values. However, we are now on the brink of 1939 once again. If we let Putin win the war in Ukraine, we let him cross the Rubicon. In a few years, it will lead to war with one or more NATO members and a conflict in the Far East.
