Poland's refusal to strategise a defense put the Soviet Union in an understandably difficult situation, since Poland shared a border with them. If Poland were to be invaded it would be used as a launching pad to attack the USSR, which had happened numerous times in the recent past, including during WWI.
Despite the fact that Poland would have absolutely no ability to defend itself in the case of a German invasion, Lord Halifax used as his excuse for putting off serious negotiations with the USSR that it was due to Josef Beck's refusal to allow Russian soldiers to enter Poland, even if it were to drive back a Nazi army"who wanted to exterminate the Polish race as Hitler explicitly stated repeatedly.
Lord Halifax is on record after a meeting with Hitler having said of the fuhrer "By destroying communism in his [Hitler's] country, he had barred its road to Western Europe"Germany therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against communism." (4)
Nine days after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed on Sept 1, 1939 the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. After 18 days of fighting not a single Polish division was left. On Sept 17th, the Red Army entered eastern Poland and Poland ceased to exist.
This situation could have been avoided. Poland did not have to suffer the fate it did during WWII, which had the only concentration camp outside of Germany, near their shared border with the Soviet Union, meant to extinguish their race (and everyone knew that the Russians were next on the list).
Poland suffered this fate because Great Britain and France had decided that they were "expendable" for the destruction of the Russian people. Hitler would have to consume Poland before consuming the Soviet Union. By failing to organise an alliance as Stalin requested months beforehand, Germany was allowed to wreak havoc on numerous countries, each country left to attempt meekly to defend itself, and one by one they fell.
What was it all for?
Stalin was aware that Hitler would never leave Russia alone, and the pact was a desperate manoeuvre to attempt to buy time, it was his hope that Hitler would attack France and Great Britain and only then turn his attention towards Russia. We cannot judge this harshly, since it had already been decided by Britain and France to play those very cards. Since alliance was off the table, it was left to a matter of avoiding being first on the chopping block.
Churchill was convinced throughout the war and afterwards, that Stalin was no different from Hitler, and that no alliance could be trusted. Churchill feared that Stalin's greatest wish was to conquer and subdue western Europe. This fear and delay in forming a second front, by rejecting Eisenhower's Operation Sledgehammer and delaying Operation OVERLORD for months would cost many millions of innocent lives.
The United States chose to see the situation differently, as Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State from 1933-1944, wrote in his Memoirs that the signing of the pact was Stalin's way "to keep Hitler's legions from approaching too close to Russia"We [FDR and Hull] did not wish to place her on the same belligerent footing as Germany"Hitler had not abandoned his ambition with regard to Russia." And thus, it was regarded as a defensive manoeuvre.
It is interesting to note that Stalin received messages that summer of 1939 from both Hitler and Roosevelt but he received no messages from either Chamberlain or Daladier.
On Oct 31, 1939 Hans Frank, the German governor-general of occupied Poland announced:
"The Poles do not need universities or secondary schools; the Polish lands are to be turned into an intellectual desert"The only educational opportunities that are to be made available are those that demonstrate to them their hopelessness or their ethnic fate."
And indeed, that is exactly what happened.
When the Red Army liberated Poland, it found no buildings usable as schools, no school equipment, no scientific material, no laboratories. What the Germans did not destroy they shipped back to the fatherland.
The Fight for a U.S.-Russia Alliance
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