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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
Poland
87 years ago
The German invasion of Poland, which began on September 1, 1939, and started the Second World War in Europe.
Shortly before five in the morning on September 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte, near Danzig. Along the border, more than a million German troops crossed into Poland, supported by tanks and by aircraft that bombed Polish airfields, railways, and towns. Germany had not declared war. The invasion was justified by a set of fabricated incidents, including a staged attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, in which prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms were killed and left as evidence.
Poland fought hard but was overwhelmed. The German advance combined fast-moving armored columns with close air support, a method the world would soon learn to call blitzkrieg. On September 17 the Soviet Union invaded from the east, under the terms of the secret protocol to the pact Germany and the Soviet Union had signed in August, which divided Poland and much of Eastern Europe between them. Warsaw surrendered on September 27. Organized Polish resistance ended in early October, and the country was partitioned between two occupying powers.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Second World War, the global conflict that began with the invasion of Poland and ended in 1945, involving most of the world's nations and killing an estimated seventy to eighty-five million people.
Britain and France had guaranteed Polish independence in March 1939, after Germany's seizure of the remainder of Czechoslovakia had destroyed any remaining faith in Hitler's assurances. On September 3, having received no reply to their ultimatum demanding a German withdrawal, both countries declared war. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who had negotiated at Munich the previous year in the hope of avoiding exactly this, told the nation by radio that no such undertaking had been received and that Britain was consequently at war with Germany.
The war that opened in Poland spread across the globe. Within two years it had drawn in the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States, and it was fought in Europe, North Africa, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and Asia. It introduced strategic bombing of cities, industrialized genocide, and, in its final weeks, nuclear weapons. Estimates of the dead range from seventy to eighty-five million people, the majority of them civilians. It remains the deadliest event in recorded human history.
Poland suffered proportionally worse than almost any other country. Roughly six million Polish citizens died, about half of them Jews murdered in the Holocaust, much of which was carried out on Polish soil in camps built by the occupying German authorities. The country's cities were devastated, Warsaw most of all. When the war ended in 1945, Poland was not restored to independence but fell within the Soviet sphere, where it remained for more than four decades. The war that began over Polish sovereignty ended without it.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It began the deadliest conflict in human history. The invasion set off a war that killed tens of millions of people, reshaped the map of the world, and ended with the use of nuclear weapons. Almost every major feature of the twentieth century after 1945 traces back to it.
It marked the final collapse of appeasement. The policy of accommodating German territorial demands, pursued through the 1930s in the hope of avoiding another European war, ended when Britain and France declared war on September 3. The failure has shaped debates about diplomacy and deterrence ever since.
It demonstrated a new kind of warfare. The German combination of armored columns, motorized infantry, and close air support overwhelmed Polish defenses in weeks and stunned observers across Europe. Military doctrine everywhere was rewritten in response.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Before dawn on September 1, 1939, German forces crossed into Poland behind a pretext nobody believed. Britain and France declared war two days later. What followed killed more people than any other event in history, and Poland, the country whose independence was the stated cause, did not regain it for fifty years.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“This country is at war with Germany.”
— Neville Chamberlain, broadcasting to the British public, September 3, 1939
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the invasion of Poland, the pretext that preceded it, the pact that divided Eastern Europe, and the war that followed?
