Russia-Poland row over start of WW2 escalates

[Gawdzilla Sama]

They came, they saw, they hesitated, and finally they capitulated at Munich 11 month before, in the process chamberlain turned himself into caricature of delusion by waving a piece of paper with hitler’s signature, proclaiming it to mean “peace for our time”.

He waved the paper at the airport, but the proclamation came later when he addressed Parliament, and then the cameras.

[GUBU]

This is all news to me - I thought it was a universally accepted truth that Hitler started WW2 by invading Poland   also, let sleeping dogs lie? Stalin's army ENDED WW2 by seizing Berlin, no? So tarring them with the dirty end of the stick now over the start seems, er, beyond unhelpful to me.

Nazi Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov Ribbentrop Agreement in 1937 (IIRC on the year), a 10 year non-agression pact with a secret provision that when Germany invaded Poland the USSR would join in, gaining eastern Poland (which is now largely Belorussia, with some of North-Western Ukraine to balance it out).

While strictly speaking Germany started WW2, the USSR was an equal participant in carving up Poland and was only stopped from joining in against Poland on day 1 because of their agreement with the Germans.

In WW2 commemorations this chapter (up until 1941 the USSR was "neutral in favour of the Germans" to misquote a phrase describing Irish neutrality*) of its history is largely hushed up, so as not to embarrass the Soviets, and later the Russians, but it is a part of the war.

*The Free State's position in the war has been fairly described as "neutral in favour of the Allies".

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They came, they saw, they hesitated, and finally they capitulated at Munich 11 month before, in the process chamberlain turned himself into caricature of delusion by waving a piece of paper with hitler’s signature, proclaiming it to mean “peace for our time”.

Chamberlain had good reason to capitulate at Munich, actually. The French had chickened out prior to the conference and were unwilling to back the Czechs and British rearmament was not yet complete. In fact the army had pretty much told him that they weren't yet ready for war.

A bigger argument for not backing down was that Germany was actually even less ready, in the middle of an army expansion and not even close to having modernised its forces (despite the whole myth of blitzkrieg, the German Wehrmacht was still very dependant on horses for transport, much more than any of the other major participants). Add that to the problems of invading a modern, well armed Czecho-Slovakia who had strong defensive lines and defensive territorial advantages, it is likely that a war in 1938 would have gone bad for Hitler from the start. But Chamberlain didn't know any of that, and didn't realise that his bad hand was better than Hitler's terrible hand.

[Rev. Rye]

As someone who's pretty familiar with this area of history, I may as well explain a few things: Appeasement wasn't quite the idiotic move at the time as it seemed in hindsight. After WW1, the public did not really want to go into another war (the death of nigh on a million soldiers for almost no political gain will do that for a country, even if they were the victors) unless they felt it was absolutely necessary. And at that point, it didn't seem necessary. Hitler's image was nowhere near as negative then as it would be a few years later (Indeed, three years later Fritz Lang's Man Hunt, one of the first films based on an assassination attempt on Hitler, and the worst thing they could say about him was that he was a "strutting little Caesar" who reintroduced the death penalty. And bear in mind, at this point, Kristallnacht had happened, mass murders of Jews were really starting up, the death camps were being built, and the director had personal run-ins with the Nazi party that led him to get the Hell out of Dodge on 31 July 1933), the atrocities that cemented him and his goons as synonymous with pure evil were just ideas they were toying with and didn't even know how to pull off yet. And the parts of the Sudetenland Chamberlain gave to Hitler actually wanted to be absorbed into Germany. And most importantly, France had even less interest in trying to help Czechoslovakia than the British public did. And as for Chamberlain, in the earliest meetings at Berchtesgarden, he picked up early on that Hitler shouldn't be expected to keep his promise. And, a direct quote taken from my copy of Ian Kershaw's Hitler: Nemesis (page 111)

“If I've understood you correctly then you're determined in any event to proceed against Czechoslovakia. If that is your intention, why have you had me coming to Berchtesgaden at all? Under these circumstances it's best if I leave straight away. Apparently, it's all pointless.”

And he spent most of the rest of September similarly frustrated, if my re-reading of Kershaw and Evans' accounts of the events is any indication. It's really hard for me to think that Chamberlain could go from this to thinking that there was truly nothing left to worry about from Hitler.

So, overall, Munich was basically this:



with a side order of a very risky sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. And as far as September 1938 went, Chamberlain did pretty well. And he even helped build up Britain's armaments in the meantime (of course, Germany was also unprepared to the point where Hitler was actually facing a potential coup over a potential war with Britain before the Munich agreement made it unnecessary, and they actually did a better job of rearming in the intervening year.) However, he really dropped the ball a year later when he declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 and spent the next eight months doing...




And I'm inclined to think of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in similar terms, just buying time for Hitler and Stalin to actually build up their armies. And this time, they did a Hell of a better job of doing it. Or at least Russia was better at their normal strategy of "Win by being fucking huge and sending a shitton of people to die for Mother Russia." Well, that and Hitler actually had the poor judgement to invade the USSR while they still had unfinished business on the Western Front. And dragging America into it on a whim after Pearl Harbor.

[Deesse23]

They came, they saw, they hesitated, and finally they capitulated at Munich 11 month before, in the process chamberlain turned himself into caricature of delusion by waving a piece of paper with hitler’s signature, proclaiming it to mean “peace for our time”.

Hitler had good reason to think they would capitulate again.   If they had truly been clear headed and planned to fight with Germany’s next transgression, it would be reasonable to suppose they would have been more receptive to Stalin’s overtures to form a united front against Germany.  Instead they strung the soviets along, until the Soviets found it easier to gain some security by allying with Germany than trying to stitch together an anti-german alliance with unwilling anglofrench. 

The Russians are lying by pretending soviet pact with hitler wasn’t a major proximal cause of WWII.   But the western countries are lying by pretending their own contradictory policies towards the Soviets between Munich and Poland didn’t really give the Soviets any choice but to seek security in an accommodation with Hitler.

This!  
Lets also not forget that Poland was substantial in averting an anti-german pact between rance/UK and the USSR by denying russias army to cross polish territory in order to defend it from german agression. From that point on, following such a policy was pointless for Stalin. It shouldnt be a big surprise that "plan B" and the next best logical ally was (according to realpolitik): Germany

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Don't tell me who won, I'm still reading.

[Anomalocaris]

Don't tell me who won, I'm still reading.

It’s not quite over yet.  We’ve agreed to surrender unconditionally to Russia, but trump has too many golf appointments at his resorts to actually board a russian ship to sign the instrument of surrender “at the places indicated”