POLISH THEATRE: Divide and Rule

“The campaign in Poland is ended. . . . The grand total of captives is now up to more than 450,000. The total of guns seized already is above 1,200. … In all approximately 800 [Polish aircraft] either were destroyed or fell to the [German] Army as booty. . . . With the exception of a submarine, all the Polish fleet still in the North Sea on Sept. 1 was destroyed or interned in neutral harbors. … Of the entire Polish Army only an insignificant remainder still is fighting at hopeless posi tions in Warsaw, in Modlin and on the Peninsula of Hel.”

Thus with a terse communique this week the German Army High Command affected to close its books on the Blitzkrieg in Poland, promised that “exact [German] losses . . . unusually small in comparison to the enormous losses of the enemy . . . will be given in a few days.”* Estimating the material cost to Germany of shattering Poland in three weeks, the communique added: “Munitions and fuel consumption of this campaign amounted to only a fraction of [German] monthly production.” With a stiff, heel-clicking bow from the waist to the Nazi Party, the Army High Command observed that in Poland spade-wielding young stalwarts of the Nazi Labor Service “made the task of leadership much easier. … In the re-establishment of streets, bridges and railways … the Labor Service particularly proved its worth.”

The fact that he feels this way about the Nazis is one big reason why Army Commander-in-Chief Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch has the job of Germany’s No. 1 Fighting Man. The German officer corps’ leading exponent of not getting along with the Nazis, aristocratic, bemonocled Generaloberst Baron Werner von Fritsch, died under curious circumstances last week (see p. 21). Meanwhile, the German Army High Command was negotiating with the Soviet Army High Command through military commissions of German and Russian officers who met first at Brest-Litovsk and then at Moscow. They swiftly agreed last week to slice Poland just about in two (geographically) by a purely military—not political or permanent—division.

No Buffer. There had been reports in highest Berlin and Moscow circles that a strip of Poland would be left as a “buffer state” between Russia and Germany. This was even mooted in an official Moscow broadcast. Brushing it aside, the High Commands decided that no sufficient Polish authority remained in Poland last week to form the nucleus of a useful buffer, that the only thing to do was to draw the technically strongest possible frontier, separating the Russian and German Armies by the physical expanse of three great Polish rivers, the Narew, the Vistula and the San (see map, p. 80).

This gives the Soviet Union roughly three-fifths of what was Poland, and most remarkably the oil wells in the South long coveted by Germany. Germany gets almost the whole of Poland’s great industrial areas and roughly half the population of what was Poland, but gives up the common frontier she sought with Rumania as a source of oil. The Soviet Union for the first time gets a frontier with East Prussia and with Hungary, which hurriedly last week patched up its broken-down diplomatic relations between Budapest and Moscow by appointing a new minister to Moscow.

Swapped Siege. Before the Military Division line was drawn, the German Army held advance positions in Poland many miles beyond it and was besieging LwÓw. This siege they proceeded to hand over to the Russians, since they were now to get LwÓw. German officers ordered their troops out of entrenched positions surrounding the city, and into the same trenches grimly went Red Army soldiers, while the business of shelling LwÓw was taken over by Soviet artillery. In the week’s only show of cross-purposes between Berlin and Moscow, Nazi newsorgans claimed that LwÓw actually fell before the besiegers withdrew, but there seemed little doubt that Communist papers were right in reporting that Russians captured LwÓw. On its whole broad drive into Poland, the Red Army reported taking 120,000 Polish prisoners, capturing 380 pieces of artillery, 120 airplanes.

Job for Radek? “The population of [Polish] villages and towns . . . enthusiastically meets the Red Army. The mighty Red Army and the high cultural level of its rank and file evoke general admiration. The population tears down Polish flags and replaces them with Soviet flags. . . . Peasants offered the Red Army the traditional bread and ‘salt [tokens of brotherhood] on embroidered towels and invited Red Army men into their houses.” So said Tass, the official Soviet news agency. As the week advanced, Communist cohorts from Moscow poured in after the advancing Red Army, brought 100,000 portraits of Stalin, Lenin and Marx, tons of “educational leaflets.” In each town and village, soviet municipal rule was set up under councils of men and women of the proletariat. Thus at Barszczewo the new town soviet is made up of peasants owning no land, factory workers and an impecunious carpenter. Most of the new Soviets in what is now Russian Poland promptly dispatched “greetings to Our Liberator, Joseph Stalin.”

Polish policemen, identified in Soviet minds with Capitalism, were hunted from house to house, new Soviet police were described as “Workers’ Guards.” The Moscow radio announced that battalions of peasants were tracking down former Polish landlords who were hiding in the marshes and forests, clapping them into jail, added: “All their lands, livestock and personal belongings are being divided among the peasantry.” Reported seized near Krzemieniec was one of Poland’s greatest landlords, Prince Janusz Radziwill, president of the Polish Red Cross and head of one of the four most ancient and historic families in Poland. Captured near Lublin was a remote cousin of the former King of Spain, Prince Gabriel de Bourbon-Siciles. Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, Prince Andrzej Lubomirski, son of the first Polish Minister to the U. S., managed to escape to Rumania, as did scores of other landed bigwigs. Said he:

“I rode out of my estate just as Soviet cavalry rode in at the back gate. I reached the frontier after seven hours of hard riding.”

In Moscow the Red Army newsorgan Red Star published the text of leaflets given to Russian soldiers before they were started out for Poland, assuring them that the Generals and officers of the Polish Army had fled and containing appeals from the Polish populace for “liberation.” In London, the Daily Telegraph & Morning Post reported that famed Karl Radek, who was the No. 1 Soviet publicist up to 1937 when he got ten years in jail for plotting with Nazis, has actually been “busy in Moscow since last March organizing Polish Bolsheviks for the very situation which has now developed.” Reports from Paris said that Radek, who is a Pole by birth, has been placed in charge of Sovietizing the Russian slice of Poland.

“Reconstruction and Germanization.” The announced slogan of Nazi Labor Service battalions and Storm Troops in Germany’s slice of Poland last week were “Reconstruction and Germanization!” Nearly all important bridges had been destroyed, either by German bombers or retreating Polish troops, and the first big job of the Labor Service was floating pontoons and patching up Polish bridgework which could be repaired. Meanwhile, the arms and eagles of Poland were torn down from municipal buildings, replaced by the swastika, and Polish street names were swiftly changed to German. The principal stores, hotels and business houses were left in the possession of their Polish owners and staffs, but in each a Nazi was installed as boss. Many of these new bosses were former members of the German minority in Poland, and last week the passport to quick promotion everywhere was to show a card proving membership for some years in one of the minority parties—despised underdogs a few days ago, now topdogs.

Poles accused as “snipers” at the German Army were rounded up for even harsher treatment than the tens of thousands of Polish prisoners who were being shipped off constantly to work in Germany, mostly on farms but also in unskilled factory jobs where it would be difficult for them to commit acts of sabotage. They were promised pay at 60% of prevailing German wage scales, and Nazi authorities rushed about trying to get their ragged prisoners—many Polish soldiers had thrown away their uniforms—adequate clothes, shoes and overcoats for the winter rains were beginning, epidemics were feared.

In certain of the captured Polish cities, such as Tarnow, Jews comprise half of the population, and Nazis talked last week of segregating “Ghetto cities,” but meanwhile every Jew who could escaped from German Poland last week, many fleeing to Soviet Poland, since to escape to Hungary or Rumania was to leap into anti-Semitic frying pans.

“Still Waiting…” Although the German campaign in Poland was “ended” according to General Brauchitsch who left last week for the Western Front, the agony of Warsaw only increased. As the Vistula flows through Poland’s former Capital, Warsaw was sliced by the Military Division theoretically into German and Soviet parts. But the whole city continued to resist while the High Commands carved it up on paper.

Several times last week the Warsaw radio went dead, but Mayor Stefan Starzynski kept coming back on the air to ask the Allies: “When will Britain and France give such aid to Poland as will save us from the fury of German barbarism, from new deaths, from destruction of the remaining buildings of our city? We are still waiting. . . .”

*French Information (Propaganda) Chief Jean Giraudoux claimed last week that Germany has suffered 150,000 casualties in Poland, including between 600 and 700 airmen, that between 400 and 600 German planes have been shot down.