Five Brothers and a War

Poland

While it fought for about five weeks against Germany, in the end it was no match for Germany’s mechanized onslaught. But what really tilted the balance was the participation of the Russian army, as Poland’s defense posture was predicated on fighting a war on only one front with Germany. The Russians invaded from the east beginning on September 17, right after it worked out a diplomatic solution with Japan on its eastern border. When the Russians moved in, and Poland had to fight on its rear flanks as well, the battle was unwinnable for the Poles. Hitler made good on his promise to involve all parts of the populace. Because the Nazis had prepared a list of 61,000 Polish elite, scholars, activists, and others, to be rounded up ahead of time, they made fairly short work of murdering up to 20,000 in 760 mass executions. But the civilian death toll was by no means restricted only to the list. Between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians died in the initial German invasion. All told, between 5.5 and 6 million Poles died in World War II, representing about one in six Poles. Poland had estimated that it could withstand an attack for about six months, whereas France and Britain thought the number was at best half that. But the speed of the Blitzkrieg and the involvement of the Soviet Russians caught Poland, Britain and France off guard. One of the coups for the Allies was the gift of the rotors of the German Enigma code machine that the Poles had been working to decipher. This saved the British a great deal of time in being able to intercept Nazi military communications. Along with the actual rotors, a number of Polish cryptologists found their way to Bletchley Park, just north of London, where the British assembled a large team of mathematicians, chess masters, and puzzle solvers to develop the Engima solution.

nazi germany

Five Brothers and a War

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