In 1940, the USSR was still one of Hitler’s allies, and Poland was caught between the Soviet army invading from the east and the Nazis invading from the west. Poland was quickly vanquished in 1939; the 1940 Katyn massacre was not a part of any combat operations.
By the end of 1941, the USSR would be fighting against Hitler. But that didn’t change Soviet aggressiveness toward the Poles.
Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 was the trigger which caused the western allies to enter the war; one of their goals was to fight for Polish freedom. Although the Allies ostensibly won the war, they did not, at war’s end, liberate Poland.
In the two decades after the war, Poland was mercilessly subjugated; in the two decades prior to the war, Poland enjoyed more political liberty than at any other time in its history.
The Allies began the war in order to free Poland. The war, however, damaged Polish freedom, and the peace settlement at the end of the war - negotiated in Teheran and Yalta - made that damage permanent. Historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:
The political outcomes of World War II were disastrous not only for the defeated nations, but also for many who sided with the victors. Nowhere was this more obviously so than in the case of Poland. The war in Europe was ostensibly fought for Polish independence, but would end in the country’s total subjugation. Poland thus embodied the tragedy of the conflict as described by Churchill: the democracies at terrible cost had won the war, then lost the peace that followed.
When the Soviets invaded Poland, one of their goals was the permanent annexation of Polish territory. At the war’s end in 1945, with Poland totally controlled by Stalin’s army, the USSR took 77,000 square kilometers of area from Poland.
Several other border adjustments in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s, brought about further territorial losses for Poland. The worst losses for Poland, both in terms of human life and in terms of land mass, came not from the 1939 invasion by the Nazis, but rather from the communists. Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:
Poland became the proximate cause of fighting by the Western powers in September 1939, when it was invaded first by Hitler, then by Stalin, and the dictators divided up the country between them. Hitler’s invasion triggered a guarantee from England and her ally France to come to the aid of Poland in the event of such aggression. However, neither the British nor the French had the means of enforcing these brave pledges, so that Poland quickly fell to the invaders (as France herself would fall some nine months later).
The focus and goal of the Soviet communists, in the case of Poland, was to seize territory from the Poles, and tyrannize the land mass which remained as Poland.
The wartime understanding, that the Allies were working to liberate Poland, was instantly discarded at war’s end. The western allies stood back and allowed the USSR to occupy Poland.
Subsequently, when the United States entered the war as well, the Anglo-Americans would make further vows to Poland, as to other nations conquered by the Nazis. Such pledges were implicit in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and related statements by the Allies about self-government and freedom, reinforced in comments to Polish exile leaders about the reign of liberty that would follow when the war was over. But these promises too would not be honored. Rather, when the fighting ended, Poland would again be conquered and dismembered — this time with the explicit sanction of the Western powers.
The question stands: why did the western allies allow the brutal imposition of communism on Poland? The answer is simple but shocking: Soviet agents had been planted as “moles” inside various western governments.
These agents controlled the flow of information to the policy makers in those governments. Advisors, who were actually Soviet operatives, apprising leaders about foreign relations reported some items prominently, concealed other items, and fabricated narratives when events did not play into their hands.
Thus it was that some of the western leaders unwittingly enabled the Soviet plot. Others, like England’s Winston Churchill, saw that Stalin was a threat, but could not do anything about it.
