Black Earth(15)

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At first glance, a German-Polish alliance would seem more plausible than a German-Soviet alliance. The Nazis and the Soviets spent the second half of the 1930s in a vituperative contest of propaganda, each presenting the other as the ultimate evil. Warsaw and Berlin seemed, by contrast, to have much in common. From 1935 to 1938, both Germany and Poland were central European states pressing territorial claims on their neighbors while boasting a grand rhetoric of global transformation. Leaders in both Berlin and Warsaw faulted the world order for constraining flows of food, raw materials, and human beings. Both placed the Jewish question at the center of their diplomatic rhetoric, suggesting that its resolution in Europe was a matter of international justice. Both emphasized the threat of Soviet communism.

Often the German decision to attack Poland in 1939 is explained in the terms provided by Hitler and his propagandists: by Berlin’s campaign for adjustments to the border, or by Warsaw’s resistance to them. This had almost nothing to do with it. In fact, the war between Germany and Poland resulted from deep differences on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy. Hitler was willing to treat Warsaw as an ally in his grander campaigns against Moscow and against Jews, and also willing to destroy it entirely when such an alliance came to seem implausible, as it did in early 1939. Either way, Hitler saw Poland only as an element in his own master plan: as a helper in his grand eastern war, or as a territory from which that war could be launched. Hitler gave much more thought to the first variant than to the second, which was an improvisation that followed rapidly upon the surprising failure of German-Polish diplomacy in early 1939. All the while, Poland was an actor with its own aims and purposes. Germany and Poland ended up thwarting each other because German and Polish foreign policy were built upon a very different analysis of global politics and the role of the state.

Berlin’s global position after Hitler’s rise to power might be characterized as recolonial. Empires as such were just and good; the best empires were racial; Britain and America were rival exemplars of racial mastery; a German empire would restore balance to the world. The globe was naturally a world of competing empires; what was unnatural was the existence of a Jewish empire—the Soviet Union—and Jewish influence in London, Washington, Paris, and elsewhere. Germany would make a redeemingly racial empire by displacing a decadent Jewish dominion. In Hitler’s mind, Poland’s place in such a recolonial project was to help Germany: during the war as an ally or benign neutral, afterward as a satellite or puppet. In this conception no violent changes in the German-Polish border were needed, since Poland could grant territory to Germany in exchange for some of the booty in their joint conquest of the USSR. In the end this would be meaningless since Poland would fall under the thrall of Germany during the war itself.

Warsaw’s global attitude, by contrast, might be called decolonial. Poland’s history was one of destruction of an ancient Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by surrounding empires in 1795 and the creation of a nation-state in 1918. As Poles saw matters, empires had no special legitimacy, and as a matter of historical logic and justice were giving way to nation-states. Empires might be destroyed, as the Nazis thought; but if so, they would be replaced by nation-states rather than racial regimes. All nations were more or less equal actors in history, striving towards freedom. Most leading Polish politicians were attached to the nation-state as an intrinsic value and a collective achievement of the recent past. The unglamorous conservative definition of the state, the monopolist of violence and the enforcer of laws, was for many Poles a precious and unlikely achievement. No Polish leader, despite a grandiosity of rhetoric about foreign policy, imagined that Poland would displace one of the world powers. Unlike Hitler and some of the Nazis, the Polish leadership had no theory about the secret leadership of the USSR or all empires by Jews, and no illusions about the hidden fragility of the great powers. The imperial system, of which the USSR was a more or less normal part, would eventually give way to national liberation. In the meantime, maritime empires such as Britain and France had to open themselves to the resettlement of millions of Polish Jews. Warsaw hoped that Polish Jews would rebel against empires and form Polish-Jewish states that would somehow extend Polish influence in any site of settlement—least implausibly Palestine. Israel was as far as Warsaw’s dreaming went.

Both Berlin and Warsaw supported the removal of millions of Jews from Europe. For Hitler, this was part of a vast project of ecological restoration, in which the elimination of Jews after a German victory would repair the planet. The German state was a means to an end; it could and would be mutated and then put at risk. Antisemitism likely had more popular resonance in Poland than in Germany, at least before 1933, but no one with ideas similar to Hitler’s came close to achieving power in Warsaw. Whereas German policy involved the destruction of states where Jews lived, Polish policy sought the creation of a state for the Jews. The covert essence of German foreign policy in the late 1930s was the ambition to build a vast racial empire in eastern Europe; the covert essence of Polish foreign policy was to create a State of Israel in Palestine from the territories granted by a League of Nations mandate to the British Empire.