Black Earth(32)

It quickly became obvious in Warsaw what that design entailed. Hermann G?ring, Hitler’s plenipotentiary on Polish matters, was quite forthcoming with his Polish interlocutors. On a hunting trip in the Bia?owie?a Forest with Polish officials in January 1935, G?ring unveiled the grand scheme of a German-Polish invasion of the USSR, with Poland to get the spoils of Ukraine. Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin, found this implausible and asked G?ring not to repeat such ideas to Pi?sudski when they all returned to Warsaw. G?ring did so anyway, but was ignored; Pi?sudski was in any event very ill. G?ring made similar approaches on at least four more occasions after Pi?sudski’s death, sometimes offering land to the Poles from Soviet Ukraine, sometimes from northern Soviet Russia. No one in Warsaw would ever be persuaded by any of this, though the barrage of proposals from G?ring and others continued for years.

G?ring would later return to Bia?owie?a to hunt—after the war began, after Poland was destroyed, after the SS cleared the woods of Jews.

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Cults of personality are open to postmortem interpretation. Pi?sudski’s successors struggled to preserve the status quo by realizing what they saw as his political testament of 1932–1934: a diplomatic balance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. People who wanted to change Europe recalled the young Pi?sudski: Betar saw the legionary of the First World War in 1918, Irgun the conspiratorial state builder of the Polish Military Organization of 1919—and the Nazis the military commander who had beaten the Red Army in 1920. Hitler saw Pi?sudski as the “great patriot and statesman” who having defeated the Bolsheviks once would surely have seized the chance to do so again. The Polish leadership, although happy to dabble in Jewish revolution in Palestine, had a much more conservative understanding of Pi?sudski’s European prescription for the 1930s. Poland was to keep an equal distance from both mortal threats, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The hope was that if Poland could stay neutral between what Pi?sudski had called “totalistic states,” no war could take place. Any war, the Poles liked to think, would have to involve Poland as an ally of either the Soviets or the Germans, since any war that involved them would have to take place on Polish territory. The plan was to stop all wars by refusing to join in them, to halt two mobile forces by standing still between them. Although Pi?sudski himself understood that this was at best a strategy for a few years, his successors became attached to the leverage of neutrality and saw it as a doctrine. This prevented them from recognizing the scale of Hitler’s ambition and from grasping that Stalin had dismissed the Polish state and was awaiting an offer from Hitler.

Right after Pi?sudski’s death, G?ring proposed a common German-Polish invasion of the Soviet Union, an offer he repeated in February 1936. Throughout that year, Hitler made similar appeals to the Poles. Jan Szembek, Beck’s number two in the Polish foreign ministry, reported upon his extensive conversations with Hitler at the Berlin Olympics of August 1936: “Hitler’s policy to us is dictated by the conviction that Poland will be his natural ally in future conflicts with the Soviets and communism.” That November, Germany and Japan initiated the Anti-Comintern Pact. Though ostensibly a defensive arrangement against international communism, this rather quickly became the basis for a military alliance. Berlin asked Warsaw to join the Pact in February 1937, a full six months before Italy became its third member. Warsaw refused this proposal then, as it did on at least five occasions thereafter.

This was a trying time for Polish diplomats. Unlike the Germans, Japanese, and Italians, the Poles had experience with communist power and a sense of what a conflict with the USSR would mean. Many of the Poles running the country in the late 1930s had fought the Soviets in 1919–1920 and had lost comrades to the Red Army and to the Soviet secret state police, back then called the Cheka. Some of them had seen the tortured bodies of friends and relatives in mass graves; such things were not forgotten. In 1936, Polish diplomats serving in the Soviet Union received instructions about how to comport themselves in the event of arrest by the NKVD, as the Soviet secret state police was by then known. Beginning in 1937, Polish diplomats were filing or reading reports about the distressing number of ethnic Poles disappearing from Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the large cities of Soviet Russia.





General instructions from the Warsaw headquarters of Polish military intelligence made clear that the disastrous Polish position in the Soviet Union could not be improved by a German invasion. Poland had no capacity to intervene on Soviet territory, and a German intervention would only make matters worse. Poland’s policy of equal distance meant that its territory was not only Germany’s shield to the east, but the USSR’s shield to the west. It was a dire situation, whose logic Polish diplomats, of course, did not explain to their German colleagues. They tried, as diplomats do, to make the most of what their interlocutors wanted, without acceding to it. When asked about a German-Polish alliance against the Soviet Union, they evaded the issue for as long as possible. When finally forced to issue a categorical response, they categorically refused.