Black Earth(41)

Throughout the territory of Soviet Ukraine, which bordered Poland, Polish men were shot in huge numbers in September 1938. In the city of Voroshilovgrad (today Luhansk), Soviet authorities considered 1,226 cases in the Polish Operation during the Czechoslovak crisis and ordered 1,226 executions. In September 1938, in the regions of Soviet Ukraine adjacent to the Polish border, Soviet units went from village to village as death squads. Polish men were shot, Polish women and children were sent to the Gulag, and reports were filed afterward. In the Zhytomyr region, which bordered Poland, Soviet authorities sentenced 100 people to death on September 22, 138 more on September 23, and 408 more on September 28.

That was the day that Hitler had set as the deadline for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. The German army was standing at the Czechoslovak border. The Red Army was standing at the Polish border; and the NKVD had cleared the hinterland of suspicious elements by massive shootings and deportations of Poles. A German invasion of Czechoslovakia would have provided the pretext for a Soviet invasion of Poland. Perhaps the Red Army would then have entered Czechoslovakia and sought to engage the German army. More likely it would have sought some truce with Germany that allowed it to take territory from Poland without having to engage the Germans. The suspicion is warranted, since the next time Soviet forces massed at the Polish border it was eleven months later, after Moscow had made just such a deal with Berlin. But this cannot be known for certain, since the crisis was resolved. At Munich on September 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany decided that Czechoslovakia should cede the territories that Hitler wanted.

Czechoslovakia had no part in this Munich accord and was not legally bound by it. Abandoned by their friends and allies, its leaders decided not to fight the Germans alone. As Czechoslovak troops and police withdrew from the “Sudetenland” in October, political violence prevailed: mostly Germans attacking other Germans, pro-Nazis killing the rival Social Democrats whose orientation had been illegal in Nazi Germany for five years. In November the “Sudetenland” was joined to Germany—Germans, Czechs, mountains, fortresses, arms factories, and all. An Einsatzgruppe entered with the assignment of eliminating political opponents; its members were explicitly forbidden to kill. The thirty thousand or so Jews who had lived there, like the Jews of Austria a few months earlier, found themselves suddenly deprived of state protection. About seventeen thousand of them were deported by the Germans or fled; they lost their property. In what remained of Czechoslovakia, Jews rightly feared the total destruction of their state and thus the loss of their property rights. About a third of Czechoslovak banking and industrial capital was owned by Jews; much of this was acquired at tremendous discount by Germans in late 1938 and early 1939.

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Poland bordered all parties most concerned by the crisis of state destruction of 1938: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. Warsaw had no sympathy for Prague, since the Czechoslovak army had seized some important industrial territory around Teschen in 1919 when the Polish army had been busy fighting the Soviets. Polish diplomats wrote of Czechoslovakia as an “artificial creation” and an “absurdity.” While Berlin presented itself as the defender of the rights of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, Warsaw followed suit and presented itself as the protector of Poles in Czechoslovakia. When Germany seized the territories it called the Sudetenland, Poland exploited the moment to claim the Teschen region that Czechoslovakia had taken in 1919.

Poland looked like a German ally in these days, although its policy was, in fact, an independent one that Warsaw had to explain to Berlin. Poland wanted the Teschen region for some of the same reasons that Germany wanted the Sudetenland: It was rich in resources, rail connections, and industry. Teschen would help Poland prepare for war, but Germans could not be entirely sure on which side Poland would be fighting. Polish diplomats tried to get credit in Berlin for their “decided position” against the Soviet Union, with no effect. Hitler was consciously provoking a European war, and would have taken it in whatever form it came. He could not be impressed that Poland had proven to be a barrier to a Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia when what he really wanted was an offensive war against the Soviet Union. He expected much more from the Poles than an imitation of German policy in these local crises, and he was telling them so.

By November 1938, Germany had absorbed Austria and much of Czechoslovakia. Some nine million people had been added to the Reich, along with Austria’s gold and Czechoslovakia’s arms. No doubt Hitler thought that these gains made his offer of a “comprehensive solution” to German-Polish problems more difficult for the Polish leadership to refuse. After all, Germany had shown that it could take what it wanted in any case. Hitler believed that Warsaw had no choice but to recognize common interests with respect to the Jews and the Soviet Union. But Warsaw saw the Jewish and the Soviet questions rather differently than did Berlin, and it viewed growing German power as a source of worry rather than as a reason for compromise. The Poles understood, since the Germans had said so for years, that territorial adjustments in central Europe were only a small part of a much larger plan.