On September 9, 1939 the battle of Bzura commenced – during the September Campaign it was the sole Polish offensive operation against Wehrmacht. The hope evaporated with the Polish defeat on September 18; it also worth mentioning that the day before the Red Army entered Poland. Despite the fact that some isolated continued the fight the war was over. The strategic initiative of the Polish Army by the Bzura River couldn’t bring in more than it did. The incompletely mobilized army was attacked simultaneously from the west, north and south by an enemy with multiple advantages in artillery, armored weapons, aviation and communications. Was it possible to predict such a course of events?

More perspicacious diplomats and politicians might have foreseen the September defeat, but there were very few of them, and those few were not listened to. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Second Polish Republic, Józef Beck, did not seem to accept the possibility of a war with Germany, at least not in 1939. After all, Poland was protected by recent guarantees of aid presented in the speech of the British Prime Minister in the House of Commons in April 1939. Neville Chamberlain said that he was also speaking – after appropriate arrangements – on behalf of the French, with whom Poland already had an agreement of 1921.

Great Britain and France had a reputation, particularly in Poland, of invincible powers, therefore only a madman and a suicide – wile Hitler had not yet had such an opinion – would dare to go to war on two fronts. All the more so because in Germany it was remembered that the war on two fronts was lost in November 1918. That should mean that Poland was secured with its predictive foreign policy.

As a matter of fact however, Germany was not in danger of a war on two fronts. France, full of pacifist sentiments, felt safe behind the Maginot Line, and overseas England had almost no land forces to deploy in Europe. The French, having an army similar to the German one, “ not want to die for Gdańsk”, and almost a year later it turned out that they also did not want to die for Paris. Who did this Beck had a pact with , you might ask, and why did he feel safe?

In the People's Republic of Poland, Beck had the worst possible opinion, he was blamed for the September defeat, while the historiography and propaganda of the Polish Peoples Republic showed, instead of the chosen tactics, based on paper guarantees, the “only righteous” path – the Soviet Union, with which we should have set up an alliance against Germany, which would mean inviting the Army Red to Poland. That is to say “treat” ourselves to satellite status towards Russia six years before the Polish People's Republic. For a communist it is an ideal solution, but there were not many communists in Poland. For Poles, the alliance with the Soviets was a deadly threat and nobody considered it seriously.

One could say that Józef Beck did what he could under the circumstances in which he acted, and that it was known how it ended. But the minister was criticized not only in the People's Republic of Poland, where the entire Second Polish Republic was deprived of reverence and faith, but also in the circles of independence-orientated emigration. After all, his policy resulted in over five million deaths, concentration camps, street round-ups, slave labor, occupation terror unknown in history, pacification and displacement of entire areas of Poland, the hecatomb of the Warsaw Uprising and the complete destruction of the capital, and – indirectly – the Soviet enslavement of Poland after the war for long decades.

Over the last decade, alternative history has come to the fore in Poland, and from its achievements one can learn what would have happened if Józef Beck had realized an alliance with Hitler. Shocking and unthinkable? Critics of this option cannot but think of Hitler as one of the greatest criminal in history. But they keep arguing that in 1938 or 1939, it wasn’t this Hitler yet. He was a dictator and anti-Semite, but not yet a criminal as we know him from history. Maybe it was enough to just plug your nose in the name of Realpolitik?

In his well-documented and widely read book “The Ribbentrop-Beck Pact”, Piotr Zychowicz assesses Minister Beck as worst for his bet on France and England. He acted like a minister of a superpower, which Poland was not, and refused Hitler the Gdańsk and the highway and railway line to East Prussia through Pomerania. Zychowicz understands that it would be a vassalization of the state, but better a loss of full sovereignty than of independence, which eventually happened to Poland.

And things could have come different. Marshal Józef Piłsudski, when Hitler was not at power yet – but it was about to happen – sent an envoy to him with an exploratory mission. The Marshal was pleased with the results of the conversation, especially since the Weimar Republic was extremely anti-Polish. The former Prussian lands had been demanded and military cooperation with the Soviets had been tightened, which worried Piłsudski a lot. If it was written about Poland in the press, it was only the worst possible, and the satirical periodical “Kladderadatsch” in its drawings presented Poles as insects. It couldn’t be worse at a time of peace. For the Weimar chancellors, Poland was a seasonal country which, in the interests of Germany and even Europe, should disappear.

Hitler came to power in 1933. Already in 1934, he signed a non-aggression pact with Poland for 10 years, and in the statements of the leader of the Third Reich about Poland, friendly, at least neutral accents appeared something that which was impossible in the times of the Weimar Republic, in “Kladderadatsch” Poles acquired human features, and the leading organ of the Nazis, “Volkischer Beobahter” wrote respectfully about the Marshal. Herman Göring (the second person in the state) came to the funeral of Józef Piłsudski in 1935, and Adolf Hitler organized an impressive mourning ceremony in Berlin.

Where did this idyll come from? For years, Hitler didn’t want to conquer Poland, but to make it an ally. The war was to start with France, friendly Poland was to protect the Third Reich against a possible Soviet strike, and soon after the victorious campaign, German and Polish troops were to parade in Moscow. After defeating – as Zychowicz assumes – the Soviet Union, Germany would start losing to the Americans and the British in the West, Poland would change its alliances and find itself in the camp of the victors of World War II. Full independence of Poland was possible only after defeating both enemies, and the scenario presented in the book was the only possible one.

Why didn’t Beck understand it, didn’t agree in 1938 to hand over Gdańsk – being German one after all – and the highway, neither did he join the anti-Comintern pact, which was a further demand of Hitler? If he had understood that, the history of Europe and even the world would have been different. There would have been no People's Republic of Poland and no Soviet Block, there would have been be no expansion of communism in the world, because there would have been no Soviet Union ...

There would have been no casualties or losses in Poland and no Holocaust. Even if Germany had managed to counteract the change of alliances by Poland and intervene, it would have been a few years later than the actual occupation began, which would mean a corresponding number of losses and casualties less than in reality. It was Józef Beck, due to his short-sightedness, who was the true gravedigger of the Versailles order that prevailed after World War I.

The realpolitik requires getting rid of feelings and sentiments; what counts is cunning and strength, and states have no imponderable interests to protect. Meanwhile, Józef Beck delivered a speech in the Diet on May 5, 1939, after the renewed German proposals concerning Gdańsk, in which he said:

“I hear a demand for the annexation of Gdańsk to the Reich, when I do not receive an answer to our proposal, submitted on March 26 to jointly guarantee the existence and rights of the Free City [of Gdańsk], and then find out that it was considered a rejection of the negotiations – I have to ask myself a question what it is all about? Is it for the freedom of the German population of Gdańsk, which is not in danger, or for prestigious matters, or for pushing Poland away from the Baltic Sea, from which Poland cannot be pushed away!”

After all, in the Second Polish Republic, the popular song sang:

O, the sea, our sea,
I will guard you faithfully!
We have an order to hold you,
Or to fall at the bottom, at your bottom,
Or at the bottom with honor to die.

Probably in connection with this conviction, minister Beck continued in his Diet speech:

“Peace is a precious and desirable thing. Our generation, blooding in wars, certainly deserves peace. But, like almost all things in the world, peace has a price, a high but measurable price. We, in Poland, do not know the concept of peace without price. There is only one thing in the lives of people, nations and states that is priceless. That thing is honor”.

States don’t have honor but interests, and it is the duty of the state authorities to look after them. It was the interest of Poles to survive the inevitable impending war, and if it is possible to earn something in the East, Piotr Zychowicz repeats ad nauseam. The book responds to the allegations expected at the time of its being written. After the war, we would have be treated no worse than Italy. Hungary and Romania, although they were satellites of the Third Reich, suffered no worse fate than us, steadfast – i.e. within the camp of socialist countries.

As for the Holocaust, these are professor Timothy Snider’s calculaions which say that in countries subject to German subordination to various degrees, but which retained statehood, on average every second Jew survived, in the countries under occupation – one in twenty.

Therefore, it was necessary to have a vassal but independent state. Duce Benito Mussolini did not hand over Jews until the occupation of Italy by the Third Reich. Likewise, regent Admiral Miklós Horthy in Hungary and conducător Ion Antonescu in Romania. Hitler respected the separateness of his allies as long as they were his allies, and it is difficult to imagine that some Totenkopf units would have established extermination camps in allied Poland, or Eisatzgruppen following the Polish sections of the eastern front.

These and other arguments of Piotr Zychowicz are great to read so the heart grows. A snag – one of many – at this point rests in this alliance change. Would we have switched at a better time than Hungary and Italy? Would America have joined the war in Europe in the face of a German-Polish Blitzkrieg in the East, or would it have been stuck in isolationism and the thousand-year-old Third Reich would have arisen, with our help, from the Atlantic to the Ural and “we would have grazed cows for the Germans on the Ural ” as it was bitterly expressed by Józef Beck, already interned in Romania. For greater realism, it must be added that since it obtained nuclear weapons (August 1945), the US could have already started a war with a most powerful Reich, being able to turn Berlin into a very large Hiroshima.

And how could Beck have enrolled Poland in the anti-Comintern pact in the face of strongly anti-German sentiments in the army, opinion-forming elites and the Polish public opinion? By the way, we would have to betray – admittedly we do not know why, but our sister – France, besides Poles does not wage aggressive wars at all, but defend the homeland. To some extent, the authorities can go against the public mood, but how far? Poles were hostile to both Russia and Germany. Marshal Piłsudski warned against the alliance of our eternal enemies, warned against starting a war on two fronts and said: “wait as long as it is possible, and if it is impossible, set the world on fire”. According to Józef Piłsudski, Poland should enter the future war as the last one, and the peace on the Polish-German border ensured by the pact of 1934 was calculated for four years. He died in 1935 and left followers, including one of his most trusted people, Józef Beck.

Józef Beck had a typical “Sanacja” biography. The legionnaire, decorated four times with the Cross of Valor and Virtuti Militari, showed himself in the bloodiest battle of the Legions at Kostiuchnówka. He performed bravely in the war of 1920. From the line officer, still during the war, he moved to the intelligence, then a staff officer, a certified artillery colonel, during the May coup, of course, on Piłsudski’s side.

The Commander [as Piłsudski was sometimes called] appreciated his intelligence analyzes, hence the position of the head of the Marshal’s office, deputy prime minister and in 1932 the minister of foreign affairs. Beck listened diligently to the teachings of the Leader, whom he, like other colonels, was a true admire of. According to Piotr Zychowicz, he betrayed his master’s teachings or did not understand them. What would the Marshal have done in 1938 and 1939? Would he have made the same alliances with the West, which he rightly deemed “rotten”, as his apprentice? Or would he have given up Gdańsk? It is difficult to imagine the Commander as someone’s vassal.

Gdańsk and the highway would have been just the beginning, as the so-called Sudeten crisis showed. Hitler in Munich swore that the Sudetes were his last demands, and six months later he was in Prague. Józef Beck, speaking about honor in May 1939 in the Diet, could not ignore these recent events, so it would be a refusal to the Germans in somewhat romantic rhetoric, which specifically meant that we had seen though our would-be partner.

Did Beck betray Piłsudski? Piotr Zychowicz lists that the Commander warned against the war on two fronts, and Beck led to this that Poland was to enter the war as late as possible but entered the first, and that one should not count on the rotten West, and Beck trusted the guarantees that turned out to be worth only as much as the paper on which they were written on.

Zychowicz was not the first to criticize Beck's policy and to prompt a politician about the German option post factum, but when, for example, the late professor Paweł Wieczorkiewicz did it academically, without too much emotional charge, Piotr Zychowicz (whose thesis was reviewed by Wieczorkiewicz) wrote a passionate pamphlet. Józef Beck in his book is a bête noire in Europe and even the world, whereupon the demonic effects of his actions consisted of unprecedented incompetence and self-confidence of the minister.

Could anyone else, in Beck’s place, have foreseen the worst and did he really betray the Marshal’s political thought? He did not take into account – like many diplomats of the time – that the USSR and the Third Reich could enter into an alliance, and apparently, once it was concluded, he neglected it and there was a war on two fronts. But so what, we would have lost against Germany as well, we had already lost before September 17, 1939. Even then, cautious Hitler secured himself from the East unnecessarily, because Stalin would not have attacked Germany by “helping” Poland. He wanted to enter the war as late as possible, he was definitely not ready for it yet, another thing was to occupy half of the already defeated Polish territory.

We were the first to enter the war, but Beck did not plan it, after all, he secured Poland with alliances. Even if he did not fully believe in them, which is very possible, he counted on Hitler being scared of wars on two fronts and indeed, as the memoirs say, the Führer had nervous moments, but he took the risk, it turned out that he was right. And Beck internationalized the war of the Third Reich against Poland, that is, “set the world on fire”, as the Marshal desired. And that nothing came of it for us, because the front in the West – let’s skip Italy as less important – was only established in 1944, no one could have foreseen it, even the Marshal who called for the aforementioned “arson”.
br> And so on and so forth – Beck can be attacked and defended in a somewhat fairy-tale narrative. A politician should be forward-looking and calculating in cold blood, but no nation counts on its psychic and astrological skills. What would the Marshal have done if he had lived to see the German ultimatum on Gdańsk, the highway and the anti-Comintern pact? Would he have given up Gdańsk and prepared the army for Moscow forgetting the honor? Would he given up Gdańsk, forgetting his honor too, and prepare the army for a German attack, if they started going too far? Both? Neither one nor the other, hoping that the West would not fail this time and you could count on its sense of honor?

The marshal proposed to France a preventive war against Germany in 1934 or 1935, and he would have been be clear about the West. Joseph Beck offered France military assistance if it wanted to react to the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, which was a breach of the Versailles Treaty by Germany.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE The proposal was ignored and there was no response, so he too was clear. Therefore he was not seriously counting on guarantees, and he expected Hitler to be scared. Or the red carpet that had been stretched for him at the London station turned his head. Beck was sensitive to red carpets – France, be it, but England, its guarantees must be serious. Not everything is written in black and white in historical sources, the thoughts of the actors of the events cannot be accessed, let alone the psyche.

Marshal Piłsudski recommended a policy of equal distance towards Germany and Russia. As for Russia, the distance was obvious and natural, as for Germany, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs was impervious to the sirens of the anti-Soviet alliance, at the price of Gdańsk, and even the luxurious three-volume edition of Józef Piłsudski's writings in the Reich did not change it. Before the official proposals were made, for four years there were visits and talks; Herman Göring visited Białowieża every year.

The distance was kept in accordance with the Marshal’s political will, except for the Sudeten crisis, where Hitler could count on a natural Polish protection in the event of an attempt by the Red Army to help Sovietophilic Czechs. And the seizure of Zaolzie did not seem to follow the equal distance policy, although it took place without asking the Germans for their opinion. The Czechs took the same Zaolzie from us earlier, taking advantage of our difficult situation on the front of the war with the Bolsheviks.

The minister's wife, Jadwiga Beck, kept a perfectly equal distance, equally avoiding dancing at diplomatic receptions in Warsaw with Krauts and Muscovites, which she wrote in her memoirs (“I was an Excellency”). This is how she wrote down the nationalities of her neighbors.

The Marshal himself did not have equal distance to the invaders, he went with the Legions against one another. Strength is required to maintain balance and to maintain an equal distance between two enemies. Józef Piłsudski did not have it, having only the Legions. Józef Beck did not have one either, although he thought otherwise. When he crossed the Romanian border on September 17, 1939, he was supposed to say: “I thought I had one hundred divisions behind me but I had a piece of shit.”

Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły probably told him about these divisions. In this inventory after the Second Polish Republic, it is necessary to explain why, when speaking of foreign policy, one actually only talks about Józef Beck. The Sanacja created a specific division of powers. As long as the Marshal lived, it is known – with all the most important things, everybody came to him.

After Piłsudski's death, a triumvirate ruled; president Ignacy Mościcki, inspector general of the Armed Forces, Edward Rydz-Śmigły and minister of foreign affairs, Józef Beck. There was, of course, the prime minister, Felicjan Sławoj-Składkowski, who dealt with the administration and contributed to improving the level of hygiene in the countryside, he did not always attend the political talks of the triumvirate. Beck had autonomy in foreign affairs and made many decisions independently.

Maybe too much, but Mościcki represented and graced, and Rydz-Śmigły dealt with the army and waited for the rock-solid presidency after Mościcki. The three of them could not replace one Marshal, although they at least talked to him, Składkowski only reported.

What would the Marshal himself have done in 1938 and in 1939, we asked rhetorically, because there is no other way. There was a joke in the Polish People's Republic in the form of a press announcement: “I will exchange sovereignty for a favorable geographical location”, signed: Poland”. It fits the years of the end of the Second Polish Republic and more. The pincers of this position clench with different force from the reign of Stanislaus II Augustus until today.

–Krzysztof Zwoliński
Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists