ABSTRACT
The defeat of the Polish armed forces in the September Campaign and the evacuation of the Polish Government abroad, to France until June 1940, then London, cleared the way for the genocidal occupation and subjugation of Poland by the allied invaders, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Britain and France, Poland’s official allies, looked on without offering by way of protest anything other than vacuous platitudes. The Soviet invasion a few weeks later prompted the same meaningless reaction, with the British Government issuing what must be considered one of the most spectacular understatements of the war, to the effect that ‘the full implication of these events is not yet apparent’. Tellingly, neither Britain nor France ever declared war on the Soviet Union. Even more insulting to the Poles was the extraordinarily tasteless article in the press by the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, hailing the invasion and rejoicing in Poland’s collapse, which he described as just reward for her supposed misdemeanours. When in office, he had scarcely disguised his disapproval of Polish independence in 1918-19. Following a further agreement between Hitler and Stalin on 28 September regarding their respective spheres of control and administration, the Nazis were now able to implement the racial imperatives of their ideology, according to which the Slavic Poles were not only inferior but also sub-human, while the Soviets pursued equally relentlessly the class and polonophobic aspects of Bolshevism. These were the macabre prescriptions for a veritable nightmare in both parts of Occupied Poland.
