75th WW2 Anniversary Polls–#1 AUGUST 1939

Hitler wanted to go to war against the Soviet Union, but not against the Western democracies. From his perspective, any Lebensraum he wanted could be found to the east of Germany. On the other hand, any western war would pit Germany against the massive industrial potential of Britain and the United States.

In 1939, dishonest French and British politicians promised that France would launch a general offensive against Germany if Poland was attacked. In 1939, Polish leaders naively based their entire foreign policy on that false promise. They adopted a strongly anti-German foreign policy.

Suppose instead that France had never made such promises to Poland; or that Poland’s leaders had been astute enough to recognize those promises for the pack of lies they were. Poland’s leaders would then have realized they would have had no choice but to seek friendly relations with either their eastern or western neighbor. Presumably this would have meant friendly relations with Germany, because Stalin wanted all of Poland east of the Curzon line. (Over half of Poland’s prewar territory.)

Friendly, or at least relatively neutral, relations between Germany and Poland would have given the Western democracies no excuse to intervene. The nations of Eastern Europe would have gradually fallen into either the German or Soviet spheres. Eventually, Germany and the Soviet Union would have gone to war against each other. A Nazi-Soviet war was probably unavoidable. But it need not have become a world war; and the Western democracies need not have intervened on the Soviet Union’s behalf.

@KurtGodel7:

In 1939, Polish leaders naively based their entire foreign policy on that false promise. They adopted a strongly anti-German foreign policy.

What anti-German measures did the Polish government take prior to the German invasion, and what did they hope to achieve by such?

@Herr:

@KurtGodel7:

In 1939, Polish leaders naively based their entire foreign policy on that false promise. They adopted a strongly anti-German foreign policy.

What anti-German measures did the Polish government take prior to the German invasion, and what did they hope to achieve by such?

The Danzig Crisis, Hello!

You can hardly blame the Poles for resisting annexation of parts of their national territory.

Hello, the war could have been prevented during the attack on Austria in 1938. Canaris had mobilized several troops of military police to arrest Hitler for war mongering, but he changed his mind when he realized how happy the German people got, and the next year it was too late

Yes, if the Art School had accepted Hitler as a student after WWI, then he would have spent his time making art, not war

IMHO the WWII could have been prevented if the French had honored the Versailes Treaty and not been idiots that occupied Germany 10 years after the war just for revenge. They should have known that hatred would grow in the German hearts when they starved.

Yes I believe that God the almighty could have prevented this war, if he was not so keen on punishing the Jews. Of course WWII could have been part of his Master Plan to get the Jews moving into the promised land Israel, and in that case, WWII would have been unavoidable

@Narvik:

Hello, the war could have been prevented during the attack on Austria in 1938. Canaris had mobilized several troops of military police to arrest Hitler for war mongering, but he changed his mind when he realized how happy the German people got, and the next year it was too late

Better still, the war might have been avoided if France had reacted to the March 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland by sending in its army.  If that had happened, the Wehrmacht would have been compelled to withdraw because it had inadequate resources to resist – a fact recognized not just by various senior German officers but by Hitler himself, who said, “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”  This would have been a serious blow to Hitler’s prestige – possibly even a fatal one (as Guderian believed it would have been).  It would also have been a demonstration of the principle that a show of force was a far more effective response to Hitler’s territorial grabs than Munich-style compromises, and from that point on France and Britain might have been emboldended to take a harder line with Germany when (and if) Hitler next turned his sights on Austria, the Sudentenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Yes Marc, but in that case UK and France could just as well accepted the proposal from the Sovjet Foreign minister Litvinov and marched into Germany in 1933 to arrest Hitler. After all, Hitler did threat to attack USSR in his book Mein Kampf, so nobody could say they didn’t know. It looks like the capitalist Brits hated the commies so much, they wanted Germany to grow strong and kill the commies. So no, I don’t think the Brits or the French would have done anything to prevent the war from starting. It had to be prevented by someone else, like the Terminator coming to 1936 by accident, and mistaking Hitler for John Connor