England owes Poland immigrant claims

[dang65]

That was Nazi propoganda, used to justify the invasion of Poland.

Are we talking about the Katyn massacre here? That was done by the Russians during the Soviet-German occupation of Poland and was used in Nazi propaganda when Germany and the USSR were at war with each other later on. It wasn't used to justify the invasion of Poland though, and it wasn't Poles committing war crimes against Russians or Germans (not sure at what point they'd have had the opportunity to do that anyway?)

As for the betrayal of Poland, it's a bit harsh to dump that on the British isn't it? We've betrayed quite a few people in our time, but it was the Russians that waited on the edge of Warsaw while the Germans destroyed the place during the Uprising. The British did at least attempt to supply the Polish resistance with air drops. The fate of Poland was one of the greatest tragedies of WWII, but it's hard to see what could have been done at Yalta. Stalin held too many cards.

[Lucifer Box]

OK fair point about the nukes, but are you seriously suggesting we should have carried on after defeating Germany and gone after Russia?

General Patton seriously suggested it (and was sacked as a result) and more than one senior member of the German High Command assumed that after the death of Hitler, the remnants of the Wehrmacht would be reorganised under the leadership of Admiral Raeder (who took over as Fuhrer) and integrated into the Allied command structure for an attack on Soviet forces in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

[AtW]

Patton was seriously clueless - I don't think allied forces stood a chance even with a few nukes - Soviet military production was at its peak and unlike Germans who did not make many Tigers and Panthers, Soviet factories were making many many thousands of T34s and IS-1/2s.

USA would have been too far to attack easily without huge naval fleet, but UK would have certainly been steamrolled - no offence anyone, but very few sane people are prepared for the kind of losses that Soviets were willing to take and inflict.

[Lucifer Box]

Patton was seriously clueless - I don't think allied forces stood a chance even with a few nukes - Soviet military production was at its peak and unlike Germans who did not make many Tigers and Panthers, Soviet factories were making many many thousands of T34s and IS-1/2s.

USA would have been too far to attack easily without huge naval fleet, but UK would have certainly been steamrolled - no offence anyone, but very few sane people are prepared for the kind of losses that Soviets were willing to take and inflict.

Get a copy of Patton in Flames and find out for yourself once and for all.

[AtW]

That's Sheman tank shown there, not exactly a match for T34-85mm or SU-152...

[Lucifer Box]

True enough, but the M26 Pershings that were available in increasing numbers made for more of an even match (or indeed, the ones that were fitted with the 105mm cannon and redesignated as M45s).

[AtW]

The problem for US and UK crews was that they did not experience horrors of brutal fights that took place in the Ost Front - historically Russian forces were prepared to take very heavy losses, these have very bad effect on moral of units that are not used to it: one german tank division was moved from France to Russia and they were not prepared for a fight there and got completely f***ed in the first encounter losing like 80% of capability, had to be pulled back and reformed.

Say Battle of Berlin alone cost Soviet side aroudn 150k dead, I think Americans lost as many in the whole war. Granted Germans were very good fighers and Soviet commanders were used to brutal rather than smart force, but still the willinness of taking such heavy casualties in one battle would have been totally unsettling to any reasonable commander on UK/US side, so no wonder Patton was told to STFU as he had no clue about what real war was like.

Sadly I think allies did not have a chance to start fight with Stalin immediately after 1945 and win it, this may have been possible if UK/US joined with Nazi Germany in 1941 or even 1943, but this was not possible as Nazi's policies made it impossible to happen.

[Lucifer Box]

Time for an Alf style quote from my favourite film...

Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he's short of know how. I mean, you just can't expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys. And that's not meant as an insult, Mr. Ambassador, I mean, you take your average Russkie, we all know how much guts he's got. Hell, lookit look at all them the Nazis killed off and they still wouldn't quit.

[AtW]

Soviet side won because of quantity rather than quality: T34s were good, but crews were not as well playing in the team as Germans, so as the result we were losing a lot of tanks, but who cares when you have huge assembly lines making those tanks like there is no tomorrow and endless flow of people who are willing to die for fake communist believes?

At the time Soviet military machine was relocated to and behind the Urals, so it would not have been possible to end the war quickly or easily like it happened when USSR entered Germany - it is simply too small and lots of factories fallen quickly, and you can't fight when you don't have ammo.

Pity foreign intervention in 1920s did not succeed in toppling communist regime - this would have saved many many millions of lives.

[Clog II The Avenger]

That was Nazi propoganda, used to justify the invasion of Poland.

I suggest you do some research, (not everything is on the Internet, try the library) these are just a few snippets. Poland was not quite the innocent part as the propaganda machine made out. They had been the aggressors against Russia and Germany for many years.


http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/J/ap.html

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Poles committed wartime crimes against their Jewish neighbors in at least 24 places, a government researcher said Saturday.

The claim was released in advance of the publication of a report on a study initiated after revelations that Poles carried out a massacre previously blamed on the Nazis.

http://www.fsmitha.com/time20-2.htm

1920 Russia is suffering from civil war and starvation. The Red Army, holding center ground, defeats various anti-Bolshevik forces coming from different directions. A Polish army drives into the Ukraine trying to recreate what had been a Polish empire.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020...franklin092302

The terrible thing about war is how hard its consequences fall on those who aren't involved in bringing it on. For as utterly awful as German action during WWII was, it's impossible to see the rape of 1-2 million German women as any sort of justice, cosmic or otherwise, for their complicity in Nazi society.

http://www.dw-world.de/popups/popup_...125431,00.html

Focusing on the suffering and loss caused by the Nazis, the exhibits touch on, among others, the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915, the expulsion of Christian Greeks from the city of Smyrna (today called Izmir) in 1922, the deportation of Poles and Italians, Muslims from former Yugoslavia, Jews from Vienna and the expulsion of an estimated 12 million Germans from countries in eastern Europe at the end of World War II.

http://www.answers.com/topic/mass-grave

Unable to stem the onrush of German forces during the invasion of their country, Polish soldiers and civilians started fleeing eastwards. It was during this flight to the east that the ethnic German civilians, resident in Poland for many years, received the full impact of the spite and hate stored up in the hearts of the fleeing Polish soldiers and their civilian followers. German houses were entered and the occupants arrested and then murdered. Not all were shot, many were brutally put to death by all sorts of tools and their bodies severely mutilated. As the soldiers left to search for more German houses, their civilian helpers were left behind to plunder and steal and in most cases, to set the house on fire. Many of the German women were raped before being shot. During this retreat from the west, the Polish soldiers, together with the civilian irregulars, were responsible for the deaths of around 6,000 German residents. At a later investigation, the testimonies of 593 witnesses established the fact that at least 3,841 named ethnic Germans were murdered by the Poles prior to the full German occupation. In September, 1939 these Volksdeutsche formed themselves into Self-protection units known as Selbschutz and came under the control of the SS and later under the Ordungspolizei (Order Police). The infamous reputation that it earned caused it to be disbanded on 30th of November, 1939.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Sachse...assGraves.html
Because every form of contact with the outside world was strictly forbidden, particularly receiving news from relatives, the Special Camp was often referred to as the 'Camp of Silence.' After the camp's closing was propagandistically reported in the press in the spring of 1950, it was not permissible to speak of the camps in the German Democratic Republic. Even in the west zones of occupation and later the Federal Republic of Germany - where organizations like the 'Fighting Group Against Inhumanity' and the 'East Offices' of the SPD and CDU had tried to procure and spread information about the 'Camps of Silence' - by the end of the cold war the camps were completely forgotten.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP7.HTM
Estimates of the pre-war German population in the areas from which the Germans were expelled vary greatly.
• Uncounted millions of Germans fled their home areas or were evacuated by the German Army during the war and especially in the face of the oncoming Red Army, during which uncounted numbers perished. Also, many Reichdeutsch and ethnic Germans died from the war itself.
• Many returned to their land before or were in the process of doing so when the expulsions began after the war; estimates of the immediate postwar population in these areas may or may not take the deaths and all these movements into account, but in any case these estimates also vary widely.
• There are diverse figures for the number expelled, even among official statistics; and these may or may not include those expelled before the official Potsdam regulated expulsions began.
• Even the figures for those Germans remaining after expulsion vary greatly; census based estimates are helpful, but differ depending on whether Germans are defined by their nationality or by their mother or first language, and any definition adopted is impossible to maintain across the various estimates of those expelled, killed during the expulsion, or found in occupied Germany.
• Censuses may also under report the Germans remaining after expulsion because many may have changed their citizenship (as in the Oder-Neisse territories) or refuse to divulge their ancestry.
• There is then the count or census of refugees in Germany, which may or may not inadvertently include wartime evacuees, refugees, or expellees.
• For all these population or census based estimates, new born and natural deaths are usually not taken into account.
• There are those Reichdeutsch or ethnic Germans who after the war, before or after expulsion, fled to Austria or other Western countries.
• Finally, no estimate of the post-war death toll makes clear whether pre- and post-expulsion deaths are also included ("German authorities seem...to reckon...casualties due to evacuation in with the casualties later caused by expulsion")5, as they should be according to my definition of democide; in any case these mortality estimates differ greatly (e.g., West German publications estimates vary from 1,000,000 to 4,500,000)6.

The Western Ukrainian People?s Republic (ZUNR), proclaimed on November 1, 1918 after a successful revolt of the ethnic Ukrainian elements of the Austro-Hungarian garrisons in Galicia, had a population of 6,2 mln (71% Ukrainians, 14% Poles, 13% Jews, and 2% Germans). Whereas Polish minority launched an insurgency in Lviv, supported by the intervention from Poland, denying Ukrainian right for national statehood in Galicia, the Jewish community maintained a friendly neutrality, recognized the Ukrainian government and even participated in the armed struggle. According to the existing contemporary reports, the Jewish population of such districts as Buchach, Rava-Russka, Rudky?Komarno and Olesk supported the Ukrainian revolt of November 1, 1918 immediately after it was successfully accomplished. In the town of Dolyna the local Jewish community even swore the oath of allegiance to the new Western Ukrainian state and declared its members the state citizens. The Jewish youth in the city of Ternopil (provisional ZUNR capital) initiated the formation of a student battalion in the Ukrainian Galician Army in December 1918, known as the 1st Jewish Battalion, which, however, was not completed at the time. In November?December 1918 in Western Ukrainian cities and towns, where considerable Jewish communities traditionally settled, multi-party representative Jewish assemblies were called by the prominent Jewish leaders for closer cooperation with the Ukrainian authorities. The Jewish National Councils were created in Ternopil, Drogobych, Stanislav, Stryj, Boryslav, Buchach, Kolomyja, Kalush, Chortkiv, Borshchiv, Burshtyn, Gvizdec, Gusiatyn, Zhydachuv, Zabolotiv, Zalishchyky, Kopychynci, Nadvirna, Otynia, Pidgajci, Snjatyn, Tysmenyca, and Tlumach. In Peremyshl, where the control of the city was established by the Ukrainian troops on November 2?3, 1918, the confrontation with the Polish units began on November 4, so the Jewish community, sympathetic towards Ukrainians, established two representative bodies?the civilian National Jewish Council and military People?s Jewish Council. The latter controlled the Jewish militia unit, created from the personnel oif the 9th Infantry Regiment. Unfortunately, the outcome of the fighting on November 10?11, 1918 and the occupation of the city by Polish troops, brought the cooperation between Ukrainians and Jews in Peremyshl to an abrupt end.