What was Hitler's excuse for invading Poland? I'm curious.

Any history majors out there? Or anybody old enough to remember?

Drones too!

With mass graves and gassing their own people with gas they got from some fascist guy with glasses.

I think Hitler accused the Polish Gov't of not being able to protect ethnic Germans in and around Gdansk.

a serious answer).

Was given a large portion of what had been East Prussia before WW I. Germany was allowed to keep Danzig (Gdansk in Polish) and a thin corridor connecting the city to the rest of Germany. Hitler argued that the Poles would cut the people of Danzig off & try to force them into joining Poland.
Historians view the reason to be completely without merit - if Danzig hadn't existed Hitler would manufactured another reason.

My father survived Hitler's labor camps, but did not dispute that the Sudeten Germans were mistreated. Of course, liberating ethnic Germans from real or imagined oppression isn't where the Nazis ended ...

in northern Poland and along the border. Since Hitler's movement was pan Germanism, the unity of all Germanic peoples, he felt he needed to take "their" territory back from the barbaric Poles.

Pan Germanism had been a growing movement for over 50 years by that time. The philosopher Hegel and the playwright Fichte were the main promoters of the idea.

That was the justification, the liberation of Germans in Danzig (Gdansk) from Polish rule. Exterminating Poland's Jews and Gypsies along with quite a number of ethnic Poles was almost an afterthought. Unification was the basic ideal.

but all of Pomerania and East Prussia.

I'm Pomeranian. I have a friend who's Dalmatian. :)

border?


This is just from off the top of my mind, but I remember something about either German military personel or maybe one of those "brown shirt" type organizations who were dressed in uniforms of Polish military taking over a radio station close to the border and broadcasting propaganda that made the German leadership look bad or something.


EDIT: Found this with a little more info to go on about that staged attack.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/aa090399.htm


On the night of August 31, 1939, Nazis took an unknown prisoner from one of their concentration camps, dressed him in a Polish uniform, took him to the town of Gleiwitz (on the border of Poland and Germany), and then shot him. The staged scene with the dead prisoner dressed in a Polish uniform was supposed to appear as a Polish attack against a German radio station.

Hitler used the staged attack as the excuse to invade Poland.

The Gleiwitz incident refers to a staged attack against a German radio station in Gleiwitz (nowadays Gliwice) on the night of August 31, 1939 . There were other staged Polish-German border incidents (such as house torching in the Polish Corridor) and spurious propaganda output. Together the Nazis claimed these incidents as the pretext for operation Fall Weiss, the invasion of Poland the following day.
The border incidents were collectively dubbed 'Operation Himmler'.

The Gleiwitz incident was organised by Alfred Helmut Naujocks under orders from Reinhard Heydrich and accompanied by Heinrich Müller, the chief of Gestapo (according to the sworn affidavit of Naujocks at Nuremberg Trials). Naujocks stated that a small group seized the station and a message was broadcast that urged the Poles resident in Silesia to strike against Germans. After receiving a lethal injection a convict, Franciszek Honiok, was given gunshot wounds and left dead at the scene of the incident as evidence that he had been killed while attacking. This was presented as proof of the attack to the invited press and police officials.

Other convicts were available for use but ultimately only Honiok was used. The Germans referred to them by a code word Canned Goods. Therefore some sources (incorrectly) refer to this incident as "Operation 'Canned Goods'".

The facts relating to the Gleiwitz radio station attack are often confused with other actions performed on 31 August. As the attack was supposed to represent an attack by Polish insurgents, the "attackers" (including Honiok) did not wear Polish military uniforms.

http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Attack_on_Gleiwitz_radio_station

But it was, to use modern terminology, the tipping point, as identified with the Nazi reqime...

There was the Danzig situation as well as hundreds of years of land being won and lost back and forth since before the formation of the German republic....

"Quarrels with Poland should be avoided. Should
Poland however adopt a threatening attitude
towards Germany, 'a final settlement' will be
necessary, notwithstanding the pact with Poland.
The aim is then to destroy Polish military
strength, and to create in the East a situation
which satisfies the requirements of defense. The
Free State of Danzig will be incorporated into
Germany at the outbreak of the conflict at the
latest. Policy aims at limiting the war to Poland,
and this is considered possible in view of the
internal crisis in France, and British restraint
as a result of this." - Hitler


The Tribunal
is fully satisfied by the evidence that the war initiated by
Germany against Poland on 1st September, 1939 was most
plainly an aggressive war, which was to develop in due
course into a war which embraced almost the whole world, and
resulted in the commission of countless crimes, both against
the laws and customs of war, and against humanity.

http://www1.us.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/imt/tgmwc/judgment/ftp.py?imt/tgmwc/judgment//j-invasion-poland

...

The SS took twelve prisoners out of Buchenwald and forced them to take poison, shot them after they had put on Polish uniforms. An SS Officer yelled in Polish into a radio that they had come to invade Germany, and then the SS fled.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler told the Nazi Reichstag that Poland had tried to invade Germany, and the Wehrmacht was returning fire since 5:45 AM. Actually, in a carefully planned and highly mobile attack codenamed Fall Weiss (Case White) planned by Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch, German land, sea, and air forces were moving rapidly into Poland.

Poland’s army in 1939 was totally unprepared for the new warfare it found itself in. Poland, like many armies, had large cavalry forces. What modern aircraft the Polish Air Force had were caught on the ground.

...

http://www.worldwar2database.com/html/poland.htm

I have to take issue with he statement Poland was the statement "Poland's army.. was totally unprepared for the new warfare it found itself in. Poland, like many armies, had large cavalry forces."

While the Poles did have large Calvary formations, they used them effectively against the Germans (as did the Russians later on in the period 1941-1945). The problem was NOT the existence of Cavalry forces but that Poland was caught in a bind. Napoleon observed you can keep troops on the borders to keep out Smugglers, but that is NOT how to defend against an Invasion. The Troops need to be further inland to be able to respond to the invasion, but if the Poles kept their troops nearer Warsaw, that meant Germany could take Poland's industrial heartland of Silesia without almost firing a shot. Thus the Polish Army, to defend Polish Industry that the Army needed to be able to fight the Germans, kept the Polish Army to close to the Border. Being to close to Germany, the Germans could attack the Poles from what is now the Czech Republic and what was then East Prussia surrounding the Polish Forces within days of the Start of the Conflict. Once this was done most of the Polish Army was destroyed.

Now the Poles held out another six weeks and even launched an offensive and re-took some territory the Germans had taken during that time period but the costs of losing so many troops in the early days of the War forced the Poles to Surrender within weeks of the Soviet intervention into the Conflict on the side of the Germans (This intervention had been agreed to by the Germans even before the Germans invaded Poland, but Stalin waited till the Germans were clearly winning before he sent in Soviet Troops).

Thus the reason the Poles lost was NOT do to the Blitzkrieg of the Germans (The Poles had participated in similar Blitz attacks during WWI, the Eastern Front during WWI ebbed and flowed unlike the Trenches of the Western Front, in fact many senior Polish Officers had served in the Austrian Army during WWI and had worked with Germans forces during WWI).

Thus the purpose of my comments, it was NOT how the Polish Army was organized in 1939 that lead to their defeat but how that Army was used in addition to the overwhelming strength of the German and Soviet Armies and the fact that in many ways Poland had indefensible borders from WWI onward.

You have added to my knowledge today.

Nazi Germany attacked Poland on the morning of September 1, 1939. In Hitler's speech to the Reichstag later that day, he referred to twenty-one "border incidents" of the previous night
in which Polish troops had allegedly initiated hostilities. The attack on Poland was hence presented as a defensive necessity. But the attack had been planned long before. The Nazis
only needed a pretext, so that the war would not be strongly opposed by the German people and,
hopefully, other nations.

...Yhe plan dubbed "Operation Himmler," was to have members of the Gestapo and the Security
Service, dressed as Poles, stage various raids near the Polish-German border on the night of
August 31...The plan in some cases was to take some German convicts, dress them as Poles,
give them fatal injections, take them to sites, shoot them, then leave them there as proof
that they had been killed while attacking German troops."

Page 5 of David Ray Griffin's Chapter 9-11 and Prior False Flag Operations, in the book
Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9-11, WJK Press, 2006

which really turned out to be a faked Gestapo operation.

of Poland if I recall correctly. Hitler had to invade to protect them but it was really Germans dressed as members of the Polish army.. Someone let me know if I'm mis-informed.

That was in Hitler's radio statement of Sept. 1, announcing that Germany had invaded Poland.

The posts above cover things well enough. The immediate pretext was a set of false-flag terror attacks carried out by German SS forces on German territory on the evening of August 31, 1939. The most prominent of these was the faked seizure of a radio station in the border town of Gleiwitz. The station briefly broadcast anti-German propaganda. Concentration camp prisoners were dressed up in Polish military uniforms, shot dead, and had their bodies scattered around the station, as though they were Polish soldiers who had been killed in the battle to take it back. This had been preceded by months (years really) of aggressive propaganda concerning Polish mistreatment of German minorities, who according to Nazi ideology had a right to be part of the German nation, and the lack of a corridor to the German enclave around Danzig (Gdansk), which had been cut off from the main part of Germany after World War I.

The Western Allies had committed themselves to go to war in defense of Poland - following the experience of backing down and selling out Czechoslovakia in 1938, ceding the Sudetenland to Germany only to then see Germany swallow the whole of Czechoslovakia in Feb. 1939. In August, Stalin cut the counter-deal, a "non-aggression" pact with Hitler with secret codicils laying out a division of Poland between Germany and the Soviets. After the invasion began, France and Britain declared war on Germany on Sept. 3. Polish forces were overwhelmed and destroyed within days, Warsaw falling in a couple of weeks before the Russians moved in from the east and took their 1/3 share of Poland in October. The Nazis annexed parts of Poland and put the rump under the Generalgouvernement. Jews were rounded up into ghettos perhaps a tenth the size of their previous neighborhoods and had their properties expropriated (and starting in 1942 were deported altogether to the camps, where most died). Polish intellectuals, officers and professionals of any kind were in great danger, as the Nazi idea was to destroy any independent cultural identity as well as potential for resistance. Polish POWs were put to work as forced laborers on the German harvest, and Poles generally treated as a servant caste to the German Volk. Things didn't go much better in the Soviet sector, where thousands of Polish military officers were massacred soon after the occupation. And then of course that was also invaded by the Nazis when they went after the Soviet Union in June 1941...

1) That the port town of Gdansk (Danzig in the German) was always German and he was taking it back.

2) That it was being used as a launch point to repress and harass ethnic Germans in the area. Sort of a variation of his Sudetenland Czech annexation excuse.

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and East Prussia with the rest of Germany. Danzig was a "free state" between the two wars. It was also the capital of the province of Pomerania. Further east, and divided from Danzig by Poland, was the German region of East Prussia.

Hitler claimed that he was nust trying to unite all German people with the "Fatherland", as he had claimed when taking the Sudetenland.

Since WW11, Danzig has been called Gdansk, and is part of Poland. The Germans in the area, for the most part, fled west to escape the Soviets at the end of the war.

of the war.

Germany was no longer cut in half because all of the Germans in East Prussia as well as large parts of Pomerania and Silesia were forcibly removed, and German land which had been unquestionably German for centuries were renamed and resettled by Russians or Poles.

The great German cities of Konigsberg became Kaliningrad, Breslau became Wroclau, Posen became Poznan and hundreds more. Millions of people were deported. Most fled in front of the Red Army in the winter of 1945 by foot. It's today considered the largest number of rapes in the history of the world.

It worked.

There aren't any marches or liberation fronts today. There aren't any refugees either. The refugees were long ago settled into the German population in what remained of Germany. And the estern portion of Germany is now just a memory.

Imagine being descended from a people who no longer have a homeland.

I've been told, though I'm not sure, that Milwaukee has the largest Pomeranian population of any city. There are no Pomeranian cities anymore.