About Polish doublethink
The persistent propaganda of the Katyn theme gradually turns against Poland itself. A presentation of the book “Polish Captivity” by Gennady Matveyev was recently held in Warsaw about the fate of 28 thousands of Red Army soldiers captured during the Soviet-Polish 1919-1920 war and disappeared in Polish camps. Obviously, the Poles did not like the book, V. Glovatsky even wrote an article “Russian” is an answer to Katyn, in which, of course, he tried to cast doubt on the conclusions of the Russian historian, saying that the numbers are based on assumptions.Basically, the Poles have correctly grasped the meaning - this is really the answer to Katyn, or rather, to persistent attempts to make Russia guilty and get political dividends from it. The Poles are obviously trying to turn themselves into a kind of moral standard and take the position of a judge. Apparently, they believe that this allows them to tell Russia what to do and how to do it. And when they were presented with evidence that they themselves are not at all “white and fluffy,” the Poles did not like it. They boomed as professors at a conference of the Polish Institute of International Affairs in 2011, where Gennady Matveyev presented the results of his research. But this is only the first swallow. Many pages are recent stories Poland has not yet been written, and in Poland no one is going to write them, they really smell bad.
There is something to be remembered: pacification, siege, terrible poverty and hunger among the peasants of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, the concentration camp at Bereza-Kartuzskaya, the plundering of Jewish property during the German occupation, and other similar moments.
It is worth mentioning the expulsion of more than seven million Germans immediately after the end of the Second World War from the territory east of the Oder-Neisse rivers (Odra-Nisa Luzhitsk, in Polish).
This "action of eviction", as they say in the Polish works, was not only accompanied by a cruel attitude towards the German population, but in general is an interesting example of Polish double-thinking.
First, the accession of these territories was very pathetically decorated, as a return "to Meadows Frontier" (that is, to the borders of the Ancient Polish state, which was ruled by the princely and royal Piast dynasty, X-XIV centuries), as a triumph of historical justice and ancient aspirations of the Poles handed down from generation to generation. Although, judging by some reservations, the idea of growing land to the Oder-Neisse was born in pre-war Poland, in order of controversy with supporters of the Polish colonial policy. The supporters of the “metacarpal frontier” considered the plans to increase land in Argentina and Madagascar as unrealistic, while the defeat of Germany and the taking of these lands were quite realistic. Anyway, the first sentences of this kind appeared before the 1939 year. During the war, the London emigre government of Poland was a supporter of these ideas, and when Germany’s defeat became inevitable, it became noticeably more active in this direction. At first, the Polish socialists were against it, but then they also succumbed to the general mood, and a return to the “metacarpal frontier” became a kind of Polish consensus.
Secondly, with all the pathos, the Poles immediately set out to get rid of the Germans who lived in this territory, resettle the Poles here from other regions of Poland and as soon as possible to polish the territory.
Historical pathos has become the rationale for the most genuine ethnic cleansing and forcible expulsion of the German population. The scale of this ethnic cleansing was colossal. According to the 1939 census of the year, 7,2 million Germans lived in territories located east of the Oder-Neisse line, and then entered into Poland. In 1948, only 100 thousand people of the German population remained in the same territory.
And this despite the fact that during the war, especially in 1944, a massive evacuation of the population from West Germany and Berlin, who were subjected to allied attacks, was carried out aviation. Say, in Breslau, in the capital of Silesia, before the war, 625 thousand people lived, and during the war the population exceeded a million people. So the number of forcibly evicted Germans is greater than the arithmetic difference between the pre-war and post-war population.
How does the Poles explain this? They created a very prescient version of events. Share, they say, these Germans do not know where during the war.
The February census of 1946 shows that 2,1 million Germans lived on this territory. Where are the rest of the 5 million people? They supposedly left this land during the war or in the first months of the 1945 of the year, and the Poles had nothing to do with it.
The remaining Germans had to be evicted, but here the Poles expose themselves to almost the injured party: the Allied powers, transferring this territory to Poland, forced, they say, to expel the Germans, which was a difficult and expensive task for the difficult post-war time. If you read some Polish works, you can shed a tear over how the Poles reluctantly evicted the Germans, almost under duress.
Meanwhile, the truth is not always hiding behind seven locks, but often written through a couple of pages. Referring to the detailed consideration of a particular region, you can unravel this tangle of doublethink. We are talking about the territory of the former German province of Silesia, which the Poles call Dolni Slask or Far Silesia (there is also Mountain Silesia and Opole Silesia, parts of the region that were part of Poland before 1939). Far Silesia was a developed industrial region, with large-scale coal mining, mechanical engineering, and chemical industry. In 1939, 3 million Germans lived here, and this number increased during the war.
The Germans in 1945 prepared for the defense of Silesia, created a network of powerful fortifications, put 15 thousands of minefields, but during the Vistula-Odessa operation 12 in January - 3 in February 1945, the whole territory was seized by the Red Army. The Wehrmacht suffered huge losses. Breslau was taken to the February ring of 14 and stayed surrounded by 6 on May 1945 of the year, until surrender was signed. Silesia was badly damaged: Breslau was destroyed by about 80%, the civilian population was evacuated and suffered losses during the fighting. For example, in Breslau, around 200 thousands of civilians were surrounded, and for two and a half months of shelling, bombing and continuous fighting, far from all survived.
But it is in vain that the Poles claim that most of the Germans left the "Long Silesia" during the war. Yes, by February 1946, the German population of this territory was reduced to 1,2 million people. However, B. Pasierba’s special work, released in Wroclaw in 1969 and dedicated to German migration, explicitly states that 1945 thousands were evicted in 449,8, 1946 thousands - 1 thousands, 102,9 thousands were evicted in 1947.
Here we come to a very dirty and smelly page of Polish history. The fact is that in Polish sources there is information that the polishing of "Far Silesia" went along with the eviction of the Germans and was accompanied by the robbery of the evicted. All this was organized precisely as the seizure of the territory, under the slogan: "There is no place for the Germans in Poland." As early as May 1945, the Office of the Government Plenipotentiary of Poland in Far Silesia issued an appeal to the population of the Kelets Voivodeship to move to the occupied lands.
However, since April, the resettlement has become widespread. It was not only the organized resettlement of Poles from Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, conducted by the Soviet government, not only the resettlement of repatriates who had returned from abroad, but there was also massive unorganized migration. More fighting did not end in Breslau, and the Poles have already rushed to occupy the land. Newspapers pushed on all this, they say, if there is no transport, then you need to go west on foot: "If the future of Poland depends on us, then this needs to be done." However, it was hardly necessary to further customize someone. In the Polish literature it is explicitly stated: "Practically immigrants, who arrived in the cities, acquired houses, buildings and property on their own."
In other words, the settlers simply occupied the houses and apartments they liked, expelling the Germans from them, seizing land plots, plundering the German population.
There were even pseudo-entourage, that is, people who claimed to be immigrants, used free transport and received help from the State Repatriation Office of Poland, but in fact engaged in the looting of German property. All this is openly written in Polish literature. And there is not the slightest indication that any such pseudo-rider was caught and punished. In this regard, it is worth remembering the famous Jewish pogrom in Kielce 4 July 1946 of the year. Although the Polish government apologized and recognized this as a shameful incident, nevertheless, this pogrom perfectly fits into the overall picture of Poland’s post-war "device": to terrorize, rob and expel all non-Polish people. After the pogrom, 35 of thousands of Jews left Poland, miraculously surviving the terrible German occupation and death camp.
Yes, all this "polishing" of the Far Silesia was carried out in the atmosphere of the struggle with the German underground "Werewolf". The underground really existed and really carried out the attacks, but the struggle with the underground was a hell of a convenient excuse for plundering the German population. After all, a German could be declared a supporter of the Nazis or underground, and then appropriated his property or land. The land, by the way, has been confiscated and divided 52,3 thousands of hectares.
In 1945, 551 thousand were instilled in Far Silesia, 1946 1 thousand in 338, and 1947 1 thousand Polish immigrants in 580.
Since the autumn of 1945, due to the influx of immigrants, the eviction of the Germans was carried out in a more organized manner: assembly points were set up, transport and railroad cars were supplied. The evicted took with them only what they could carry in their hands; the rest was taken up by the Poles.
In a war-torn and starving Germany, especially in the Soviet occupation zone, more affected by the fighting, these people did not expect anything good. The fact that the Soviet Union allowed the Poles to do this is our big mistake. We did not fight with the German people, and simple Germans were not enemies for us. Obviously, it was impossible to carry out the resettlement on such a huge scale in the face of tremendous military destruction, and this entire burden fell on the shoulders of the Soviet military administration in Germany. It was necessary to insist that during the resettlement economic possibilities were taken into account, so that the Germans who were resettled would receive housing, work or land in the new place. In addition, among them were many skilled workers who would restore the Silesian industry faster and on a much larger scale than the Poles could do. This would allow Poland and the GDR to recover more quickly after the war. The Poles, having expelled the Germans, could not bring the population of Far Silesia to the pre-war level even by the 1963 year, when 1,9 million people lived there.
In the Polish literature about the fate of the evicted Germans is written very sparingly. But the Poles were very concerned about the question of how to integrate Poles from different places culturally into Far Silesia. Of the post-war population, only 25% of local Poles were. 26% came from Western Ukraine, 38% came from different regions of Poland, 5% came from Western Belarus. So the question arose of how people from different places tolerate the Silesian climate, whether local lands are suitable for their usual economy, whether there is cultural integration (it turned out that after 25 years after the war, the communities of immigrants from different places almost did not enter into mixed marriages), and etc. Commendable care. The whole book was published, as they say, in the subject, with photos of how the settlers put hay in the Carpathian custom, as celebrated holidays, what songs they sing. The fate of the Germans evicted from Silesia was not a half-word in this book.
This is the Polish doublethink. If we are talking about Poles, then there will be patriotic pathos, and touching care, and attention to all the little things. If we are talking about non-Poles, then any crimes of the Poles against them will be declared by coincidence, or any silence and slander will be ignored.
All this can be clearly seen in the example of the Katyn epic, where the Poles use the lie of the terry, Goebbels specimen itself. The same can be seen in the example of the expulsion of the Germans from Silesia: lies and euphemisms, however, are quite easily exposed. And these people are still trying to teach us morality ...
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