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Bitter taste of victory The war started in defense of the sovereignty and independence of Poland, and it ended with the handing over of Poland to the government of a foreign power. Note of the Ambassador Edward Raczyński to the British Government, 1945 Anyone tries to introduce his system as far as his weapons allow him to. Joseph Stalin Poland, the nation who was defended in 1939 by France and the United Kingdom, lost in 1945 all the fruits of its victory. The Polish Armed Forces, with 240,000 military men under the command of the |Government of the Republic in the exile, had been in 1940 the greatest ally of the UK. This did not prevent, however, that the Government of Her Majesty started an appeasement policy towards Stalin that eased his treacherous actions against the Polish allies. Taking advantage of the indecisive attitude of the Western powers, the Soviet Union put into a practice a policy of faits accomplis in relation with the occupied territory of Poland. After the break in 1943 of the diplomatic relations with the Polish government in the exile, the Territorial changes of Poland as consequence of the WWII. Soviet Union named in 1944 a puppet Jurij (CC BY-SA 3.0) government in Poland, which was accepted by the Western allies in 1945. Therefore, at the same time the USSR was fighting against the German troops and taking them out of Poland, it also was also ruining the efforts to reconstruct an independent Poland. In March 1945 the NKVD kidnapped 16 leaders of the Polish Underground State and took them to Moscow, accusing them in trial of alleged terrorist actions against the Red Army. It is worth to mention a very symbolic action happenned when the 1st Division commanded by the General Stanisław Maczek conquered in March 1945 the main German base of the Kriegsmarine in Wilhelmshaven. The war that Germany had started in Gdańsk to cut Poland from the Baltic Sea was ended by the surrender of the German naval forces to a Pole. The fate of the Republic, though, was sealed by the decision of the 3 powers during the Potsdam Summit in summer of 1945. It was decided to keep under Polish administration the German territory at the West of the rivers Oder-Nys-Łużycka, part of East Prussia and the city of Gdańsk. At the same time, it was agreed that the final delimitation of the Soviet Western border with Poland will be postponed until the peace conference with Germany. It has to be noted that Poland has never signed the Potsdam Peace Treaty who ended the war with Germany. The proRussian Bierut government issued on 23 August an unilateral declaration stating that Poland renounced to claim war reparations to Germany. For some time, the People’s Republic of Poland and the rest of the East Block recognized as only German country the German Democratic Republic (GDR), who ceased to exist in 1990; Poland did not establish diplomatic relations with the German Federal Republic(GFR) until as late as 1972. The usurper government of the People’s Republic of Poland signed with the Soviet Union in August 1944 the delimitation agreement and, in September, the republican agreement with the Soviet Republics of Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus giving them Kresy Wschodnie (the Eastern Border Lands). In that way Poland lost, among others, the major culture cradles placed in the Polish ethnographic area: Vilnius and Lviv. Poland lost a total of 77,990 km², 20% of its pre-war extension. The Soviet Union seized 48% of the Polish soil East of the Bug river, adding up to 178,000 km² inhabited by Poles. Such losses were not compensated by the 101,000 km² of the Recovered Territories at the West. These moves implied the repatriation of 2 million of Polish citizens and 3.5 million German citizens. In relative terms, Poland suffered the biggest amount of German light cruise Köln sunk at the human casualties among all the countries who took part in Wilhelmshaven base in May 1945 (PD-US) the World War II. During the German occupation (19391945) and the Soviet occupation (1939-1941 y 1944-1945), 7,600,000 Polish citizens died, meaning the 22% of the population of the II Republic. German weapons killed 6,028,000 Poles, while Soviets killed 680,000 Polish civilians and 150,000 military men and officials (such figures were probably doubled between 1941 and 1945). Polish intelligentsia was persecuted as a norm. One third of Poland’s University professors, scientists and physicists, and almost half of its lawyers, disappeared. Among the 24 million of Poles who survived the War, approximately 5 million of them were abroad at the end of it. Warsaw, the capital city and main cultural center, was almost entirely destroyed and 700,000 of its citizens were dead. After the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, it was burnt by the Germans, who intentionally destroyed the historical monuments –palaces, churches, statues, museums, archives and libraries. They burnt the seat of the Krasicki Library, the biggest national manuscript archive. They destroyed 85% of the urban frame, 90% of the industry, 72% of the habitable buildings and 90% of the national patrimony. The German aggressors destroyed 64,5% of the chemical industry, 64,3% of the typographical one, 59,7% of the electrotechnical industry, 55,4% of the textile, 53,1% of the food industry and 48% of the metallurgy. They destroyed half of the Ruins of Warsaw’s Old Town in 1945. (PD-Polish) railway, aeronautical, ground and marine infrastructure. Moreover, 352 hospitals, 17 superior schools, 271 high schools and 4880 primary schools disappeared. The losses of all the Polish libraries added up to the 75% of its catalogues. Since 1939, the Germans systematically stole and made disappear art collections. Overall, the losses of Poland were estimated in USD 845 billion. It is hard to calculate the losses occasioned to Poland by the two Soviet occupations, and later by the economic exploitation of the People’s Republic. In 1945 the Red Army burnt 90% of Gdańsk and 40% of Olsztyn; when they chased the Germans out of Gniezno, the Soviets burnt the city’s Cathedral. The Russian government stole the factories and other installations previously occupied by the Germans, and took 51% of the shares of the Polish enterprises established on those lands. Reparations (15% of the occupation area) depended on the quantities and the competitive price of carbon. A destroyed Poland, selling cheap carbon (at around 10% of the world market price) de facto paid the contribution to its 1939 aggressor. The future of Poland, who was one of the members of the winning coalition, came to depend to the result of the process held by the Court in Nuremberg in 1946. The USSR, who was a Hitler ally at the beginning of the World War II and helped him to the initial defeat of Poland, took part in that process as a plaintiff of its original German ally. Maciej Szczepańczyk