To Be Or Not To Be 1942 - Third Reich: The Fall TV - The World at War TV - David Baddiel TV - W Averell Harriman - Franklin D Roosevelt - The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler TV - Hitler’s Henchmen TV - Oliver Stone TV - Infamous Assassinations TV - Joseph Stalin - Churchill’s Betrayal of Poland TV - Criminal Behaviour: A Vatican Cover-Up TV - World War II: The Complete History TV - The Nazis: A Warning From History TV - World War II: The Apocalypse TV - Ross Kemp TV - Inside the Gangsters’ Code TV - Bette Midler - Donald Tusk - Jan Pietrzak - Charles Wheeler TV - Pope vs Hitler TV - Battle of Britain 80: Allies at War TV - Visions of War: The World in Flames TV -
Lubinski. Kubinski. Lominski. Rozanski & Poznanski. We’re in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. It’s August 1939. Europe is still at peace. At the moment life in Warsaw is going on as normally as ever. But suddenly something seems to have happened! Are those Poles seeing a ghost? Why does this car suddenly stop? Everybody seems to be staring in one direction. People seem to be frightened, even terrified. Some flabbergasted. Can it be true? It must be true. No doubt. The man with the little moustache – Adolf Hitler. To Be Or Not To Be 1942 starring Carole Lombard & Jack Benny & Robert Stack & Relix Bressart & Lionel Atwill & Stanley Ridges & Sig Ruman & Tom Dugan & Charles Halton & George Lynn & Henry Victor et al, director Ernst Lubitsch, opening commentary
The German onslaught lasted for twenty-eight days before Warsaw finally surrendered. Third Reich: The Fall II, History 2010
An average of 3,000 Poles a day died under German occupation. ibid.
September 1st 1939: Germany attacks Poland. The World at War 2/26: Distant Land, ITV 1973
The Germans thrust into Poland from the west and north. In two weeks the Polish army had virtually ceased to exist. ibid.
Is the lack of a restitution law in Poland just about money or is it something more sinister? David Baddiel & The Missing Nazi Millions, BBC 2007
Poland, of course, was the key country. I remember Stalin telling me that the plains of Poland were the invasion route of Europe to Russia and always had been, and therefore he had to control Poland. W Averell Harriman
Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years. Franklin D Roosevelt, in a conversation with Winston Churchill, Yalta 1945
Poland was crushed … Poland would suffer proportionately more than any other country in this war. The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler: Leading Millions into The Abyss II, BBC 2012
These two [Hitler and Ribbentrop] were prepared to gamble – they didn’t think Britain would stand by Poland. Hitler’s Henchmen II: Von Ribbentrop: The Errand Boy, SBS 1998
With these signatures, freed Poland ceased to exist ... The Germans and Soviets now had a common border. They celebrated their new neighbourliness with a military parade. Poland was crushed. ibid.
Differences over Poland would become the single greatest source of mistrust between the US, Britain and the Soviet Union during and after the war. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States II: Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace, Showtime 2012
July 4th 1943 Gibraltar: The passenger-carrying B24 Liberator warms up on the airstrip. The pilot guns the engine and it rolls forward ... The plane climbs to about a hundred and fifty feet when the pilot puts it into a shallow dive to gain speed. But instead of pulling out the aircraft continues its dive and plunges into the sea. Only the pilot survives. Among the sixteen dead is a key figure in the alliance to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe. Infamous Assassinations: General Sikorski
Sikorski plays a leading role in the Battle of Warsaw. ibid.
Sikorski has become a focus for resistance not just to the Nazis but to the old enemy Russia. ibid.
Sikorski moves to Britain and starts to build up the Free Police forces again. ibid.
Two mysterious passengers – Mr W H Lock and Mr Pinter – they boarded at the last moment in Cairo. And their background has never been clarified. Plus a last-minute change – a courier. ibid.
How the mailbag got on to the runway is never satisfactorily explained. ibid.
Churchill might have wanted Sikorski dead because he was becoming a threat to Allied unity. Without the Soviet Union remaining as an ally the war could not be won. This theory was first put forward in the 1960s in a controversial German Play Soldiers, by Ralph Hochhuth. His suggestion in the play that the plane’s pilot might deliberately have crashed it was successfully contested in a libel trial. ibid.
Soviet technicians did have free access to the area. Also, the officer in charge of the Iberian section of British intelligence at the time was Kim Philby – he was to be unmasked exactly twenty years later as a long-time KGB agent. ibid.
It was all too convenient. Joseph Stalin
July 4th 1943: the fourth year of the Second World War – a plane carrying the Polish prime minister in exile, Wladyslaw Sikorski, takes off from Gibraltar, and sixteen seconds later plunges into the sea. To this day mystery surrounds the plane crash. Was it an accident? Was it sabotage? Or political assassination? Churchill’s Betrayal of Poland, Military Channel 2012
Stalin himself complained about Sikorski. ibid.
Was it pure coincidence that Mayski and Sikorski were in Gibraltar at the same time? bid.
In August 1944 the people of Warsaw revolted against the Germans. The Nazis ruthlessly set out to break the Polish spirit. All able-bodied men in Krakow were then arrested and taken into custody. Criminal Behaviour, A Vatican Cover-Up
When President Carter moved into the White House he appointed a Polish-American Catholic, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser. And later went to Poland with a private agenda. ibid.
The Polish government was not a democracy in the same mould as Britain or France. The Polish government was dominated by the military. The ruling party, the Cleansing Movement, attempted to dominate all aspects of Polish life. Poland was an aggressive country, and sought to punch above its weight. World War II: The Complete History: The End of Illusion, History 2000
On August the 31st Poland attacked Germany: in fact German SS troops faked an aggression. By the end of the next day the Polish air force had been destroyed. And the German army was deep into Poland. On September 3rd France and Britain demanded Germany withdraw from Poland. War broke out. ibid.
France and Britain demonstrated their decision to end appeasement and honoured their decisions to aid Poland. But the democracies did little to actually help Poland in any material way. World War II: The Complete History: The War That Wasn’t
In the coming Battle of Britain Polish pilots were to be among the most courageous, resolute and successful destroyers of German attackers. World War II: The Complete History: A Kind of Victory
An equally ruthless and sadistic Soviet Union squeezed Poland on two sides with attacks. Of the one million Poland servicemen, six hundred thousand did not live to see peace. World War II: The Complete History: The Presence of History
One country suffered more than any other under the Nazis: Poland. Nearly one in five Poles died during World War II. The Nazis: A Warning From History: The Wild East, BBC 1997
The Germans invaded Poland on 1st September 1939; within five weeks the Polish army had been crushed. ibid.
Hitler himself never put his own views about the subject [Polish deportations] down on paper. ibid.
Far from being a victim of Hitler’s policy, [Arthur] Greiser was their greatest beneficiary. Far from acting under orders, he had interpreted the vague instructions he had been given from Hitler in a way that brought greatest profit to himself. Far from being a scapegoat, he chose to be a thief and a murderer. ibid.
In the first twenty months of their occupation of Poland, the Nazis had shown they were the cruellest conquerors the world had seen. But even worse was to come. ibid.
This killing factory, one of six the Nazis built in Poland, is near a tiny hamlet whose name is still infamous today: Treblinka. How could it happen? How could such places ever come to exist? The Nazis: A Warning From History: The Road to Treblinka
4,500 Polish officers are executed with a bullet in the head in the Katyn forest. World War II: The Apocalypse: Hitler’s Rise to Power aka Apocalypse: The Second World War: Aggression
The first shots of the Second World War were fired on Danzig. ibid.
Poland is being ruthlessly carved up. ibid.
Stalin by occupying Poland is playing into the hands of Hitler. ibid.
The Nazis now have three million Polish Jews at their mercy. ibid.