The Soviet victory led to a tremendous geographic shift in Polish territory and, ultimately, to the establishment of a communist dictatorship in Poland. Virtually all of Poland in its prewar boundaries had been liberated by Soviet forces by the end of January 1945.
1918. the 4-year-long First World War, during which Poland's occupiers found themselves on opposite sides, ends. Austria and Germany are among the defeated, the Russian Tsar empire has collapsed. Poland regains independence.
According to the historian Maciej Siekierski, when Soviet troops finally “liberated” Warsaw in January of 1945, “Poland's capital was a vast desert of hollow-shelled buildings and rubble.”
Poland was the first country in Europe to experience World War Two, which begun on 1 September 1939. Poland was also the first country to engage in armed combat with the joined forces of Nazi Germany and the USSR in their attempt the change the world order.
The July Constitution was promulgated on 22 July 1952 and the country officially became the Polish People's Republic (PRL).
' Over the next 123 years, a large part of Polish population and former territory would be subject to the rule of the Russian Empire. However, Poland was undergoing a cultural and political revival after the First Partition culminating in the Constitution of 3 May 1791 and the Kościuszko Uprising in 1794.
The “reason” given was that Russia had to come to the aid of its “blood brothers,” the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who were trapped in territory that had been illegally annexed by Poland. Now Poland was squeezed from West and East—trapped between two behemoths.
Virtually all of Poland in its prewar boundaries had been liberated by Soviet forces by the end of January 1945. After Germany's surrender, Soviet troops occupied most of eastern Europe, including Poland.
Poland would join an anti-Soviet alliance and coordinate its foreign policy with Germany, thus becoming a client state. The independence-minded Polish government was alarmed and a British guarantee of Poland's independence was issued on 31 March 1939.
After the war, a five-year reconstruction campaign by its citizens resulted in today's meticulous restoration of the Old Town, with its churches, palaces and market-place. It is an outstanding example of a near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to the 20th century.
The main reason for the Western Allies' failure to adequately assist Poland in September 1939 was their complete miscalculation of both Germany's and Poland's strategies and their respective abilities to implement them.
The Soviets wanted a Polish government -- ANY Polish government -- as a buffer between the USSR and the Nazi armies. The utter betrayal of the fascist Polish Government of its own people frustrated this plan.
Warsaw's rebuilding
Warsaw was rebuilt by the Polish people between the 1950s and 1970s. The Palace of Culture and Science (completed in 1955) was a "gift" from the Soviet Union. Some landmarks were reconstructed as late as the 1980s.
Material losses under Soviet occupation
As a result, under the pressure of world powers, Poland was forced to cede the Soviet Union 48% of its territory, equating to the loss of 178,000 km² of land, gaining the equivalent of 101 000 km² in the west.
Simply put, the Soviets had no interest in assisting the Home Army to liberate Warsaw. The Soviets were planning to annex the eastern half of Poland, first occupied in 1939 under the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, and to exercise control over the rest.
Like other Eastern Bloc countries (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania), Poland was regarded as a satellite state in the Soviet sphere of influence, but it was never a part of the Soviet Union.
In the end, German losses totaled 14,000 dead or missing and 30,000 wounded out of a total of 1,250,000 troops involved in the invasion; Polish casualties numbered 66,000 dead, 130,000 wounded, and 400,000 captured out of 800,000 troops.
In World War Two, the Polish armed forces were the fourth largest Allied forces in Europe, after those of the Soviet Union, United States, and Britain. Poles made substantial contributions to the Allied effort throughout the war, fighting on land, sea, and in the air.
Poland was liberated, not by the Americans or the British, but by the Soviet Union. For the Poles this was a bitter irony. Having had to endure the onslaught of the Nazi invasion on 1 September 1939, Poland underwent a second invasion at the hands of the Red Army just sixteen days later.
Poland re-emerged in November 1918 after more than a century of partitions by Austria-Hungary, the German, and the Russian Empires. Its independence was confirmed by the victorious powers through the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, and most of the territory won in a series of border wars fought from 1918 to 1921.
German and Soviet cooperation in the invasion of Poland has been described as co-belligerence. The Red Army, which vastly outnumbered the Polish defenders, achieved its targets, encountering only limited resistance. Some 320,000 Poles were made prisoners of war.
Poland mobilized late, and political considerations forced its army into a disadvantageous deployment. The Polish army also lacked modern arms and equipment, had few armored and motorized units, and could deploy little more than 300 planes, most of which the Luftwaffe destroyed in the first few days of the invasion.
105,000 Poles eventually returned to Poland. The remainder settled in the West, mainly in USA and Canada. 140,000 came to Britain, where they were no longer seen as brave wartime allies but as foreigners and a threat to British jobs.
The Polish Armed Forces in the West were disbanded after the war, in 1947, with many former servicemen forced to remain in exile.