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The Vegan Marxist
28th June 2011, 20:10
The following article is an English translation by Professor of Montclair State Univeristy Grover Furr and was published through my RALA news blog (http://redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/polish-minister-of-foreign-affairs-jozef-beck-was-recruited-by-the-nazis-in-1938/). The original Russian translation was published in the History Foundation (http://historyfoundation.ru/ru/news_item.php?id=2114):

http://historyfoundation.ru/upload/69c41e8eb089b1fc3f4e62c0f39e1789.JPG
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Jozef Beck
(right) sitting next to Führer of Germany Adolf
Hitler (left).

Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Jozef Beck was recruited by the Nazis in 1938
June 28, 2011

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Jozef Beck was recruited by the Nazis in 1938. This is revealed in the confessions of Luftwaffe General-Lieutenant Alfred Gerstenberg, published in the documentary collection “Tainy diplomatii Tret’ego Reikha: Germanskie diplomaty, rukovoditeli zarubezhnykh voennykh misii, voennye i politseiskie attaché v sovetskom plenu. Dokumenty iz sledstvennykh del” [“Secrets of the Diplomacy of the Third Reich. German Diplomats, Leaders of Foreign Military Missions, Military and Political Attachés in Soviet Captivity. Documents from Investigative Files”] (Moscow, 2011), published by the “Democracy” fund.

In an interrogation of August 17 1945 General Gerstenberg, who had occupied the position of air force attaché in Poland since 1938, communicated the following information concerning Beck’s recruitment:

“Question: It is well known that Goering often visited Poland. Was he really only interested in hunting in Poland?

Answer: Goering often went to Poland and other countries to hunt, but in reality he was not so much interested in hunting as in carrying out political tasks under this guise. Before my departure for Poland Goering told me that he would be travelling to Poland for hunting and would facilitate my task.

And in fact in 1938 Goering arrived in Poland, where he went hunting together with Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs de Beck. During this hunting trip Goering gave Beck a check for 300,000 marks, after which Beck began to strongly champion friendship with Germany.

Question: How do you know that Goering bribed Beck?

Answer: I learned that Beck had been bribed by Goering from Moltke, German ambassador to Poland, who took part in the hunting trip. In this connection Moltke said that Beck would not escape from our clutches.”

(Tainy diplomatii Tret’ego Reikka. Moscow, 2011, p. 581. The transcript is kept in: TsA FSB. D. N-21147. T. 1. L. 35-53.)

The information about the Nazi recruitment of Jozef Beck explains many strange things about the foreign policy of Poland in 1938 and 1939, according to Aleksandr Diukov, director of the Fund for Historical Memory. “When Germany began the revision of European boundaries, Poland undertook analogous actions”, he said. “Thus, in March 1938 Warsaw organized a provocation on its line of demarcation with Lithuania and gave her an ultimatum demanding that she officially recognize as Polish territory the Polish annexation of the province of Vilna in 1922, occupied by Polish forces in 1920. In case of refusal Poland threatened to declare war on Lithuania. That initiative received the support of Berlin.

Shortly afterwards Poland took part with Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by seizing the Těšín province. Poland was the de facto aggressor. In the September 20 1938 talk with Hitler the Polish ambassador to Berlin stated that that the position his country had taken paralyzed the “possibility of Soviet intervention into the Czech question.” In March 1939 Poland again stood on the same side of the barricade with Germany by actively supporting the idea of Hungarian occupation of Transcarpathian Ukraine.

Speaking of these events contemporary Polish historians try to convince us that in reality during the 1930s Poland was only carrying out a policy of “equilibrium” between Germany and the Soviet Union. However this is untrue. It is easy to see that the foreign policy of Poland was in the Nazi channel. The information about Beck’s recruitment explains why.”

“I would also like to note that in the summer of 1939 it was precisely the position of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs that facilitated the breaking off of negotiations towards an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance against Germany.

Thus, for example, at the end of April Warsaw informed Berlin that “Poland will never permit a single soldier of Soviet Russia on its territory.” “We have no military treaty with the USSR and we do not wish to have any”, declared Jozef Beck on August 19, 1939. Nazi Germany was the main beneficiary of this position of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Beck repaid with interest the money he received from the Nazis”, concluded Aleksandr Diukov. The historian remarked that after the defeat of Poland by German armies in September 1939 Beck fled to Rumania, where he lived until his death in 1944.

Kiev Communard
28th June 2011, 21:11
The Inter-War Polish regime was authoritarian as hell, resembling Israel in its segregation policies with regard to Ukrainians and Byelorussians, undertaking numerous acts of military aggression against its neigbours (including occupying almost the third of Lithuania's territory for almost two decades and clamping down on the workers' dissent within Poland itself, with Polish anarcho-syndicalist union, the ZZZ, which had almost 130,000 dues paying members (and was the only significant revolutionary organization in Poland after Stalinised Komintern dissolved the Communist Party of Poland) being heavily repressed.

The political regime itself was a variant of corporatism more akin to Mussolini's model than to Nazism, but still with a lot of irrationalist and charismatic elements in its ideology. Therefore it is unsurprising the Polish state entered into an alliance with Hitler, albeit temporarily, and I do not think Dyukov's simplistic account of "conspiracy" between Goering and Beck is relevant there.

Ismail
28th June 2011, 21:29
The political regime itself was a variant of corporatism more akin to Mussolini's model than to Nazism, but still with a lot of irrationalist and charismatic elements in its ideology.In private conversations with Dimitrov, Stalin actually referred to Poland as a fascist state.

Dimitrov summed up Stalin's words to him in his diary on 7 September 1939 as follows:

—Formerly (in history) the Polish state was a nat state. Therefore, revolutionaries defended it against partition and enslavement.
—[I]Now [Poland is] a fascist state, oppressing Ukrainians, Belorussians, and so forth.
—The annihilation of that state under current conditions would mean one fewer bourgeois fascist state to contend with!
—What would be the harm if as a result of the rout of Poland we were to extend the socialist system onto new territories and populations?(The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov: 1933-1949, p. 116.)

Jose Gracchus
30th June 2011, 05:29
I like how you post "Stalin sez!" along with his obvious revanchist motivations directly beneath.

DiaMat86
30th June 2011, 06:32
re·vanche (rhttp://img.tfd.com/hm/GIF/schwa.gif-vänchhttp://img.tfd.com/hm/GIF/prime.gif, -vähttp://img.tfd.com/hm/GIF/nsc.gifshhttp://img.tfd.com/hm/GIF/prime.gif)n.1. The act of retaliating; revenge.
2. A usually political policy, as of a nation or an ethnic group, intended to regain lost territory or standing.

At first I thought you were saying something bad.

Ismail
1st July 2011, 01:57
I like how you post "Stalin sez!" along with his obvious revanchist motivations directly beneath.I guess Lenin was a "revanchist" too, considering he considered the annexation of Moldavia as illegal and wanted it back.

hardlinecommunist
1st July 2011, 02:45
I guess Lenin was a "revanchist" too, considering he considered the annexation of Moldavia as illegal and wanted it back. Lenin also wanted The There Baltic States of Lativa Lithuania and Estonia back as well since he considered The Independence of these there states illegal as well

A Marxist Historian
1st July 2011, 19:39
Lenin also wanted The There Baltic States of Lativa Lithuania and Estonia back as well since he considered The Independence of these there states illegal as well

Wrong, he considered it legal, in fact he let Chicherin sign treaties with them. Moldavia was another story, the Rumanian claim on Moldavia was always absurd, which is why it's an independent counry now and nobody except crazed Nazis wants it to merge with Rumania, whereas plenty of Moldavians would like to be part of Russia, despite how disgusting Putin is.

But that doesn't mean Lenin thought it was right. These were all three right-wing dictatorships where, at first, the great majority of the population wanted to be part of the USSR. Especially Latvia, which was probably the most pro-Bolshevik area in the whole Russian Empire. The way they got "independence" was real simple, the German Army was occupying them and killing everybody who thought otherwise.

Stalin, that brilliant political genius, managed to piss off the people in the Baltic states so much that the originally pro-Bolshevik population of the Baltic states feels very very differently nowadays.

The right wing in these countries played brilliantly with anti-Semitism. All of them, especially Lithuania, had big Jewish populations at one point. Peasant resentment of the Jews grew and grew, cleverly fanned by the petty right-wing dictators running them between WWI and WWII, and the peasants eagerly jumped on the bandwagon of the Holocaust when the Nazis marched in, doing a lot of the actual killing there.

You have a lot of semi-closeted pro-Nazi sentiment there to this day. Since the Jews were all killed, now they hate Russians instead of Jews. The very large Russian population of Latvia and Estonia are second class citizens with few rights. Things are a little better in Lithuania, where Jewish traditions are so strong and the local anti-Semitism was not quite as bad.

-M.H.-