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Soviet invasion of Poland
Part of the invasion of Poland in World War II
Red Army cavalry in Lviv, 1939.
Date 17 September – 6 October 1939 Location Poland Result Soviet victory
Belligerents
Poland	Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
Edward Rydz-Śmigły	Mikhail Kovalov (Belarusian front), Semyon Timoshenko (Ukrainian Front)
Strength
Over 20,000 20 understrength battalions of Border Protection Corps and improvised parts of the Polish Army.	Estimates vary from 466,516 to over 800,000 33+ divisions, 11+ brigades
Casualties and losses
Estimates range from 3,000 dead and 20,000 wounded to about 7,000 dead or missing, not counting about 2,500 POWs executed in immediate reprisals or murdered by anti-Polish OUN bands. 250,000-400,000 captured	Estimates range from 737 dead and under 1,862 total casualties (Soviet estimates) through 1,475 killed and missing and 2,383 wounded to about 2,500 dead or missing or 3,000 dead and under 10,000 wounded (Polish estimates).

The Soviet invasion of Poland of 1939 was a military operation which started on September 17, 1939, during the early stages of World War II, sixteen days after the Nazi German attack on Poland. It ended in a decisive victory for the Soviet Union's Red Army.

Shortly before the onset of the war, in 1939, the Soviet Union attempted to create an anti-German alliance with the United Kingdom, France, Romania and Poland on the condition that Soviet troops be allowed to enter onto Polish territory. The negotiations ended in failure, after which the Soviets instead signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany on August 23, in accordance with which, on September 17, the Red Army crossed the eastern Polish border, following German successes in western Poland. To justify their actions, the Soviet Union issued a declaration that the Polish state had ceased to exist, and that the Soviet actions were intended to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians who inhabited the eastern part of Poland.

The Soviets quickly achieved their goals, easily overcoming the sporadic Polish resistance. About 6,000 to 7,000 Polish soldiers died in the fighting against the Red Army; about 230,000 or more became prisoners of war. The Soviet Union declared all 13.5 million Polish citizens in the annexed areas Soviet citizens and quelled unrest by executing or arresting thousands. Hundreds of thousands (estimates vary) were sent to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR in four major waves of deportations during 1939–41.

The Soviet military operation, which the Politburo called "the liberation campaign", led to the incorporation of western Ukrainians and western Belarusians into the new expanded Soviet Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. During the existence of the People's Republic of Poland, the Soviet invasion was considered a delicate subject, almost taboo, often omitted from official history, in order to preserve the illusion of "eternal friendship" between members of the Eastern Bloc.

Prelude

In the light of Germany's aggressive stance in the late 1930s, the Soviet Union attempted to create an anti-German alliance with the United Kingdom, France and Poland, all opponents of German expansion. Negotiations for a Soviet-British-French alliance failed in summer 1939 partly because of Soviet insistence on a sphere of influence stretching from Finland to Romania and on activation of the treaty not only by direct aggression but by "indirect aggression" towards territories in the assumed Soviet sphere of influence. For their part, the Soviets believed the British and the French could not be trusted on the principle of collective security, since they had failed to assist Spain or protect Czechoslovakia from the Fascists and Nazis, and that the western allies might be content to see the Soviet Union and Germany exhaust themselves fighting each other. Soviet demands for right of passage and pre-emptive entry into Poland, Romania and the Baltic States were rejected by the respective governments, who, as Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Józef Beck, put it, did not trust the Red Army, once on their territory, to ever leave. On 23 August, the Soviets instead signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, nine days before the German invasion. Officially a non-aggression pact, the agreement included a secret appendix in which the Soviet Union and Germany divided Eastern Europe into their respective spheres of influence and partitioned Poland along a line of the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers. The treaty was one of the decisive factors in convincing Hitler to begin the invasion of Poland.

The treaty afforded the Soviet Union additional defensive space in case of hostilities in the West. Indeed, Soviet infantry doctrine required ground forces to be spread out over scores of miles in order to counter the dagger-thrust tactics that characterised Blitzkrieg. It also offered a chance to regain control over disputed territories lost after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and ceded to Poland in the aftermath of its defeat twenty years earlier and the possibility of reuniting the eastern and western branches of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples under Soviet control. To facilitate a war between the capitalist powers might lead to their mutual exhaustion, opening new territories to the spread of communist ideology.

The German government followed the Polish September Campaign with repeated requests for the Soviets to act upon the August agreement and attack Poland from the east. The German ambassador to Moscow, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, and Stalin's protegé Vyacheslav Molotov exchanged a series of diplomatic communiqués on the matter. The Soviets delayed their response because they needed time to mobilise the Red Army and were distracted by the recent flare up in the Soviet-Japanese Border Wars. They also had to consider the possible reaction of the Western Allies were they to intervene before Poland had disintegrated. The Soviets and Japan signed an armistice on September 16, following the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.

Military campaign

On 17 September 1939, the Red Army crossed the border into Poland, by which time, the Polish defence of the western borders was already over and the major Polish counter-offensive of the Battle of the Bzura under way. The over-450,000-1,000,000-strong Soviet Union Red Army entered the eastern regions of Poland with seven field armies organized into two fronts, the Belarusian under Mikhail Kovalyov, and the Ukrainian, under Semyon Timoshenko. In contrast, the Polish border defence corps in the east (Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza) consisted of only about 20 understrength battalions, with roughly 20,000 troops, under the command of general Wilhelm Orlik-Rueckemann.

The invasion violated the Riga Peace Treaty, the Soviet-Polish Non-Aggression Pact and other international bilateral and multilateral treaties between the Soviet Union and the Polish state which the Soviets declared they no longer recognised. Soviet diplomats stated that they were "protecting the Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities of eastern Poland in view of the imminent Polish collapse." Britain and France denounced Soviet actions as unjustified and reaffirmed their obligations to Poland.

The Polish commander-in-chief, Marshal of Poland Edward Rydz-Śmigły, at first ordered the border forces to resist the Soviets. After consultation with Prime Minister of Poland Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski Rydz-Śmigły ordered them to fall back and not to engage the Soviets except in self-defense. These conflicting orders created confusionbecause Polish forces were often forced to defend when attacked by the Red Army, leading to various clashes and small battles. In some cases non-ethnic-Polish populations, particularly Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews welcomed the invading troops as liberators. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists rose against the Poles, and communist partisans organised local revolts, for example in Skidel. The NKVD acted quickly to discipline such rogue elements.

The Polish military's original fall-back plan had called for retreat and reorganization along the Romanian Bridgehead, an area in the south-east of Poland near the border with Romania where Poles intended to hold out and wait for an agreed French and British attack to in the west. The Polish battle plan assumed that Germany would find itself fighting on two fronts, and Polish forces were expected to survive - depending on various estimates - from several weeks to several months, with the expectation of increasing relief from a promised Western Allies attack on Germany's western border; but the Soviet attack made that strategy impossible.

Polish political and military leaders believed they were losing the war even before the Soviet invasion put the issue beyond doubt, but they refused to surrender or negotiate a peace with Germany. Thus the Polish government now ordered all units to evacuate Poland and reassemble in France. At around midnight on 17 September, the Polish government itself crossed into Romania. The Polish government in exile established itself quickly on foreign soil and set up the Polish Underground State to provide military and civilian resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Polish forces tried to manoeuvre towards the Romanian bridgehead area. They were still actively resisting the German invasion as well as occasionally clashing with the Soviet forces. The Germans defeated the Polish Armies Kraków and Lublin at the Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski, the second largest of the campaign (after the battle of Bzura), which lasted from 17 September to 20 September. Lwów (Lviv) surrendered on 22 September, a week after the Germans had handed operations over to the Soviets in mid-siege. In a similar example of co-operation, the Wehrmacht passed the Brest Fortress, taken after the Battle of Brześć Litewski, to the Soviet 29th Tank Brigade when they arrived on 17 September; and the two forces held a joint victory parade in the town under German General Heinz Guderian and Soviet Brigadier Semyon Krivoshein. Soviet forces took Wilno on 19 September after a two-day battle, and captured Grodno on 24 September after a four-day battle.

The Red Army reached the line of the rivers Narew, Western Bug, Vistula and San by 28 September. They often met German units advancing from the other side. Soviet troops drove Polish units into the forests at the battle of Wytyczno on 1 October, one of the last battles of the campaign.

The Polish capital Warsaw held out till 28 September, defended by militias, civilian volunteers, and reorganised retreating units. And some isolated Polish garrisons managed to hold their positions long after being surrounded by enemy forces. The Modlin Fortress, north of Warsaw, surrendered after an intense sixteen day battle on 29 September. Oksywie garrison held out until 19 September, and Hel was defended until 2 October. The last operational unit of the Polish Army to surrender was General Franciszek Kleeberg's Independent Operational Group Polesie (Samodzielna Grupa Operacyjna "Polesie") on 6 October, after the four-day Battle of Kock, near Lublin, which marked the end of the September Campaign. On 31 October, Molotov reported to the Supreme Soviet: "A short blow by the German army, and subsequently by the Red Army, was enough for nothing to be left of this ugly creature of the Treaty of Versailles".

Aftermath

The reaction of Poland's two main allies, France and Britain, was muted, since neither wanted a confrontation with the Soviet Union at that stage. The British under the terms of the Anglo-Polish Agreement of 25 August 1939 had promised Poland full support and assistance if attacked by a European power. When Polish Ambassador Raczyński raised the matter, British Foreign Secretary Halifax bluntly told him that Britain was free to make up its own mind whether to declare war on the Soviet Union. British Prime Minister Chamberlain proposed to his cabinet the release of a strong statement condemning the Soviet invasion and committing Britain to restore Polish statehood; but nothing came of it, and the government issued only general statements of condemnation.

Although the French, for their part, had made many promises to Poland before the German offensive, including air support, these assurances have not been fullfilled. Once the Soviets had moved into Poland, both the French and the British believed that there was nothing they could do for Poland and instead planned for a long-term victory in the war. Having tentatively advanced in early September into the Saar, they withdrew behind the Maginot Line on October 4, after the Polish defeat. Many Poles resented this lack of support from their western allies, which aroused a lasting sense of betrayal.

In October 1939, Molotov reported to the Supreme Soviet that the Soviets had suffered 737 fatalities and 1,862 casualties during the campaign, though Polish specialists suggest up to 3,000 Soviet deaths and 8,000–10,000 wounded. On the Polish side, 6,000–7,000 soldiers died fighting the Red Army, and 230,000–450,000 were taken prisoner—230,000 immediately after the campaign and 70,000 more when the Soviets annexed the Baltic States and assumed custody of Polish troops interned there. The Soviets often failed to honour terms of surrender. In some cases, they promised Polish soldiers freedom after surrender and then arrested them when they lay down their arms.

Poland and the Soviet Union never officially declared war on each other; the Soviets effectively broke off diplomatic relations when they withdrew recognition of the Polish government at the start of the invasion. The Soviets chose therefore to regard Polish military prisoners not as prisoners of war but as counter-revolutionaries illegitimately resisting the legal Soviet reclamation of West Ukraine and West Belarus. The Soviets murdered tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war—some, like General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński, who was captured, interrogated and shot on 22 September, during the invasion itself. On 24 September, the Soviets murdered forty-two staff and patients of a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec near Zamość. After a tactical Polish victory at the battle of Szack on 28 September, where the combined KOP forces under general Wilhelm Orlik-Rueckemann routed the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division, the Soviets executed all the Polish officers they captured. Over 20,000 Polish military personnel and civilians perished in the Katyn massacre.

On 28 September, the Soviets and Germans modified the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and now included all of Lithuania in the Soviet sphere of influence, shifting the dividing line in Poland to the Bug River in favour of Germany. By this arrangement, often described by historians as a fourth partition of Poland, the Soviet Union acquired almost all Polish territory east of the line of the rivers Pisa, Narew, Western Bug, and San, amounting to about 250,000 square kilometres of land, inhabited by 13.5 million Polish citizens.

The Red Army had sowed confusion at first by claiming they were intervening to save Poland from the Nazis. Their advance came as a surprise to Polish communities and their leaders, who had not been warned how to respond to a Bolshevik invasion. Polish and Jewish citizens may at first have regarded a Soviet occupation as preferable to a German one, but the Soviets were soon to prove as hostile and destructive towards the Polish people and their culture as the Nazis. They began confiscating Polish property almost immediately, both private and state, to be nationalised or, in the case of land, redistributed. They arrested approximately 100,000 Polish citizens during the two years following the annexation and deported between 350,000 and over 1,500,000, of whom between 250,000 and 1,000,000 died, mostly civilians.

Though Polish-Soviet relations were re-established in 1941 after the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, they were severed again as news of the Katyn massacre emerged in 1943. The Soviets then lobbied the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska in Moscow.

Of the 13.5 million civilians living in the newly annexed territories, Poles formed the largest single ethnic group; but Ukrainians and Belarusians together comprised over 50% of the population. The annexation did not give the Soviet Union control of all territories inhabited by Ukrainians or Belarusians, some of which fell west of the new German-Soviet border. Nonetheless, the Soviet annexation united the vast majority of Ukrainians and Belarusians within the expanded Soviet Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics.

On 26 October, "elections" to Byelorussian and Ukrainian assemblies were held, to give the annexation an appearance of validity;but not all Ukrainians or Belarusians welcomed reunification under the regime responsible for the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33. Both the Belorussian and the Ukrainian minorities were increasingly alienated by the Polonization policies of the Polish government and its repressions towards their separatist movements, and thus both felt little loyalty towards the Polish state. In practice, the poor (organized by the Soviet agitators) usually welcomed the Soviets, while the elites, although supportive for the unification of most of their people under one state, tended to join the opposition. The Soviets went on to pursue policies of Sovietization inimical to Ukrainian culture and Belarusian culture, as well as to Polish culture. These policies required compulsory collectivization of the whole region and were accompanied by the repression, bordering on terror, of any opposition. Soviet authorities broke up all political parties and public associations and imprisoned or executed their leaders as "enemies of the people". The anti-Polish Ukrainian Insurrection Army itself met the same fate after 1939, being finally wiped out in Operation Wisła in 1947—by which time they had done much to convince western Ukrainians that their future lay in the realisation of an independent and undivided Ukrainian state rather than in integration with the Soviet Union.The unifications of 1939 were nevertheless an important event in the history of Ukraine and Belarus because the two republics eventually achieved independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, forming the Commonwealth of Independent States with the Russian Federation. Orest Subtelny summed up the historical significance of the Ukrainian reunification:

Since 1654, when the tsars began steadily to extend their control over Ukraine, Ukrainians had lived in two distinct worlds: one ruled by the Russians and the other by Poles or Austrians. As a result of the Second World War, the East/West Ukrainian dichotomy finally ceased to exist, at least on the political level. The process of amalgamation—of unification of two long-separated branches of the Ukrainian people—was not only a major aspect of the postwar period, but an event of epochal significance in the history of Ukraine.

Soviet censors suppressed details of the 1939 invasion and its aftermath. Politburo called the operations "a liberation campaign" and Soviet statements and publications would unweavingly stick to that description in the future.Immediately afterwards, Stalin insisted that the Anglo-French alliance had attacked Germany, not the other way round; and Molotov said Germany had made peace efforts which had been turned down by "Anglo-French imperialists". All Soviet governments denied the existence of the Secret Protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact until December 1989, when it was "found" in the Soviet archives.This censorship policy was applied in the People's Republic of Poland and in the Eastern Bloc as a whole, in order to preserve the image of "Polish-Soviet friendship" promoted by the respective communist governments. The official policy varied from banning all mention of the invasion to a simplified portrayal of it as a "liberation" of the Polish people from "oligarchic capitalism", and the "reunification of Belarusian and Ukrainian people"; any further study or teaching of the subject was strongly discouraged. Despite these attempts at whitewashing and the silencing of research and discussion about the the Soviet occupation and massacres in Poland, the matter was treated in various underground publications (bibuła) or in other media, such as the 1982 protest songs of Jacek Kaczmarski (Ballada wrześniowa).

See also

• Polish army order of battle in 1939
• Soviet order of battle for invasion of Poland in 1939

Notes

1. It is very hard to judge the strength of Polish forces on the eastern border facing the Soviets. Increasing numbers of KOP units, as well as most Polish Army units stationed in the East during peacetime, were sent to the Polish-German border before or after the war. KOP forces guarding the eastern border numbered around 20,000 (Sanford). On 21 September, an improvised KOP "army" had a strength of 8700 troops. Polish army units which fought the Soviets had mostly been disrupted and weakened by their retreat from the Germans, making estimates of their strength problematic; it is estimated about 250,000 of such troops found themselves in the line of Soviet advance and offered sporadic resistance (Sanford). The total Polish army on 1 September 1939, counting un-mobilized (and sometimes, never mobilized) units, numbered about 950,000 (PWN). Historians agree that the vast majority of these forces never saw action against the Soviets.
2. ^ Template:Pl icon Edukacja Humanistyczna w wojsku. 1/2005. Dom wydawniczy Wojska Polskiego. (Official publication of the Polish Army). Last accessed on 28 November 2006.
3. ^ Kampania wrześniowa na Polesiu i Wołyniu (September Campaign 1939) from PWN Encyklopedia. Please note that the above link is the Internet Archive version, mid-2006. The new PWN article is significantly shorter.
4. According to Soviet sources—Colonel-General Grigory Fedot Krivosheev, Soviet casualties and combat losses in the twentieth century, ISBN 1-85367-280-7.
5. ^ Sanford, Google Books, p. 20-24.
6. ^ Template:Ru icon Молотов на V сессии Верховного Совета 31 октября цифра «примерно 250 тыс.» (Please provide translation of the reference title and publication data and means)
7. ^ Review of Jan T. Gross' Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. H-net review, 2003. Last accessed on 14 November 2006.
8. ^ Piotrowski, p 199. Cite error: The named reference "Piotr_p199" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
9. ^ The Coming of the War and Eastern Europe in World War II. University of Kansas, lecture notes by professor Anna M. Cienciala, 2004. Last accessed on 15 March 2006.
10. Piotrowski, p 295.
11. ^ See telegrams: No. 317 of September 10: Schulenburg, the German ambassador in the Soviet Union, to the German Foreign Office. Moscow, September 10 1939-9:40 p.m.; No. 371 of September 16; No. 372 of September 17 Source: The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. Last accessed on 14 November 2006; Template:Pl icon1939 wrzesień 17, Moskwa Nota rządu sowieckiego nie przyjęta przez ambasadora Wacława Grzybowskiego (Note of the Soviet government to the Polish government on 17 September 1939 refused by Polish ambassador Wacław Grzybowski). Last accessed on 15 November 2006.
12. ^ Template:Pl icon obozy jenieckie żołnierzy polskich (Prison camps for Polish soldiers) Encyklopedia PWN. Last accessed on 28 November 2006.
13. ^ The actual number deported in the period of 1939-1941 remains unknown, and various estimates vary from 350,000 (Template:Pl icon Encyklopedia PWN 'Okupacja Sowiecka W Polsce 1939–41', last retrieved on March 14 2006, Polish language) to over two million (mostly WWII estimates by the underground). The earlier number is based on records made by the NKVD and does not include roughly 180,000 prisoners of war in Soviet captivity. Most modern historians estimate the number of all people deported from areas taken by the Soviet Union during this period at between 800,000 and 1,500,000; for example R. J. Rummel gives the number of 1,200,000; Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox give 1,500,000 in their Refugees in an Age of Genocide, p.219; in his Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917, p.132. See also: Marek Wierzbicki, Tadeusz M. Płużański (2001). "Wybiórcze traktowanie źródeł". Tygodnik Solidarność (March 2, 2001). {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) and Template:Pl icon Albin Głowacki (2003). "Formy, skala i konsekwencje sowieckich represji wobec Polaków w latach 1939-1941". In Piotr Chmielowiec (ed.). Okupacja sowiecka ziem polskich 1939–1941. Rzeszów-Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej. ISBN 978-83-89078-78-0. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) According to Norman Davies, almost half of the approximately one million deported Polish citizens were dead by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement had been signed in 1941, as quoted by Bernd Wegner, Google Books, p.78
14. Rieber, p 29.
15. ^ Ferro, Google Books, p.258 See Education in the People's Republic of Poland for other examples.
16. Jackson, pp. 71-74.
17. Boyce, pp. 263-264.
18. William Evans Scott, "Alliance Against Hitler: the origins of the Franco-Soviet pact", Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1962, LCCN 62-0
19. "The USSR proposed a ten-year Anglo-French-Soviet alliance which would include Rumania and Poland." Gronowicz, p. 51.
20. Mel'tiukhov, pp. 181-200.
21. Shaw, p 119; Neilson, p 298.
22. Kenez, pp 129-31.
23. Estonia and Latvia were placed in the Soviet sphere of influence and Lithuania in the German. According to Von Ribbentrop, Germany had agreed to what Britain had refused: a free hand in the Baltic and a free hand in the Balkan states. Weinberg, p 963.
24. On 28 September, this border was redefined by adding the area between the Vistula and Bug to the German sphere. In return, Lithuania was added to the Soviet sphere. Sanford, p 21.
25. Dunnigan, p. 132.
26. Snyder, p. 77.
27. Dmitri Trenin, "The Spacial Dimension of Russian History". From The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization. Carnegie Moscow Center. Last accessed 2 March 2007.
28. Gelven, p.236.
29. On 7 September Stalin told the secretary general of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov: "War is going on between two groups of capitalist countries...for the division of the world, for domination of the entire world. We are not against their tearing one another to pieces and weakening one another." He called Poland a fascist state which had oppressed Ukrainians, Byelorussians and others, and stressed that "the liquidisation of this government under present conditions would mean one fascist government less. It wouldn’t be so bad if as a result of the destruction of Poland we extended the socialist system to new territories and populations." Rieber, p 29.
30. ^ Zaloga, p 80. Cite error: The named reference "Zaloga-blitz" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
31. Weinberg, P 55.
32. The Soviet Union also violated the 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations (to which the USSR subscribed in 1934), the Briand-Kellog Pact of 1928 and the 1933 London Convention on the Definition of Aggression; see for instance: Template:En icon Tadeusz Piotrowski (1997). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide... McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-0371-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help)
33. On 17 September, Molotov declared in a radio speech that treaties between Poland and the Soviet Union no longer applied because the Polish government had abandoned its people and virtually ceased to exist. Degras, pp 374-5. Read extracts from Molotov's speech on Wikiquote.
34. Obligations by the Polish-British Common Defence Pact and the Franco-Polish Military Alliance.
35. Piotrowski, p 199.
36. The Death of Chaimke Yizkor Book Project, JewishGen: The Home of Jewish Genealogy
37. Template:En icon Tadeusz Piotrowski (1997). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide... McFarland & Company. pp. p. 49-65. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help)
38. For example, see events as described by Bronisław Konieczny in Mój wrzesień 1939. Pamiętnik z kampanii wrześniowej spisany w obozie jenieckim and Moje życie w mundurze. Czasy narodzin i upadku II RP .
39. The Second World War: An Illustrated History , Putnam, 1975, ISBN 0399114122, Google Books snippet (p.38)
40. The Vickers Mk. E light tank in the Polish service. Private Land Army Research Institute. Last accessed on 11 March 2007
41. Template:Pl icon Artur Leinwand (1991). "Obrona Lwowa we wrześniu 1939 roku". Instytut Lwowski.
42. Ryś, p 50.
43. ^ Fischer, Benjamin B., "", Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999-2000.
44. Grzelak, Szack - Wytyczno 1939.
45. ^ Template:Pl icon Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann (1985). Leopold Jerzewski (ed.). Kampania wrześniowa na Polesiu i Wołyniu; 17.IX.1939-1.X.1939. Warsaw, Głos. p. 20.
46. Moynihan, p 93; Tucker, p 612.
47. ^ Anita J. Prazmowska, Britain and Poland 1939-1943: The Betrayed Ally, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0521483859. 44–45.
48. Agreement of Mutual Assistance between the United Kingdom and Poland.-London, August 25, 1939, states in Article 1: "Should one of the Contracting Parties become engaged in hostilities with a European Power in consequence of aggression by the latter against that Contracting Party, the other Contracting Party will at once give the Contracting Party engaged in hostilities all the support and assistance in its power."
49. Jackson, 75.
50. Sanford, p 23. See information box for more estimates.
51. Template:Ru icon Отчёт Украинского и Белорусского фронтов Красной Армии Мельтюхов, с. 367. (Please provide translation of the reference title and publication data and means)
52. Sanford, pp 22-3; See also, Sanford, p 39: "The Soviet Union's invasion and occupation of Eastern Poland in September 1939 was a clear act of aggression in international law...But the Soviets did not declare war, nor did the Poles respond with a declaration of war. As a result there was confusion over the status of soldiers taken captive and whether they qualified for treatment as PoWs. Jurists consider that the absence of a formal declaration of war does not absolve a power from the obligations of civilised conduct towards PoWs. On the contrary, failure to do so makes those involved, both leaders and operational subordinates, liable to charges of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity."
53. Template:Pl icon Olszyna-Wilczyński Józef Konstanty, entry at Encyklopedia PWN. Last accessed on 14 November 2006.
54. Template:Pl icon Śledztwo w sprawie zabójstwa w dniu 22 września 1939 r. w okolicach miejscowości Sopoćkinie generała brygady Wojska Polskiego Józefa Olszyny-Wilczyńskiego i jego adiutanta kapitana Mieczysława Strzemskiego przez żołnierzy b. Związku Radzieckiego. (S 6/02/Zk) Polish Institute of National Remembrance. 16.10.03. From Internet Archive.
55. Template:Pl icon Tygodnik Zamojski, . Last accessed on 28 November 2006.
56. Template:Pl icon Szack. Encyklopedia Interia. Last accessed on 28 November 2006.
57. Davies, p 1001.
58. "The prisons, ghettos, internment, transit, labor and extermination camps, roundups, mass deportations, public executions, mobile killing units, death marches, deprivation, hunger, disease, and exposure all testify to the 'inhuman policies of both Hitler and Stalin' and 'were clearly aimed at the total extermination of Polish citizens, both Jews and Christians. Both regimes endorsed a systematic program of genocide.'" Judith Olsak-Glass, Review of Piotrowski's Poland's Holocaust in Sarmatian Review, January 1999.
59. Peter D. Stachura, Poland, 1918-1945: An Interpretive and Documentary History of the Second Republic, Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0415343585, Google Books, p.132
60. Piotrowski, p.11
61. Template:Pl icon Represje 1939-41 Aresztowani na Kresach Wschodnich (Repressions 1939-41. Arrested on the Eastern Borderlands.) Ośrodek Karta. Last accessed on 15 November 2006.
62. The mass deportations were motivated by class warfare—Soviet propaganda hammered home the message that they were fighting a war against barbarism on behalf of civilisation—and obsessive security concerns. Less openly admitted advantages of the deportations accrued from the restribution of deportees' housing and land, the establishment of a back-up labour force prior to inevitable war with Germany, and the radical alteration of the ethnic demographic of the annexed region. Rieber, p 14, pp 32–37.
63. Soviet Note of April 25 1943, unilaterally severing Soviet-Polish diplomatic relations. online, last accessed on 19 December 2005, English translation of Polish document.
64. Dean, Collaborations in the Holocaust.
65. ^ Template:Pl icon"Among the population of Eastern territories were circa 38% Poles, 37 % Ukrainians, 14.5 % Belarusians, 8.4 % Jewish, 0.9 % Russians and 0.6 % Germans"
    Elżbieta Trela-Mazur (1997). Włodzimierz Bonusiak, Stanisław Jan Ciesielski, Zygmunt Mańkowski, Mikołaj Iwanow (ed.). Sowietyzacja oświaty w Małopolsce Wschodniej pod radziecką okupacją 1939-1941 (Sovietization of education in eastern Lesser Poland during the Soviet occupation 1939-1941). Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanowskiego. p. 294. ISBN 978-83-7133-100-8. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
66. Some Ukrainians and Belarusians lived in the areas traded to Germany by the Soviets in the agreement of 28 October (see maps). Chełm and Lemkivshchyna (Łemkowszczyzna), for example, were among the Ukrainian enclaves left in German-occupied Poland.
67. The voters had a choice of only one candidate for each position of deputy; the communist party commissars then provided the assemblies with resolutions that would push through transfers of land to peasant communities and the nationalization of banks and heavy industry. Rieber, pp 29–30.
68. Davies, pp 1002–1003.
69. ^ Norman Davies, God's Playground (Polish edition), second tome, p.512-513 Cite error: The named reference "Davies" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
70. ^ Template:Pl icon Stosunki polsko-białoruskie pod okupacją sowiecką (1939-1941)
71. ^ Elena Ivanova, Kharkov National University, Ukraine, Multivoicedness of history textbooks and new social practice in Ukraine, III International Society for Cultural And Activity Research Conference for Sociocultural Research, Campinas, Brazil, July, 2000.
72. ^ Andrzej Nowak, The Russo-Polish Historical Confrontation, Sarmatian Review, January 1997 Volume XVII, Number 1.
73. The Ukraine and the Present War: "The so-called "pacification" of the Ukrainians in Poland, which took place in September 1930, is well known all over the world to everyone who studied political events at that time. Trials and verdicts against the Ukrainians continued day by day until the fall of Poland. But the most terrible extermination of Ukrainians took place in the Soviet Russia."
74. Wilson, 17.
75. Subtelny, p 487.
76. Kubik, p 277; Sanford, p 214–16.
77. Rieber, p 29.
78. Pravda, 30 November 1939.
79. "It is generally known, however, that the British and French governments turned down German peace efforts, made public by her already at the end of last year, which for its part, owed to preparations to escalate the war." Molotov's report on March 29 1940.
80. Template:Pl icon Ballada wrześniowa (September's tale). Text from official page of Jacek Kaczmarski. Last accessed on 15 November 2006.

References

This section lists printed references used for this article. For inline citations, see notes section above.

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External links

• The Soviet invasion of Poland during World War II
• September 17 1939 - Soviet aggression on Poland - gallery of photos
• Template:Pl icon Documents related to the Soviet invasion of Poland (II wojna światowa: Źródła do historii Polski)
• Template:Ru icon Red Army's friendship with the Nazis (Поджигатели Войны: Дружба Красной армии с нацистами).

• Polish September Campaign
• Polish-Russian wars
• 1939 in Poland