The year 1939 proved to be a crucible, irrevocably altering the geopolitical landscape and plunging Europe into a conflict that would redefine the century. It was a year marked by strategic maneuvering, broken agreements, and the brutal exercise of power, particularly by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, setting the stage for unimaginable suffering.
In the pivotal months of August and September 1939, Joseph Stalin, with characteristic foresight, directed his attention toward “maps not just of east Europe but of east Asia,” strategically positioning the Soviet Union. He aimed to enhance the Soviet stance in the Far East, securing the western border against potential threats. This period saw a significant shift in Soviet foreign policy. Previously, throughout the 1930s, Stalin had viewed Poland as part of an international “capitalist encirclement” alongside Japan, even fearing a joint Polish-Japanese invasion. He had sought nonaggression pacts, successfully securing one with Poland in July 1932, thereby gaining “far more room for maneuver in his western borderlands”. Despite Soviet intelligence claims, an offensive alliance between Tokyo, Warsaw, and Berlin was “highly unlikely, if not impossible,” as Poland maintained a policy of “equal distance” between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, declining Germany’s invitation to join the Anti-Comintern Pact.
However, the diplomatic game shifted dramatically. On August 20, 1939, Stalin’s forces (along with their Mongolian allies) attacked Japanese forces at a contested border area in East Asia. Just three days later, on August 23, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed between Germany and the Soviet Union. This agreement, officially a nonaggression pact, included a secret protocol that designated “areas of influence for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union within eastern Europe,” including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. This pact effectively nullified the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan, causing a “political earthquake in Tokyo” and leading to the fall of the Japanese government. The Soviet victory over Japan on September 15, 1939, coupled with the new German-Soviet alliance, “isolated Japan” and meant that a German-Polish or German-Japanese attack on the Soviet Union was “obviously out of the question”. This diplomatic maneuver replaced the “phantom of a German-Polish-Japanese encirclement of the Soviet Union with a very real German-Soviet encirclement of Poland”.
The consequences for Poland were immediate and devastating. On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht launched a multi-pronged attack on Poland from the north, west, and south, utilizing forces that had been amassed following the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. This aggressive action, which began with the bombing of the central Polish city of Wieluń without warning at 4:20 AM, marked the true beginning of the Second World War. In the Polish capital of Warsaw, the systematic bombing by the German air force began on September 10, 1939, with seventeen raids that day. Despite stiff resistance from Poland’s military, which, though outnumbered and outgunned, fought valiantly against fifty German divisions (1.5 million troops) with its thirty-nine divisions (900,000 men), the Polish army was effectively defeated by mid-September.
France and Britain, fulfilling their promises, declared war on Germany. However, they took no meaningful military action during the Polish campaign; the French advanced only a few miles into the Saar region before withdrawing. This period, known in Western Europe as the “phony war,” meant that while Poland was being “defeated, destroyed, and divided,” with “tens of thousands of its citizens murdered or deported,” there was no active western front.
Following Poland’s defeat, the two allies, Germany and the Soviet Union, formalized their new common border with a treaty on September 28, 1939, confirming Poland’s cessation as an independent state. This marked the beginning of a “new stage in the history of the bloodlands,” with both German and Soviet “organs of destruction” concentrated on Polish territory, and both choosing Poles as targets for their “first major national shooting campaign”.
By the end of 1939, Hitler’s empire had vastly expanded. Germany formally annexed some territories in its zone, leaving the remainder as a colony known as the General Government, intended as a “dumping ground for unwanted people, Poles and Jews”. The annexation of Austria had already added six million citizens and hard currency reserves. The Munich Agreement in 1938 had brought Hitler an additional three million citizens and Czechoslovakia’s armaments industry. With the destruction of Czechoslovakia as a state in March 1939 and the subsequent invasion of Poland, Hitler’s empire now included approximately twenty million Poles, six million Czechs, and two million Jews. This dramatic expansion meant that Germany, ironically, now had “more Slavs… than in any other European state, except the Soviet Union,” transforming it into Europe’s second-largest multinational state.
The ideological implications of this expansion were stark. While Nazi ideology espoused the superiority of the German race and envisioned “racial purity,” the reality was that Germany became a vast, diverse empire. German policies in occupied Poland aimed to remove “alien racial elements” and “Polishness itself” from these lands. This included the immediate persecution of Jews. In September 1939, the Einsatzgruppen were tasked with terrorizing Jews to force them to flee eastward to the Soviet occupation zone. These detachments burned synagogues, robbed wealthy Jews, carried out cavity searches, and shot at least five hundred Jews in Przemyśl, leading hundreds of thousands to flee. Early German policies also included mass shootings of Polish citizens in “arbitrary reprisal actions”. Concentration camps like Auschwitz, originally a Polish army barracks, were established to intimidate and exploit Poles, with the first transport of Polish political prisoners arriving in June 1940. Auschwitz was envisioned as a “giant labor camp very much on the Soviet model”.
Concurrently, in the Soviet-occupied eastern territories of Poland, the Soviets annexed these lands, incorporating them into their Ukrainian and Belarusian republics. They disarmed Polish units and engaged any resistance. The NKVD made extensive arrests and deportations, particularly targeting “military veterans, foresters, civil servants, policemen, and their families”. Thousands of Polish citizens, including many Jews who had fled German depredations, were deported to labor settlements in Kazakhstan and Siberia, enduring severe cold and hunger. While the Soviets proclaimed themselves liberators of national minorities, their actions quickly turned many Ukrainians against them.
In sum, 1939 was a year that saw the collapse of traditional international norms, replaced by a ruthless pursuit of territorial and ideological dominance. The alliance of convenience between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union not only ignited the Second World War but also unleashed a new scale of systematic violence and population control on the peoples of Eastern Europe, irrevocably shaping the future of the continent.