The Waikato Times. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1939 PARTITIONING OF POLAND

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20914, 20 September 1939, Page 6

The Waikato Times. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1939 PARTITIONING OF POLAND

Developments in connection with the Polish tragedy are following closely on the lines generally predicted. With the collapse of the Polish State a division of the country between Germany and Russia is expected, to be followed promptly by peace propositions to Britain and France. The scheme, although fairly obvious, has been laid with cunning, and unquestionably with some prior agreement between Germany and Russia. As she has done previously, Germany apparently intends to approach the Allies with conquest an accomplished fact and to ask upon what ground the Allies can continue the war, since the Polish State, to protect which the war was begun, no longer exists. The Nazi-controlled Press even declares that the Anglo-Polish pact has ceased to exist. Events are moving with such rapidity that it seems the Allies will very soon be called upon to give their reply to the German proposition. If Germany is informed that the war will go on until Poland is restored to the Poles, Germany will no doubt be thoroughly convinced that the Allies arc the aggressors. What objective could France and Britain have in fighting Germany ? they ask. Of course Poland “collapsed through its own incompetence,” and of course the Polish State “from the moment of its creation after the Great War lacked natural conditions of statehood 1 :” Germany and Russia must merely “reorganise the various nationalities in Poland by creating corporate bodies of Europe, thus assuring peace and order.” This is the natural and proper course to pursue. Why should the Allies fight Germany over it? Germany innocently wonders. Nothing the Allies can do now can save Poland from its fourth major partitioning, at least temporarily, in the course of its unhappy and chequered career. The White Russians and Ukranians are reported to be receiving the invading Soviet troops with wild enthusiasm. They, or at least some of them, are said to be delighted at the prospect of becoming good Communists under the rule of the Soviet. Presumably the people in the other half of Poland will be just as delighted to accept citizenship of the Greater Reich under the control of the Nazis w r ho, most people believed, were the direct antithesis of the Communists. Soon the forces of Communism and Nazism will meet in the middle of Poland. Will they too welcome each other as long lost brothers ? Unless the Nazis have capitulated to the Russian Communists, the prospects of lasting peace between the partners in the destruction of the Polish State are very slender indeed. It is suggested that a shrunken Poland will be allowed to remain as a buffer State between the two —a prospect that must be anything but alluring to Polish patriots. The pressure of Communism on the one side and of Nazism on the other would probably render the separate existence of a tiny Polish State impossible, and the Nazis and the Communists must inevitably meet again. Thus the seeds would be sown for a harvest of conflicts in the future. Hitler and Stalin have made some sort of agreement for the moment, but is there any possibility of permanent agreement among the common peoples of Germany and of Poland ? Lurid pages of history will probably be written before that state of affairs is put to an enduring test.