This is an honest question, for which I do not know the answer. How corrupt was the Polish government in 1938, before Hitler and Stalin chopped it in two and each took half?
It would seem to me that sometimes in geopolitics you have to choose, not between good and bad, but between bad and worse, and we unfortunately have a penchant for choosing “worse” over “bad”: we did in Cuba in 1960, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Libya in 2011, just for three.
Historical
In the early 1920s, during the first years of the Second Polish Republic, Polish institutions were plagued by endemic corruption,[1] and several of the governments of the day were accused of widespread corruption, very likely with a sound cause.[2] Between 1923 and 1926, Józef Piłsudski came to conclude that the system which he dubbed "Sejmocracy" fostered general corruption, ultimately leading him to launch the May Coup and seize power.[3] His byword Sanation referred to the cleansing he promised to introduce, in contrast to his predecessors' shady practices.[4]
However, once in power, his allies uncovered very few cases of corruption in past governments; persistent references to mass corruption amounted to a type of "primitive propaganda", in the words of historian Andrzej Garlicki. Later, it was Piłsudskiites who became embroiled in a well-publicized scandal revolving around election budgets, the Czechowicz Affair.[5] By the 1930s, the country had developed an economic model involving nationalised industry, with key industries in government hands. While this fostered growth in vital areas, it also gave rise to inefficiency and corruption. Private businesses found it hard to compete directly with state-owned concerns, in particular for public contracts.[6]
In the communist People's Republic of Poland, corruption was widespread, particularly by Polish United Workers Party officials (see nomenklatura).[7][8][9] Corruption under the communist regime was so pervasive that some scholars have referred to the system as "legalized corruption".[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Poland