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To: dfwgator
Hitler never even considered treating Poland like Slovakia, allowing some level of autonomy. He was hell-bent on destroying all vestiges of all Polish language and culture.

True by 1939 onwards.

However, Hitler had a real soft spot for Pilsudski, even ordering a state funeral (in absentia, of course) when he died in 1936.

Sometimes I think that if Pilsudski had lived, Poland (like Hungary) would have entered the war on the German side: she would have had to make territorial concessions in the west, but would have been promised restoration of Poland's 1754 borders in the east.

104 posted on 04/23/2015 9:42:32 AM PDT by pierrem15 ("Massacrez-les, car le seigneur connait les siens")
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To: pierrem15

Pilsudski hated Russians more than anything, so in the early days Hitler pictured him as a potential ally to fight Russia. I could imagine even then Hitler promising Poland some spoils if they aligned with Germany.

But Pilsudski never trusted Hitler, and while his successors were more anti-semitic, they also hated the Germans just as much.

But the one thing the probably doomed Poland in the end was the fact that there were so many Jews in the country, could Hitler allow a Polish State to exist that protected so many Jews? It begs the question, what if Poland offered to return Danzig and the Corridor to the Reich, would Hitler have stopped, or would he simply have kept moving the goalposts until virtually Poland had to acquiesce into becoming a Nazi Puppet State, like Slovakia?


105 posted on 04/23/2015 9:48:29 AM PDT by dfwgator
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