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That's certainly... a take. What exactly were they supposed to do? Their country had only recently been created- until recently their land was part of Russia and Germany, so it's natural that both of those countries wanted it back. Is there some alternative universe where they voluntarily surrender to the USSR and then Germany just leaves them alone?
Literally any other option would have been a better idea than putting trust in a British defense guarantee.
but you would trust a nazi or soviet defense guarantee? Sometimes there just aren't any winning options.
A neighboring state can at least conceivably provide military assistance. Britain cannot.
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Also, correct me if in wrong but was it really resistance to the Nazis/Soviets that caused the deaths or that they ended up being a battleground between the soviets and Nazis as well as having a disproportionate number of Jews? Their disproportionate suffering was due to geography and demographics, not diplomacy.
It seems to me that much of the destruction would have happened either way, but there being a small outside chance that the soviets/Nazis would leave them alone and route around them if they got deterred by the British security guarantees.
Either of the parties routing around them seems like an unrealistic prospect considering their location. In hindsight, the strategy that would probably have preserved the most Polish lives (if perhaps not other things that the Poles valued) would have been to immediately and enthusiastically join one of the two warring parties, preferably the Nazis as they had the initial momentum behind them. The extra ~30m population and industrial base would have probably made enough of a difference to turn the Battle of Moscow into an Axis victory, rapidly putting us in an alternative history timeline where it does not seem so likely that Poland is turned into a primary battleground again anytime soon.
...and then American nukes hitting German cities, not touching Poland?
Nuke availability was nowhere near the point where you could just throw them out of spite without having an invasion army lined up to follow up, and a German victory in Russia surely would have put any Normandy plans at least a few years behind schedule - long enough for the German atomic bomb programme to catch up, at which point there would just be MAD.
Within a year we had seven more nukes, despite massive demobilization of the Manhattan Project after Japan's surrender. The original plan was to shoot for seven bombs per month by then, a rate which we passed in 1948 despite the peace-time.
Even if for some reason plutonium production during an active nuclear war was still limited to only 7 bombs per year, a target turning into a mushroom cloud every couple months with no end in sight is shocking enough that you'd expect spite to be the resource in too-limited supply first.
"The point in 1942 when the army relinquished control of the project was its zenith in terms of the number of personnel devoted to the effort, and this was no more than about seventy scientists, with about forty devoting more than half their time to nuclear fission research. After this the number diminished dramatically"
A tenth of a Manhattan Project (at most? I'd bet the ratio of engineers was even worse), under active attack, and ideologically determined to disparage that idiot Einstein's "Jewish physics", is not going to be producing counter-nukes by 1946.
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Doubtful.
Even with a clean win on the eastern front Germany would be resource limited relative the US and without any real means of delivering the nukes, assuming they were built. German bombers and V-weapons were stretching thier legs just to hit London with an 1000 kg payload. Carrying 5 times that to US industrial centers like philidelphia Pittsburgh and Detroit would've been a non-starter. Meanwhile almost all of germany but most importantly Berlin would've been well within the range of nuclear-equipped B29s flying out of Reykjavik. The distances involved would actually be a couple hundred miles shorter (roughly 1,475 miles one-way vs 1,600) and with more favorable winds for most of the year than the historical strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Meanwhile the US and UK also enjoy a substantial advantage in the form of a meaningful surface Navies and an integrated air defence network where as the Germans were still dependent on visual spotting and individual radar equipped aircraft. In short individual allied raiders have a far greater chance of penetrating German terretory than induvidual german raiders do the US or UK. This disparity was the practical justification for the shift towards V weapons in the first place.
It'll be at least the late 40s maybe 1950 before Von Braun can build the Nazis an effective R-7 clone and thats assuming he doesn't drag his feet or the German industrial heartland isn't already sprouting mushroom clouds.
That's assuming the Germans don't seize Iceland (I think they had a plan to do so, which may only have been scrapped after things started to go south on the Eastern Front). A lot of things could have gone differently if the Germans had been under less pressure at that stage - consider also that in a "Nazi Poland" scenario, the British are denied crucial intelligence that probably was necessary for them to break the Enigma cipher.
MAD doesn't require the Germans to be able to destroy US industrial capacity - a simple "leave us alone in our European possessions or we ride a suicide U-boat with a nuke into Manhattan" may have been enough to give the Americans pause at least for a while. (The Germans did manage to land some guys on US soil unseen!) Consider also that the Pacific War is probably made more painful for the US, since a defeated Soviet Union means that the Nazis get an overland connection to the Japanese empire. If the Soviets could use that link to overrun Japan's continental possessions in two weeks, the Germans can use it to send them significant backup.
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Ally with Germany against Russia or ally with Russia against Germany. At least then the balance of power wouldn't be totally against them. They would have at least one vaguely friendly power nearby, rather than two enemies.
Either one necessitates sacrifices. Both countries wanted land back. But what did Poland's policy of equidistance between Germany and Russia get them, other than megadeaths? They got the worst possible outcome, Russia and Germany allying against them.
Ally with a power whose leader considers your people to be 'life unworthy of life' and brags about how he's going to conquer your lands, kill everyone and move his own people in? Seems unwise.
Of course, we know with hindsight that the Soviet Union would also end up conducting genocides on its subject peoples (like the Holodomor and similar genocides that Stalin carried out).
I can't say I blame them for choosing none of the above.
He showed up for Pilsudski's funeral and really liked the man.
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Ahistorical. He had never said such a thing about the Poles/Slavs.
Even more ahistorical. Nowhere in Mein Kampf or in any of his private or public remarks does he hint at a plan to subjugate Poland. Not that there were no reasons for Beck to be suspicious of Hitler's apparently moderate stance -- obviously he would not have allowed Poland to remain an equal partner forever even under the best circumstances. But up to this time, Germany's re-expansion had been accomplished without bloodshed and his demands of Poland were not unreasonable, as even the British had generally agreed until they issued their defense guarantee at the last minute, fueling Polish recklessness.
The Polish leadership were more afraid of genocide at the hands of the Soviets than of the Nazis.
He may not have used that exact quote, but he wasn't secret about his views about the Slavs.
He talks extensively in Mein Kampf about subjugating the entirety of Eastern Europe. More to the point, he actually did it.
This was after the war started, after his initial plans were thrown into confusion by Britain's unexpected (because irrational, unfulfillable, and at odds with earlier policy) guarantee to Poland. Hitler insisted even in e.g. private communiques with his generals that he wanted no war with Poland.
His foreign policy record up to that point was that of an able, calculating (if ambitious) diplomatist, not of a megalomaniac who would accept nothing less than the prompt extermination of all racial enemies. In Mein Kampf, he definitely does not present a vision of German annexation let alone genocide of all of Eastern Europe. What he does repeat a number of times is the need for more "living space" while gesturing vaguely to the east (or Russia and her vassal states as the Wikipedia quote has it, i.e., not Poland) and talking up the Bolshevik threat. 90% of his vitriol is reserved for Jews and Communists. The Slavs as such are spoken of in a way more reminiscent of the way the Irish were discussed by Anglo-American conservatives during their early waves of immigration: domestically (in Austria), they pervert democratic institutions with their lower standard of culture and their pursuit of ethnic interest, and take up political space that should belong to the Austrian/Anglo majority. His overarching foreign policy objectives were 1. the destruction of Communism (and, similarly in his eyes, European Jewry), 2. the reunification of existing ethnically German regions under one government, and 3. the colonization of some of Eastern Europe. Since the Poles at least shared Hitler's hostility to Communism, it was hardly a given that genociding them would have been his first choice. As I said before, the Polish leadership recognized this: Soviet policy posed a greater existential risk. In the short term at least, the alliance probably would have been treated similarly to how the Romanian alliance was in fact treated later on: mercenarily, like alliances on both sides of the war, not as a conscious stalling tactic to prepare for their eventual genocide.
Edit: This may downplaying Hitler's imperiousness. The point is that whatever he had in store for the Poles, it was probably better than the predictable consequences of their refusal to accept the weakness of their position.
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