The allegation that WWI's outcome and map of Europe left Germany in a stronger position than the pre-WWI situation

[raharris1973]

Have you ever hear or read the argument, assertion, or allegation that ironically, even though Germany "lost" WWI, the war's outcome, and the territorial map of Europe it resulted in, left Germany in a *strategically better* position after WWI than it had been before the war?

I've heard this one. I've got some heavy caveats with the way the concept is expressed however.

A couple of the arguments in favor of this have to do with what happened to major combatants in WWI and what it did to their core strength.
For example, Germany was ultimately left a unified whole, regardless of any disarmament clauses, so it had an easy basis to rebuild. The war was not really fought on German soil, so it did not face the devastation and rebuilding costs that France and Belgium and Poland and Russia and Serbia and Romania faced.

The geographic argument points out that before WWI, Germany was encircled by a solid Triple Entente alliance of France and Russia on either side, and Britain at sea, and then, one step removed, Italy to the south. Furthermore, the *potential* to contain Germany was even stronger pre-WWI. It had *three* Great Power neighbors, France, the Russian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. covering most of the length of its border, with the lesser Switzerland, Low Countries, and Denmark covering lesser parts of its border. Sure, Austria-Hungary was an ally in WWI as it was actually fought, and in the pre-war years, but at least it represented a great power *potentially* useful for containing Germany, so the idea goes.

But post-WWI, Germany only borders 1 great power, France. And France has a nicer border, getting back Alsace-Lorraine, but it is still just one country. On Germany's eastern and southeastern borders however, instead of two great power empires, it now borders a series of smaller, and weaker, states that just can't measure up to the old countries that used to be there: Lithuania, Poland, Danzig Free City, Czechoslovakia, the Austrian Republic - 5 little states, not empires or great powers.

Looking at the map, and this batch of small states, obviously no match for Germany, people making the observations above often make a follow-on comment, lamenting the dissolution of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Woodrow Wilson and the Allied role in dissolving that empire during and after WWI.

"A-ha" they say, "if only the western powers could have somehow kept Austria-Hungary around, instead of helpless non-entities like the Austrian Republic and Czechoslovakia, the western powers could have had a viable partner to contain Nazi Germany in the east, and maybe watch the Soviet Union too, or prevent the war by containment and prevent any need for relying on the USSR to beat Nazi Germany, which involved the USSR occupying Central Europe as a byproduct."

I find this lament, and speculation on a continued and propped up Austria-Hungary to be based on multiple optimistic, and weak, assumptions. The first weak and optimistic assumption is "What's the guarantee, or even mere probability that a surviving Austria-Hungary would prefer to ally with Britain, France, and Poland---this last to which it has lost territory (Galicia) or is disputing territory against Germany, and not preferring to ally *with* Nazi Germany as it has allied with other German regimes in the past?" Even if a surviving Austria-Hungary has a little more gratitude and grace about being left alive than Germany and Bulgaria did, it would seem to logically have revanchist feelings about probable territorial losses in a World War I alternate settlement. Revanchist feelings about territory lost to Italy in Trentino and Istria, territory lost to Yugoslavia, Transylvania lost to Romania, and Galicia lost to Poland.
And if the Allies bent the WWI settlement to protect Austria-Hungary from one or more of these territorial losses, say to Romania and Yugoslavia, in order to 'buy' Austro-Hungarian support for the European peace treaty status quo, then this could end up handing a revanchist Germany, Nazi or otherwise, Romania or a Serbia/Yugoslavia a revisionist/revanchist partner, motivated to side with Germany against the western powers and Austria-Hungary in order to achieve its unrealized territorial ambitions from WWI.

The second weak and optimistic assumption is that the Western Allies late in the war, in the 1918 timeframe, really have it in their power to stop the national disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The peoples comprising the successor states already had national organizations, exiles organized proto--governments and military units, the Habsburg state was considered to be failing the test of war. The final Balkans campaign coming out of Salonika knocked out Bulgaria, drove Habsburg occupiers out of Serbia and Romania, revived Romania, occupied lands Serbia claimed for a joint south Slav state and that Romania claimed for itself, and penetrated into ethnic Hungary proper before armistice was signed.

And if the Habsburg state had held together by the skin of its teeth, all acknowledged it would be tied up in internal negotiations about its federal structure. Could a state like that have made decisive alliance commitments in the 20s or 30s to stop Hitler?

To sum up, based on the circumstances as they were actually developing in 1918, keeping Austria-Hungary alive in a scenario where like ours, the Allies are actually regaining the initiative and winning, is actually extraordinarily hard. If it had been achieved and the core of the empire was preserved, probably with major territorial losses outside its Austro-Hungarian-Czechoslovakian core, it would have been a weak federal state, not inclined to be a strong ally, or any kind of ally, of the western powers against Germany, and much more likely to be allied with Germany, or at best a neutral.

In OTL, yes, it is true that despite France's desire to have Czechoslovakia as an eastern ally to divide German power and keep it busy, Nazi Germany ended up absorbing Austria, then the Sudetenland, then Bohemia, and making a puppet of Slovakia, without a fight, before the outbreak of any declared war. But at least, in the crises of Czechoslovakia, and the stepwise betrayal of this ally without a fight, the alliance served a useful purpose for the western allies. Its process of dissolution served as an early warning beacon and testing ground for appeasement and 'proof of concept' that the concept was a failure, and alerted Britain and France to get reunited and ready to draw the line on declaring war before Hitler advanced any further, on either France and the Low Countries, or Poland or Romania.

In WWI, Habsburg Bohemia served no such useful purpose for the Entente powers. It was simply an unalloyed asset for the German-led Central Powers from day one of the war and decades beforehand, integrated with the arming and manpower system of Germany's main ally, Austria-Hungary. If it remained part of Austria-Hungary, that probably would have remained the case.

The way WWII did start, with France and Britain declaring war in response to a German attack on the east, in Poland (and how it could have started over Cezechoslovakia even earlier) gave them an 8 month gift of time to mobilize and prepare for German invasion. In the event, they ended up screwing up the defense and losing on the western front in 1940, but they undoubtedly had a much longer waiting and preparation period in 39-40 than they did in 1914 of the sudden German simultaneous assault all across the front from Belgium, Luxemburg, and the common border.

So I feel like the pining for Austria-Hungary as the lost potential hero or savior of WWII or the interwar era is misplaced.

The real truth of how the interwar map messed up two-font, three-power (Anglo-Franco-Soviet) containment of revanchist Nazi Germany is simpler, and in some ways uglier......

Basically, the WWI settlement of real life and Versailles Treaty brought Poland back to life. And Poland existing, got in the way of smooth western collaboration with the Soviet Union.

The pre-WWI Franco-Russian alliance was simple to manage. Between the two countries, it was only one-country deep, Germany. The two continental allies could pledge to attack Germany in the interest of the other and protect their mutual survival.

But when Poland was reborn, it had to worry about either Germany or the USSR smothering it, equally. The new existence of Poland created a constant temptation for Germany and the USSR to cooperate for a fourth Partition of Poland. By 1935 France and the Soviet Union were both mightily alarmed by Nazi Germany, and France made a security pact with the USSR. France hoped this would be a second layer of protection to add to its 14 year old alliance with Poland. But it could never reconcile the two alliances, because of territorial disputes between its two eastern partners and Poland's well-founded existential fears.

 

[raharris1973]

Now let's speculate to an alternative to the 'Polish problem'. - What if the Soviets win their 1920 war against Poland? They take Warsaw and most of Poland. They possibly let the Weimar Germans take the Polish corridor. The Soviets make Poland into either a component Union SSR of the USSR, or a puppet Communist state, following the fraternal guidance of the USSR in all things foreign policy.

Naturally this Communist victory will be a shocking and dismaying event for noncommunist and anticommunist Europeans, but the Soviets in grabbing Poland would be at the extreme end of their logistics and endurance and this is not likely to lead to successful revolutions in Germany or anywhere else in the continent. And it is not likely to lead in successful western intervention to roll back or overthrow Communist rule in the USSR or Poland, when the western powers are all tired and already tried and failed at intervention in the Russian Civil War.

So ultimately, over the 1920s, they will get as used to Communist Poland as they got used to Communist Ukraine.

Assuming we get to the 1930s and a revisionist, revanchist Nazi (or Notzi) Germany arming up that starts to alarm France, competing with the USSR for negative attention, and the USSR starts worrying about it, and playing the anti-Fascist card and supporting Popular Fronts instead of revolutions, Paris and Moscow will likely want to cooperate against Berlin. And this time, Moscow will dictate its puppet or province of Warsaw dance along. Whether before or after Czech crises and whether London, Paris, Moscow, and Warsaw collectively or by default sacrifice Prague first or not, they should have a much easier time forming an anti-Hitler military cooperation and containment of Hitler agreement than OTL, and Moscow will have little to no reason for a separate pact with Germany. Germany's strategic room for maneuver, and margin for error, will be much less.

The interwar years will suck for Poland though.

So to sum up, the main way the changed map of Europe post-WWI left Germany strategically better off before, was *not* the dissolution of its ally, the Habsburg empire...that's silly. It was the creation of Poland (and Lithuania), which buffered it from Soviet Russia/the USSR.

.....and in a classic case of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the main planning preoccupation of Hans Von Seeckt of the interwar Reichswehr soon became.....tossing away this strategic asset of the Polish buffer by partitioning it with the USSR. Go figure.

And actually, even the existence of the Polish buffer state did not come without *some* indirect benefit to the west or detriment to Germany's other alliance partnerships in WWII. The need for Hitler's Germany to constantly turn east-west-east in his successive campaigns was trickier than the WWI challenge of going west and then east to some extent. It did knock Germany out of diplomatic and military synchronization with his ideological Italian and Japanese partners, angering them when he signed the Nazi-Soviet pact, and disrupted the ability for him to get the timing right for conducting joint attacks with the Japanese on the Soviets in particular or on the western empires from a standing start. It would have been easier for the Nazis to manage simultaneous attacks on the Soviets if they had a common border to begin with rather than having to partner with the Soviets (and in the eyes of the world, betray Japan) in order to obtain the necessary border for a later attack. Also as mentioned previously, with the attack on Poland triggering the French and British DoW, and blockade, the western Allies had warning and prep time and blockade time. They tragically underutilized it, but it put Nazi Germany in position of accepting more risk than if he had been able to simply start the war in the west.

 

[Buba]

Interesting point of view.
Made me wonder about Hitler ignoring Poland and going west in 1940.

They tragically underutilized it,

Not true.

 

[raharris1973]

Interesting point of view.
Made me wonder about Hitler ignoring Poland and going west in 1940.

Not true.

Wouldn't full utilization have resulted in a defense that would have halted the Germans well before Paris?

 

[Buba]

Wouldn't full utilization have resulted in a defense that would have halted the Germans well before Paris?

The Allies were poorly led and the Germans were insanely lucky.
Germany had 1-2 years headstart in preparing for the war, France and Britain were catching up. They moblised, they sorted out their production issues, they trained hundreds of thousands of troops, etc. They were very busy little beavers over the winter.

 

[raharris1973]

I'm surprised @ATP hasn't noticed this yet and flipped out because I'm basically saying Europe wasn't strategically able to handle/contain German aggression/revanchism because the birth of an independent Poland made it all too complicated and annoying for the bigger, more important powers to coordinate properly.

 

[ATP]

Now let's speculate to an alternative to the 'Polish problem'. - What if the Soviets win their 1920 war against Poland? They take Warsaw and most of Poland. They possibly let the Weimar Germans take the Polish corridor. The Soviets make Poland into either a component Union SSR of the USSR, or a puppet Communist state, following the fraternal guidance of the USSR in all things foreign policy.

Naturally this Communist victory will be a shocking and dismaying event for noncommunist and anticommunist Europeans, but the Soviets in grabbing Poland would be at the extreme end of their logistics and endurance and this is not likely to lead to successful revolutions in Germany or anywhere else in the continent. And it is not likely to lead in successful western intervention to roll back or overthrow Communist rule in the USSR or Poland, when the western powers are all tired and already tried and failed at intervention in the Russian Civil War.

So ultimately, over the 1920s, they will get as used to Communist Poland as they got used to Communist Ukraine.

Assuming we get to the 1930s and a revisionist, revanchist Nazi (or Notzi) Germany arming up that starts to alarm France, competing with the USSR for negative attention, and the USSR starts worrying about it, and playing the anti-Fascist card and supporting Popular Fronts instead of revolutions, Paris and Moscow will likely want to cooperate against Berlin. And this time, Moscow will dictate its puppet or province of Warsaw dance along. Whether before or after Czech crises and whether London, Paris, Moscow, and Warsaw collectively or by default sacrifice Prague first or not, they should have a much easier time forming an anti-Hitler military cooperation and containment of Hitler agreement than OTL, and Moscow will have little to no reason for a separate pact with Germany. Germany's strategic room for maneuver, and margin for error, will be much less.

The interwar years will suck for Poland though.

So to sum up, the main way the changed map of Europe post-WWI left Germany strategically better off before, was *not* the dissolution of its ally, the Habsburg empire...that's silly. It was the creation of Poland (and Lithuania), which buffered it from Soviet Russia/the USSR.

.....and in a classic case of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the main planning preoccupation of Hans Von Seeckt of the interwar Reichswehr soon became.....tossing away this strategic asset of the Polish buffer by partitioning it with the USSR. Go figure.

And actually, even the existence of the Polish buffer state did not come without *some* indirect benefit to the west or detriment to Germany's other alliance partnerships in WWII. The need for Hitler's Germany to constantly turn east-west-east in his successive campaigns was trickier than the WWI challenge of going west and then east to some extent. It did knock Germany out of diplomatic and military synchronization with his ideological Italian and Japanese partners, angering them when he signed the Nazi-Soviet pact, and disrupted the ability for him to get the timing right for conducting joint attacks with the Japanese on the Soviets in particular or on the western empires from a standing start. It would have been easier for the Nazis to manage simultaneous attacks on the Soviets if they had a common border to begin with rather than having to partner with the Soviets (and in the eyes of the world, betray Japan) in order to obtain the necessary border for a later attack. Also as mentioned previously, with the attack on Poland triggering the French and British DoW, and blockade, the western Allies had warning and prep time and blockade time. They tragically underutilized it, but it put Nazi Germany in position of accepting more risk than if he had been able to simply start the war in the west.

Not possible - soviets would try to take entire Europe,and either win thanks to mutinies in allied and german army,and then we would have soviet world,or lost - but,in this case,they would be killed for good.
No Poland here,only white Russia and Germany.
Still better then OTL.

Interesting point of view.
Made me wonder about Hitler ignoring Poland and going west in 1940.

Not true.

Hitler wanted alliance with Poland - but,we decided to die for England.
But - it is better that way,thanks to that we do not had german EU in 1945.

I'm surprised @ATP hasn't noticed this yet and flipped out because I'm basically saying Europe wasn't strategically able to handle/contain German aggression/revanchism because the birth of an independent Poland made it all too complicated and annoying for the bigger, more important powers to coordinate properly.

Nope,return of Poland was normal thing,abnormal were partitions.And german will to dominate Europe no matter what.
Did we had Poland in 1914? no? yet germans still go for conqer of Europe.

And they would try it again,as long as they have one state.Europe was safe from them before 1870 - becouse there was no united germany.

 

[raharris1973]

They were very busy little beavers over the winter.

Not to belabor this argument too much, but the Germans seem to have made more productive use of their time between October 1939 and April 1940 in refitting, repairing, raising, and retraining their forces for the 1940 campaigns, while I recall a grad school historian Professor of mine, Williamson Murray, saying the French troops over the winter of 1939-1940 were talking amongst themselves saying, "are we being trained, exercised, practicing with weapons hard enough?" - If soldiers are ever asking if their sergeants are training them hard enough, you can pretty much say, they are not.

 

[raharris1973]

Made me wonder about Hitler ignoring Poland and going west in 1940.

I've proposed this as an option a few different times, mostly on AH.com, and previously SHWI, and the idea usually get panned or pooh-pooh'ed as implausible, impractical, or overly risky, despite the seemingly good strategic argument that a neutral, independent Poland makes for a nice, buffering "shield" between Germany and the USSR to the east.

The types of objections that critics usually bring up are:

1) A basic disbelief that Poland ever would stay neutral and leave Germany alone in the east while Germany attacked France and the Low Countries in the west. The idea folks have is, despite any Polish disappointment in France, or lack of trust (since Locarno, the Maginot Line construction, the Stalin-Laval Pact, the Munich capitulation) for France, Poland still would see an independent France as its only hope for survival in Europe, so if Germany attacked France at any time for any reason while Poland had freedom of action, Poland would inevitably attack Germany from the east. Even though the French could (and did) write off the Poles in military actuality, the Poles simply could not write off the French in military-strategic actuality. ---[I think this is a good question to ask @ATP and @Batrix2070 and our other forum members about- could Poland be convinced to stay neutral in any Franco-British-German war in the west?]
2) Since Germany faces always at least a risk or possibility of a Polish attack in the east, in the event of a war, long or short, in Western Europe, it cannot denude defenses and units entirely from its long, jagged eastern border lands like East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, and client states like Slovakia. That being the case, it is more militarily efficient to crush the weaker enemy, the Poles, who could be dispatched in a single campaign of a couple months, before taking on the stronger French enemy, who is likely to take much longer to defeat, multiple campaigns taking possibly more than a single year.
3) [and this is their weakest argument I think] Not conquering Poland means not getting to loot Poland in support of the subsequent campaigns to the west (and north). [the weakness is I never heard much about getting a lot of gold, hard currency, quality finished weapons, or undamaged factories *intact* from occupied Poland, as opposed to the case in Austria and Czechoslovakia.]

 

[raharris1973]

Made me wonder about Hitler ignoring Poland and going west in 1940.

As I remarked in my second post of the thread:

So to sum up, the main way the changed map of Europe post-WWI left Germany strategically better off before, was *not* the dissolution of its ally, the Habsburg empire...that's silly. It was the creation of Poland (and Lithuania), which buffered it from Soviet Russia/the USSR.

.....and in a classic case of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the main planning preoccupation of Hans Von Seeckt of the interwar Reichswehr soon became.....tossing away this strategic asset of the Polish buffer by partitioning it with the USSR. Go figure.

 

[Buba]

IMO Poland staying neutral in case of Fall Weiss IS possible. This needs better German diplomacy, of actually trying to get Poland on board on one hand, and more realism in Warsaw on the other. The Polish junta believed that Poland could take on Germany on its own for 2 months or so (in OTL Poland was defeated inside a week or so).
The Sanacja needs to cast off its delusions of grandeur, of Poland being some sort of "big shot", and accept de fact vassalage to Germany for some time, as the alternative is being wiped off the map. Hitler, on the other hand, tells irredentists to jog on and forget about Posen and the Corrider, just like he dismissed the question of South Tirol.

 

[Skallagrim]

Ultimately, the matter of German-Polish enmity comes down to the unsolved territorial question. To resolve it, Germany at the very least wants Danzig and a land corridor to East Prussia (which in turn deprives Poland of sea access). Conversely, Poland will never be abl to trust Germany until East Prussia ceases to exist and Germany's Easternmost border lies entirely to the West of Poland. (This transpired after World War II in OTL, and as a result, German-Polish relations are now normal, and only a negligable few obsessed lunatics still harbour paranoid delusions about supposed revanchism.)

Puts simply: if you want Germany to have a strong Eastern European buffer zone, the price of that is East Prussia. They have to commit to the unthinkable, and sell their now-separated exclave to Poland, while encouraging all Germans there to move home to their "Heim ins Reich".

This kind of drastic -- indeed, mad -- choice of action would show Poland (and the world) once and for all that Germany has abandoned its "Drang nach Osten" forever. It allows for an immediate anti-Soviet alliance between Germany and Poland. Furthermore, Poland and Germany could no work together in pursuing any claims they may have at the expense of Czechoslovakia.

Obviously, this goes 100% against everything Hitler wanted. However, Hitler himself deviated from traditional German expansionist notions in quite a few ways (for instance, he gave zero fucks about colonies). If you get an ATL counterpart to Hitler, that guy may have his own quirks. Such as, for instance, a strong conviction that Germany's traditional desire to expand East is what caused the two-front debacle of World War I... and that if Germany had avoided that and put its entire focus West, then the Schlieffen Plan would have worked, damn it.

So suppose you have a German dictator who supports a "pivot to the West", a "drang nach Westen", if you will. He abandons all designs in the East, and has a basic plan:


1. Become friends with Poland. Ideally, also Romania and/or Hungary.

2. Focus all attention further West. Take all of Czechoslovakia, unite with Austria.

3. Invasion of the West as per OTL's 1940.

4. Annex much more of France, and potentially all of it.

5. Genocide in the West. Kill all "Romance" subhumans, Germanise their lands. Settle former population of East Prussia in cnquered lands. Make Western Europe your Lebensraum.

6. Get South Tirol. Either via war, or by offering Italy significant parts of Southern France "to restore the Roman Empire".

7. Focus further attention on Scandinavia, aiming to unite the entire "Germanic sphere" into one Reich.

8. Aggressively Germanise all conquests. No puppet states, but full integration.

9. Notice that America, by and large, doesn't give a fuck.

10. Build up forces gradually, don't be over-hasty, and move against Britain only once the USA is tied up dealing with Japan. Obviously, don't side with Japan.


The aim of the last step, by the way, is not to destroy or annex Britain, but to win aerial supremacy with a more built-up Luftwaffe, so you can force Britain (under a Halifax-esque leader) into a "white peace" where you take nothing from them, but they recognise all your conquests and sell you as much oil as you want at decent rates.

Step eleven involves being the leading power of Europe in the inevitable war against godless communism. (And revising the history books to downplay the mass graves in Northern France, naturally.) After the USA beats Japan, the USSR will be a potential threat to their Paific hegemony, whereas German-led Europe can do diddly-squat to America, so it's not like the Russians will be getting any Lend-Lease. German-led Europe wins against the Soviets, and a host of newly-independent states (e.g. Ukraine, Belarus...) get pulled into the German orbit.

With the eventual discovery of Dutch natural gas and Norwegian oil, the Reich is set for self-sufficiency in the longer term.

Everybody looks back on the whole "Drang nach Osten" concept as a really silly delusion. Thank God that Führer [Insert Name] got rid of that nonsense!

 

[Buba]

10. Build up forces gradually, don't be over-hasty, and move against Britain

No can do.
For former is not possible, as Germany has a 12 month window where it is still ahead of France and Britain digging themselves out of 1920s defence cuts (thank you, Winston Churchill!).
As to the latter - Britain will move against Germany at any pretext, same as in 1914.

 

[ATP]

I've proposed this as an option a few different times, mostly on AH.com, and previously SHWI, and the idea usually get panned or pooh-pooh'ed as implausible, impractical, or overly risky, despite the seemingly good strategic argument that a neutral, independent Poland makes for a nice, buffering "shield" between Germany and the USSR to the east.

The types of objections that critics usually bring up are:

1) A basic disbelief that Poland ever would stay neutral and leave Germany alone in the east while Germany attacked France and the Low Countries in the west. The idea folks have is, despite any Polish disappointment in France, or lack of trust (since Locarno, the Maginot Line construction, the Stalin-Laval Pact, the Munich capitulation) for France, Poland still would see an independent France as its only hope for survival in Europe, so if Germany attacked France at any time for any reason while Poland had freedom of action, Poland would inevitably attack Germany from the east. Even though the French could (and did) write off the Poles in military actuality, the Poles simply could not write off the French in military-strategic actuality. ---[I think this is a good question to ask @ATP and @Batrix2070 and our other forum members about- could Poland be convinced to stay neutral in any Franco-British-German war in the west?]
2) Since Germany faces always at least a risk or possibility of a Polish attack in the east, in the event of a war, long or short, in Western Europe, it cannot denude defenses and units entirely from its long, jagged eastern border lands like East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, and client states like Slovakia. That being the case, it is more militarily efficient to crush the weaker enemy, the Poles, who could be dispatched in a single campaign of a couple months, before taking on the stronger French enemy, who is likely to take much longer to defeat, multiple campaigns taking possibly more than a single year.
3) [and this is their weakest argument I think] Not conquering Poland means not getting to loot Poland in support of the subsequent campaigns to the west (and north). [the weakness is I never heard much about getting a lot of gold, hard currency, quality finished weapons, or undamaged factories *intact* from occupied Poland, as opposed to the case in Austria and Czechoslovakia.]

Possible only if our ruling Sanacja agree to alliance - but,they were mad and belived that we are superpower....
And,your scenario when soviets stopped in Poland in 1920 is funny,but not possible - they were going for entire Europe.
And,thanks to german stupidity,they could get it - after Poland fall,german workers would rise once again,just like french soldiers.
Soviets would win thanks to propaganda here,not strenght of their army.

IMO Poland staying neutral in case of Fall Weiss IS possible. This needs better German diplomacy, of actually trying to get Poland on board on one hand, and more realism in Warsaw on the other. The Polish junta believed that Poland could take on Germany on its own for 2 months or so (in OTL Poland was defeated inside a week or so).
The Sanacja needs to cast off its delusions of grandeur, of Poland being some sort of "big shot", and accept de fact vassalage to Germany for some time, as the alternative is being wiped off the map. Hitler, on the other hand, tells irredentists to jog on and forget about Posen and the Corrider, just like he dismissed the question of South Tirol.

In theory possible,in practice.....Sanacja was lead by dudes who was mad and belived,that Poland is superpower.
But,let assume,that it happened - we would help germans defeat soviets,and then what?

If germans attack USA,we would still lost,and USA would gave us to soviets - notching change,except that we do not get our western lands.
If there is peace,germans made EU in 1945,and we would be lesser germans now.



To be honest,dunno what would be worst....

Ultimately, the matter of German-Polish enmity comes down to the unsolved territorial question. To resolve it, Germany at the very least wants Danzig and a land corridor to East Prussia (which in turn deprives Poland of sea access). Conversely, Poland will never be abl to trust Germany until East Prussia ceases to exist and Germany's Easternmost border lies entirely to the West of Poland. (This transpired after World War II in OTL, and as a result, German-Polish relations are now normal, and only a negligable few obsessed lunatics still harbour paranoid delusions about supposed revanchism.)

Puts simply: if you want Germany to have a strong Eastern European buffer zone, the price of that is East Prussia. They have to commit to the unthinkable, and sell their now-separated exclave to Poland, while encouraging all Germans there to move home to their "Heim ins Reich".

This kind of drastic -- indeed, mad -- choice of action would show Poland (and the world) once and for all that Germany has abandoned its "Drang nach Osten" forever. It allows for an immediate anti-Soviet alliance between Germany and Poland. Furthermore, Poland and Germany could no work together in pursuing any claims they may have at the expense of Czechoslovakia.

Obviously, this goes 100% against everything Hitler wanted. However, Hitler himself deviated from traditional German expansionist notions in quite a few ways (for instance, he gave zero fucks about colonies). If you get an ATL counterpart to Hitler, that guy may have his own quirks. Such as, for instance, a strong conviction that Germany's traditional desire to expand East is what caused the two-front debacle of World War I... and that if Germany had avoided that and put its entire focus West, then the Schlieffen Plan would have worked, damn it.

So suppose you have a German dictator who supports a "pivot to the West", a "drang nach Westen", if you will. He abandons all designs in the East, and has a basic plan:


1. Become friends with Poland. Ideally, also Romania and/or Hungary.

2. Focus all attention further West. Take all of Czechoslovakia, unite with Austria.

3. Invasion of the West as per OTL's 1940.

4. Annex much more of France, and potentially all of it.

5. Genocide in the West. Kill all "Romance" subhumans, Germanise their lands. Settle former population of East Prussia in cnquered lands. Make Western Europe your Lebensraum.

6. Get South Tirol. Either via war, or by offering Italy significant parts of Southern France "to restore the Roman Empire".

7. Focus further attention on Scandinavia, aiming to unite the entire "Germanic sphere" into one Reich.

8. Aggressively Germanise all conquests. No puppet states, but full integration.

9. Notice that America, by and large, doesn't give a fuck.

10. Build up forces gradually, don't be over-hasty, and move against Britain only once the USA is tied up dealing with Japan. Obviously, don't side with Japan.


The aim of the last step, by the way, is not to destroy or annex Britain, but to win aerial supremacy with a more built-up Luftwaffe, so you can force Britain (under a Halifax-esque leader) into a "white peace" where you take nothing from them, but they recognise all your conquests and sell you as much oil as you want at decent rates.

Step eleven involves being the leading power of Europe in the inevitable war against godless communism. (And revising the history books to downplay the mass graves in Northern France, naturally.) After the USA beats Japan, the USSR will be a potential threat to their Paific hegemony, whereas German-led Europe can do diddly-squat to America, so it's not like the Russians will be getting any Lend-Lease. German-led Europe wins against the Soviets, and a host of newly-independent states (e.g. Ukraine, Belarus...) get pulled into the German orbit.

With the eventual discovery of Dutch natural gas and Norwegian oil, the Reich is set for self-sufficiency in the longer term.

Everybody looks back on the whole "Drang nach Osten" concept as a really silly delusion. Thank God that Führer [Insert Name] got rid of that nonsense!

That could actually work - but our not-Hitler need to fight civil war with prussians here.But,if he win...it could happened.

 

[Batrix2070]

1) A basic disbelief that Poland ever would stay neutral and leave Germany alone in the east while Germany attacked France and the Low Countries in the west. The idea folks have is, despite any Polish disappointment in France, or lack of trust (since Locarno, the Maginot Line construction, the Stalin-Laval Pact, the Munich capitulation) for France, Poland still would see an independent France as its only hope for survival in Europe, so if Germany attacked France at any time for any reason while Poland had freedom of action, Poland would inevitably attack Germany from the east. Even though the French could (and did) write off the Poles in military actuality, the Poles simply could not write off the French in military-strategic actuality. ---[I think this is a good question to ask @ATP and @Batrix2070 and our other forum members about- could Poland be convinced to stay neutral in any Franco-British-German war in the west?]

Is it possible. Well, paradoxically yes but it requires several moves that are rather mostly independent of Germany itself.

First and foremost, Hitler must show that he will not pose a threat to Poland. That Germany seriously wants to get along so that the wolf is full and the sheep whole.

This is not impossible, for surprisingly it was Hitler who stopped the hardline anti-Polish course that had prevailed in Germany since the fall of the Empire, thus breaking the plans of the Foreign Ministry.

But to do so, Hitler must unequivocally prove that his Lebensraum will not touch an inch of Polish soil. How to do it? Simple, no ultimatum along the lines of I do you Poles a favor, as was the case with Danzig and the exterritorial route. The former.
The second is, like @Skallagrim proposes, to give back the land, but I prefer a more realistic version than giving back East Prussia. What does it mean? Giving back... Slovakia under Polish tutelage. For it was the hardline takeover of Slovakia that was the last red flag for the Polish Government that there is no getting along with the Germans. For they have unequivocally shown that they can't help but seize more for themselves, instead of yielding to others in their interests. So it was clear that whenever the opportunity arose, they would throw Poland into more shit because they wanted to.

Of course, this is only what Germany can achieve on its own as a minimum. The best they could do would be to make regural requests for joint maneuvers, or to unequivocally blunt grassroots anti-Polishness.
What is left is, rather, already out of the hands of the Germans. Namely, France and Britain should show themselves as a much worse alternative, which is difficult. For, contrary to the myths cited by other Poles, Sanation approached the matter very pragmatic and rational. It is a pity, of course, that the two main enemies turned out to be, complete madmans.

So what would have to happen for the pragmatic Triumvirate that prevailed in Poland to consider the option of alliance with the Allies as a bad one?
Simple, the Allies should have been much more willing, including attempts to break Poland's resistance through unethical means like take the not happening at all IRL coup by somehow removing or blocking the legitimate government's ability to control the country, in favor of the preferred government, in an effort to gain an alliance with the USSR.

In short, for Poland not to go to the relief of France, it must recognize that France, in saving itself, sold it to the USSR in exchange for support. Of course, for this to happen, a completely different French government from OTL and a different distribution of forces on their internal political scene is required. The left should be in power, as an absolute minimum.

The same with GB, Beck must return to Warsaw with deep disappointment. Deep enough that he will be ready to look for an alternative within the Axis, taking advantage of positive relations with both Japan and Italy. Not necessarily to join, but to get a hedge against the Soviets having Western acquiescence.

 

[raharris1973]

Is it possible. Well, paradoxically yes but it requires several moves that are rather mostly independent of Germany itself.

First and foremost, Hitler must show that he will not pose a threat to Poland. That Germany seriously wants to get along so that the wolf is full and the sheep whole.

This is not impossible, for surprisingly it was Hitler who stopped the hardline anti-Polish course that had prevailed in Germany since the fall of the Empire, thus breaking the plans of the Foreign Ministry.

But to do so, Hitler must unequivocally prove that his Lebensraum will not touch an inch of Polish soil. How to do it? Simple, no ultimatum along the lines of I do you Poles a favor, as was the case with Danzig and the exterritorial route. The former.
The second is, like @Skallagrim proposes, to give back the land, but I prefer a more realistic version than giving back East Prussia. What does it mean? Giving back... Slovakia under Polish tutelage. For it was the hardline takeover of Slovakia that was the last red flag for the Polish Government that there is no getting along with the Germans. For they have unequivocally shown that they can't help but seize more for themselves, instead of yielding to others in their interests. So it was clear that whenever the opportunity arose, they would throw Poland into more shit because they wanted to.

Of course, this is only what Germany can achieve on its own as a minimum. The best they could do would be to make regural requests for joint maneuvers, or to unequivocally blunt grassroots anti-Polishness.
What is left is, rather, already out of the hands of the Germans. Namely, France and Britain should show themselves as a much worse alternative, which is difficult. For, contrary to the myths cited by other Poles, Sanation approached the matter very pragmatic and rational. It is a pity, of course, that the two main enemies turned out to be, complete madmans.

So what would have to happen for the pragmatic Triumvirate that prevailed in Poland to consider the option of alliance with the Allies as a bad one?
Simple, the Allies should have been much more willing, including attempts to break Poland's resistance through unethical means like take the not happening at all IRL coup by somehow removing or blocking the legitimate government's ability to control the country, in favor of the preferred government, in an effort to gain an alliance with the USSR.

In short, for Poland not to go to the relief of France, it must recognize that France, in saving itself, sold it to the USSR in exchange for support. Of course, for this to happen, a completely different French government from OTL and a different distribution of forces on their internal political scene is required. The left should be in power, as an absolute minimum.

The same with GB, Beck must return to Warsaw with deep disappointment. Deep enough that he will be ready to look for an alternative within the Axis, taking advantage of positive relations with both Japan and Italy. Not necessarily to join, but to get a hedge against the Soviets having Western acquiescence.

@Batrix2070 - instead of sharing out Slovakia with Poland, can Germany pacify Poland by supporting it in its crisis in March 1938 with Lithuania, supporting Poland in escalating to war and conquest of Lithuania?

 

[ATP]

@Batrix2070 - instead of sharing out Slovakia with Poland, can Germany pacify Poland by supporting it in its crisis in March 1938 with Lithuania, supporting Poland in escalating to war and conquest of Lithuania?

Maybe? Sanacja was Piłsudzki fanboys,so they would certainly want Lithuania.

 

[Batrix2070]

@Batrix2070 - instead of sharing out Slovakia with Poland, can Germany pacify Poland by supporting it in its crisis in March 1938 with Lithuania, supporting Poland in escalating to war and conquest of Lithuania?

Maybe? Sanacja was Piłsudzki fanboys,so they would certainly want Lithuania.

Not very, if OTL the Polish government wanted to do something with Lithuania, it would pursue more than.... establishing diplomatic relations. For over 20 Lithuania had no diplomatic relations with Poland.

Yet even if they had decided to be revisionist, occupying Lithuania instead of gaining Slovakia would have done nothing to make Poland think it was less threatened by Germany.
For Germany's seizure of Memel was another indicator that increased the threat Germany was generating against Poland.

Why? Well, the simplest answer is that it was another tens of square kilometers of somewhat unnecessary buffer, of which Poland in the east has really a lot.
More importantly, this country is poorer than Poland, with a partially hostile population to the very idea of Poland, which suggests by itself that it gives room for pressure for the Germans on Poland. Add to this that the preferred port to serve this country is already in German hands.

To sum up, the very disadvantages of this solution which do not improve but worsen the situation of Poland.
Slovakia in Polish (or Hungarian) hands is essential for a Polish-German agreement, because it does not extend the war zone to other areas of the main economic and cultural center. It does not expose Poland from its tender underbelly in the south.

 

[raharris1973]

To sum up, the very disadvantages of this solution which do not improve but worsen the situation of Poland.
Slovakia in Polish (or Hungarian) hands is essential for a Polish-German agreement, because it does not extend the war zone to other areas of the main economic and cultural center. It does not expose Poland from its tender underbelly in the south.

I guess for Germany, it emplaces Poland along a sensitive import route for Romanian oil, possibly even touching the Danube. Although admittedly, there is still a route entirely to the south, by rail or road, from Romania through Hungary to the Austrian Gau.

 

[raharris1973]

This is not impossible, for surprisingly it was Hitler who stopped the hardline anti-Polish course that had prevailed in Germany since the fall of the Empire, thus breaking the plans of the Foreign Ministry.

What were these (German I suppose?) Foreign Ministry plans? A hardline against Poland and trade war forever. Demand for Danzig and an extraterritorial corridor. Anything more expansive and specific? Cooperation with the USSR for a joint war against Poland to steal territory from Poland, like West Prussia, or Posen? Or cooperation with the USSR for a complete partition and erasure of Poland?

But to do so, Hitler must unequivocally prove that his Lebensraum will not touch an inch of Polish soil. How to do it? Simple, no ultimatum along the lines of I do you Poles a favor, as was the case with Danzig and the exterritorial route. The former.

So Hitler tainted his real world alliance offers to Poland by saying he would give Poland territory and alliance on one hand, but wanted to receive territory from Poland on the other?

The second is, like @Skallagrim proposes, to give back the land, but I prefer a more realistic version than giving back East Prussia.

Ah, your thinking is because no leader realistically ever gives away his own land he starts with, just other people's land that is up for grabs?

Giving back... Slovakia under Polish tutelage.

Conceding Slovakia as a Polish sphere of influence signals to Poland Germany is ready for a long-term partnership of equals or at least sovereign states?

But, you are still arguing that this is not enough to break Polish ties to France in a Franco-German war, unless France screws over Poland even more blatantly than OTL and tips its hand showing that it favors the USSR over Poland?