On This Day In History: Germany Invades Poland – On Sep 1, 1939

AncientPages.com - On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland on land and from the air. World War II had begun.

The German invasion of Poland was a primer on how Hitler intended to wage war–what would become the "blitzkrieg" ( “lightning war” - in German) strategy.

At 4:45 a.m., some 1.5 million German troops invaded Poland all along its 1,750-mile border with German-controlled territory. Simultaneously, the German Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and German warships and U-boats attacked Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea.

Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler claimed the massive invasion was a defensive action, but Britain and France were not convinced.

On September 3, they declared war on Germany, starting World War II.

Any hope the Poles might have had of a Soviet counter-response - was totally lost due to the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-aggression Pact, between Germany and the Soviet Union. These two countries agreed that they would not attack each other and secretly divided the countries that lay between them.

Within one day of the German invasion of Poland, Hitler was already setting up SS "Death's Head" regiments to terrorize the populace.

Once Hitler had a base of operations within the target country, he immediately started setting up "security" forces to annihilate all enemies of his Nazi ideology, whether racial, religious, or political.

Concentration camps for slave laborers and the extermination of civilians went hand-in-hand with the German rule of a conquered nation.

German Heinkel He 111 bombers drop bombs on Warsaw, September 1939. Image credit: Nieznany - Jerzy Piorkowski (1957) "Miasto Nieujarzmione" -  Public Domain

The Polish army was defeated within weeks of the invasion. From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack.

German Soldiers Dismantle a Polish Border Barrier (September 1, 1939) . Photo credits: © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Heinrich Hoffmann

The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. Along the Bug River was the demarcation line for the partition of German and Soviet-occupied Poland.

After heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 27, 1939.

In October 1939, Germany directly annexed those former Polish territories along Germany's eastern border: West Prussia, Poznan, Upper Silesia, and the former Free City of Danzig.

The remainder of German-occupied Poland (including the cities of Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, and Lublin) was organized as the so-called Generalgouvernement (General Government) under a civilian governor-general, the Nazi party lawyer, Hans Frank.

Poland remained under German occupation until January 1945.

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