Lost Roots by Karl von Loewe

Author:Karl von Loewe [Loewe, Karl von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Families in the New Poland

Poland, between the wars, was an underdeveloped agrarian state with a weak infrastructure of railways and highways, and fractured political and societal institutions striving to advance economically. It was led by a government dominated by a strongman dictator who managed to hold together a state of minorities, many of whom chafed under Polish rule and looked outside Poland’s borders for support. From the establishment of its final and fixed borders in 1922, Poland was surrounded by states that posed an existential threat that only grew worse in the 1930s.

Younger than Johann by at least a decade, the three surviving brothers in Poland, Anastazy, Klemens and Władysław, were all in their twenties when the First World War ended. Their sister, Maria Sieracki, had just turned thirty, and was married with three children under the age of eight. Brothers and sister alike were now faced with the challenge of forging their own life paths through the tangled landscape of the Second Polish Republic. That landscape was littered with the social and political debris of that war and the half dozen that followed.

The head of state for most of the interwar period until his death in 1935 was Józef Piłsudski. This Vilna27-born “Lithuanian of Polish culture”, as he described himself, saw a multi-ethnic Poland desirable, a worthy goal at a time when inter-ethnic conflict was widespread. “Ethnic and cultural variety” within the nation he saw as a well of strength and vitality. His view of Poland was more as a tossed salad with each ingredient keeping its own flavor in the mix, rather than a melting pot dissolving all constituent parts – not so much assimilation as integration of complementary ingredients. By contrast, his chief rival for power, Roman Dmowski, the leader of the National Democrats (ND), called for combat against the “alien elements” in their midst and the emigration of all Jews from Poland.

Despite a critical need created by its unenviable geographical location, Poland was still unable to industrialize fast enough in the 1930s to develop a capacity for broad-scale armaments production. Beyond the manufacture of some advanced aircraft in very small numbers, it fell behind Germany and the Soviet Union, its two most trenchant foes. What Poland did exceptionally well was the creation of a military intelligence service, among the best in Europe. There was a tradition of military cryptography going back to the early years of the Second Polish Republic. Recent archival discoveries reveal that the “miracle on the Vistula” that saved Warsaw from Russian conquest (and Europe from the spreading of communism in some views) in August 1920, was due less to divine intervention than the breaking of the Red Army radio codes by the Polish army.28 And it was Polish mathematicians who, by 1933 with some input from French counterparts, cracked the German “enigma” code and became thereby (too well) aware of Nazi intentions for Europe. Their breakthroughs made possible the code-breaking triumphs attributed almost exclusively to Great Britain at its facility at Bletchley Park.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.