1939 - Germany invades Poland

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. To justify the action, Nazi propagandists falsely claimed that Poland had been planning, with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany and that Poles were persecuting ethnic Germans. Ultimately, the SS, in collusion with the German military, staged a phony Polish attack on a German radio station. Hitler then used this action to launch a retaliatory campaign against Poland.

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

Britain and France, standing by their guarantee of Poland's border, had declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Germany had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Soviet Union in August, which stated that Poland was to be partitioned between the two powers, and enabled Germany to attack Poland without the fear of Soviet intervention. The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. The demarcation line for the partition of German- and Soviet-occupied Poland was along the Bug River.

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