17/09/2025
💥 On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, 16 days after N**i Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subsequent military operations lasted for the following 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with the two-way division and annexation of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic by N**i Germany and the Soviet Union.
🇵🇱 This division is sometimes called the Fourth Partition of Poland. The Soviet (as well as German) invasion of Poland was indirectly indicated in the "secret protocol" of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed on 23 August 1939, which divided Poland into "spheres of influence" of the two powers.
🪖 Soviet troops also executed all the Polish officers they captured at the Battle of Szack on 28 September 1939. The NKVD killed 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians in the Katyn massacre in 1940. Torture was widely used by the NKVD in various prisons, especially in small towns.
🔴 The Red Army, which vastly outnumbered the Polish defenders, achieved its targets, encountering only limited resistance. Some 320,000 Poles were made prisoners of war. The campaign of mass persecution in the newly acquired areas began immediately. In November 1939 the Soviet government annexed the entire Polish territory under its control.
🔴 Some 13.5 million Polish citizens who fell under the military occupation were made Soviet subjects following show elections conducted by the NKVD secret police in an atmosphere of terror, the results of which were used to legitimise the use of force. A Soviet campaign of political murders and other forms of repression, targeting Polish figures of authority such as military officers, police and priests, began with a wave of arrests and summary executions.
🔴 The Soviet NKVD sent hundreds of thousands of people from eastern Poland to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation between 1939 and 1941. Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland until the summer of 1941, when Germany terminated its earlier pact with the Soviet Union and invaded the Soviet Union under the code name Operation Barbarossa. The area was under German occupation until the Red Army reconquered it in the summer of 1944.
🔴 An agreement at the Yalta Conference permitted the Soviet Union to annex territories close to the Curzon Line (which almost coincided with all of their Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact portion of the Second Polish Republic), compensating the Polish People's Republic with the greater southern part of East Prussia and territories east of the Oder–Neisse line. The Soviet Union appended the annexed territories to the Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republics.
🔴 On 17 September 1939 the Polish Army, although weakened by weeks of fighting, still was a coherent force. Moczulski asserted, that the Polish Army was still bigger than most European armies and strong enough to fight the Wehrmacht for a long time
France and Britain refrained from a critical reaction to the Soviet invasion and annexation of Eastern Poland since neither country expected or wanted a confrontation with the Soviet Union at that time.
🔴 Under the terms of the Polish-British Common Defence Pact of 25 August 1939, Britain had promised assistance if a European power attacked Poland. A secret protocol of the pact, however, specified that the European power referred to Germany.
🔴 When Polish Ambassador Edward Raczyński reminded Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax of the pact, he was bluntly told that it was Britain's exclusive right to declare war on the Soviet Union or not
Source: Wikipedia
