Elizabeth wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:51 pm
It was Britain, not Germany, who declared World War Two.
Germany wanted only the return of German lands stolen in World War One.
canpakes wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 12:16 am
Well, then. He shouldn’t have started a war, and he could have chosen to end it once he did. So he blew it twice.
The history of eastern Europe is filled with territorial and national states coming and going, merging and splitting, mostly as a consequence of war religion and dynastic marriages. Over time, Poles developed national core values of language culture and religion. Poland existed as a nation state as early as the 10th Century. It became dynastically linked with Lithuania through marriage in the 1300s. The two became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1500s. External wars and internal conflict weakened the commonwealth over time, while its neighbors, Austria, Prussia, and Russia grew in power. In the late 1700s, the three combined to destroy the Commonwealth, each taking (or, in your words, "stealing") a part of its territory.
In 1807, when Napoleon defeated Prussia, he established a semi-independent Duchy of Warsaw. It had its own army and fought in alliance with France, militarily enlarging its territory.
After Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the Duchy of Warsaw was replaced with a new Kingdom of Poland, which was joined with Russia under a personal union under the Russian Tsar, with its own constitution and military. However, it was still part of the Russian partition of the former Poland-Lithuanian commonwealth, and Prussia and Austria maintained control over their partitioned portions as well.
In 1830, Poles staged an uprising against the partitioning nations, that became a war against Russia. The independence movement was defeated, but uprising of Poles continued to occur. Despite the efforts of the three nations that had dismembered Poland, Poles retained a strong sense of national identity and did not significantly assimilate into the three countries that had partitioned it.
With the outbreak of WWI, Poles saw an opportunity to press for re-establishment of Poland as a nation. As had been occurring in Europe for literally thousands of years, the three monarchies that lost the war lost territory. The winners agreed to reestablish a Polish nation state, although its borders were subject to continuing border wars for a number of years during the period between the world wars. Poland attempted to military conquer portions of the former Commonwealth on its eastern border, including Lithuania and Ukraine. It fought a war against Russia until 1921, resulting in the partitioning of Lithuania and Ukraine.
To claim that Hitler's military invasion of Poland was somehow justified because Poland was "stolen" from Germany is a disingenuous apologetic that ignores thousands of years of history, including the fact that Prussia, Austria, and Russia "stole" Poland from the Poles in the first place. Poles were a distinct ethnicity defined by language, religion and custom, and had a nation state for thousands of years before it was stolen from them.
France had Germany had military alliances with Poland. Hitler chose to military invade Poland anyway, which, substantively was the start of WWII. That's the way military alliances worked. Hitler apologetics is a threadbare attempt to deflect from the horrors of his treatment of Jews and other groups.