POLISH THEATRE: Divide and Rule

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"The campaign in Poland is ended. . . . The grand total of captives is now up to more than 450,000. The total of guns seized already is above 1,200. ... In all approximately 800 [Polish aircraft] either were destroyed or fell to the [German] Army as booty. . . . With the exception of a submarine, all the Polish fleet still in the North Sea on Sept. 1 was destroyed or interned in neutral harbors. ... Of the entire Polish Army only an insignificant remainder still is fighting at hopeless posi tions in Warsaw, in Modlin and on the Peninsula of Hel."

Thus with a terse communique this week the German Army High Command affected to close its books on the Blitzkrieg in Poland, promised that "exact [German] losses . . . unusually small in comparison to the enormous losses of the enemy . . . will be given in a few days."* Estimating the material cost to Germany of shattering Poland in three weeks, the communique added: "Munitions and fuel consumption of this campaign amounted to only a fraction of [German] monthly production." With a stiff, heel-clicking bow from the waist to the Nazi Party, the Army High Command observed that in Poland spade-wielding young stalwarts of the Nazi Labor Service "made the task of leadership much easier. ... In the re-establishment of streets, bridges and railways ... the Labor Service particularly proved its worth."

The fact that he feels this way about the Nazis is one big reason why Army Commander-in-Chief Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch has the job of Germany's No. 1 Fighting Man. The German officer corps' leading exponent of not getting along with the Nazis, aristocratic, bemonocled Generaloberst Baron Werner von Fritsch, died under curious circumstances last week (see p. 21). Meanwhile, the German Army High Command was negotiating with the Soviet Army High Command through military commissions of German and Russian officers who met first at Brest-Litovsk and then at Moscow. They swiftly agreed last week to slice Poland just about in two (geographically) by a purely military—not political or permanent—division.

No Buffer. There had been reports in highest Berlin and Moscow circles that a strip of Poland would be left as a "buffer state" between Russia and Germany. This was even mooted in an official Moscow broadcast. Brushing it aside, the High Commands decided that no sufficient Polish authority remained in Poland last week to form the nucleus of a useful buffer, that the only thing to do was to draw the technically strongest possible frontier, separating the Russian and German Armies by the physical expanse of three great Polish rivers, the Narew, the Vistula and the San (see map, p. 80).

This gives the Soviet Union roughly three-fifths of what was Poland, and most remarkably the oil wells in the South long coveted by Germany. Germany gets almost the whole of Poland's great industrial areas and roughly half the population of what was Poland, but gives up the common frontier she sought with Rumania as a source of oil. The Soviet Union for the first time gets a frontier with East Prussia and with Hungary, which hurriedly last week patched up its broken-down diplomatic relations between Budapest and Moscow by appointing a new minister to Moscow.