-
Germany invades Poland, initiating World War II in Europe. German forces broke through Polish defenses along the border and quickly advanced on Warsaw, the Polish capital. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish, fled the German advance hoping the Polish army could halt the German advance. But, after heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans within a month of the German attack.
-
Poland's strategic position in 1939 was weak, but not hopeless. German control over Slovakia added significantly to Poland's already overly long frontier. German forces could attack Poland from virtually any direction. Poland's major weakness, however, was its lack of a modernized military. In the 1920s, Poland had had the world's first all-metal air force, but had since fallen behind other powers. Poland was a poor, agrarian nation without significant industry.
-
Poland's one major advantage was in intelligence, beginning in the early 1930s, a group of young mathematicians had managed to break the German military codes of the supposedly unbreakable Enigma encoding machine. Until 1938, virtually all German radio traffic could be read by Polish intelligence. Thereafter, the Germans began to add new wrinkles to their systems, complicating the task.
-
The campaign ended on 6 October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland under the terms of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty.
-
Britain and France, standing by their guarantee of Poland's border, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. After the defeat of Polish forces, German authorities began enforcing their racial policies in the occupied territories. They required Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David and conscripted them for forced-labor. They expelled hundreds of thousands of Poles from their homes and settled more than 500,000 ethnic Germans in their place.