‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ Hitler remarked on the eve of invading Poland in September 1939. Nobody believed his claim that Germany was acting in self-defence; but they did believe his carefully crafted propaganda to the effect that the Poles were so dumb they used cavalry armed with lances against tanks.
In this timely and authoritative book, Roger Moorhouse dispels this and other myths concocted by German and Soviet propaganda. He has trawled through an impressive quantity of unpublished Polish and German sources, as well as a wealth of eyewitness testimonies from both sides, to produce a balanced account of this much neglected yet important episode of the second world war which is both harrowing and inspiring.
There could never have been any doubt as to the outcome. Poland was a poor country, struggling to rebuild a state after more than a century of partition and an economy from the wreckage left by the first world war, in the unpromising climate of the Great Depression.
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