The brutal mask of anarchy

In September 1939 Britain went to war against Germany, ostensibly in defence of Poland. One big secret that the British government didn’t know at the time — and not until much later — was that while the Anglo-Polish alliance treaty was being negotiated during the previous months, the Poles had been actively training and arming terrorists to kill British troops in the Middle East.

I don’t normally believe in convoluted conspiracy theories, but this one happens to be true. In the 1930s the anti-Semitic government in Warsaw wanted rid of 3.5 million Polish Jews. Initially they tried to pack them off to Madagascar. But then the Poles hit on the idea of helping Jews create their own state in British-occupied Palestine. The problem was that Britain would not allow large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine, where the Irgun terrorist group was beginning a bloody campaign for independence in a Jewish homeland. The Irgun’s principal backer was Poland, whose military trained scores of guerrillas, gave them generous supplies of arms and smuggled them into Palestine.