Innocent until proven guilty we are.

Nobody alive should be presumed guilty and made to suffer and pay with their lives and ethnonationhood, even if it is true that forebears may have over corrected, even vastly. Where people manifest traits of prior generations so as to act criminally, as homicidal imperial supremacists, that’s another matter.

Until then, it is a general UN agreement that collective punishment is not valid….let alone for the historical misdeeds of regimes from prior generations.

Nevertheless, the vast wounds, the gaping chasms of genetic capital that many may vaguely perceive as family and loved ones lost, yearn over, if not feel acutely - these losses in our genetic capital will likely well up through our unconscious and conscious systemically and must be recognized.

That caveat having been issued, having absolved present generations, we will move on to correct the record of imperialist misdeeds of prior generations and attempted cover-ups by a more recent generation.

We will be addressing the notion that Hitler and the Nazis were acting in sheer defense and that they were making bonafide peace offerings, that the Allies were the true aggressors.

To get a more accurate and fair understanding of the sources of the conflict, we need to be fairly comprehensive about the history - will begin with the more recent history and work back into historical origins… reversing the usual Nazi sympathetic order of historical survey, from Versailles to the present, as if history started there.

We will indeed begin with that fairly recent history of the conflict of imperialism and nationalism, The Treaty of Versaille’s division of national boundaries…and then we’ll work back into the relevant histories from there. Most Westerners don’t really know that in addition to the Treaty of Saint Germain’s retention of the Sudetanland for Czech, that there were only a handful relevant cities that Versailles designated for Poland and one neutral - Danzig - that Hitler was disputing or claiming as eminently warranted to recapture.

In addition to that area of Czech and those few cities of Poland, there were only villages and areas occupied by Germans within what would be a necessary corridor to the Polish nation for strategic and economic access to the sea; but there was the additional factor to their having historical claim and value to national morale, issues which we will address as well.

The common idea spread among White Nationalists that the Versailles borders were thoughtlessly drawn, arbitrarily taking land from Germany that Hitler merely and justifiably wanted back for Germany is far from beyond question; nor is it accurate to say that his designs stopped there.

       
        Frederick “The Great"s imperialist and supremacist stance with regard to Poland.

Regarding territory granted to Poland, we are are talking about a handful of cities of appreciable size - Bromberg, Thorn, Posen, Gaudzen, Kulm, Gessen and a smaller one, Lisa, along with one being made into a free city, Danzig, that the Nazis and their sympathizers would dispute as rallying propaganda, as “rightfully German.”. ..and “places where the Poles demonstrated their pugnaciousness against Germans.” We’ve touched upon Danzig, setting it out as a central issue for elaboration later…

Daily Telegraph, “Can German and Polish claims to Danzig be reconciled?” - May 5, 1939

Are we to realise soon the significance of Frederick the Great’s words, “Who rules over the mouth of the Vistula, rules over Poland better than the King of Poland himself”? Herr Hitler received a birthday gift of the freedom of Danzig. It remains to be seen whether this will involve Danzig’s receiving the “freedom” of Herr Hitler.

Roman Dmowski

The answer, of course, was no, Hitler would not grant Danzig its freedom and he thought of it much the same as did Frederick the Great. We’ll talk about the history of Polish Gdansk and the conflict between Germans and Polish in history which seem largely to have been sparked over Danzig to begin with.

Poznan, where the first Polish kings are buried.

Suffice it to say, Roman Dmowski, called the father of Polish nationalism and a representative of Poland at Versailles, thought Danzig should be Polish, as it was in 1793 when Frederick the Great took it away for Prussia.

Having set the issue of Danzig out, lets set forth disputes which should have been more clear to the Polish side - Poznan and Gniezno.

Poznan is the original founding city of Polish nationhood - in fact, the first Polish kings are buried there; nearby Gniezno represented its consecration into Christendom, which at the time was corollary to the birth of nationhood.

Fort VII, Poznan, where the Nazis exacted revenge against intelligentsia of the Greater Polish Uprising and experimented with their first gas chambers.

Józef Piłsudski

Leszno, another smallish Polish city near Poznan, took in some Czech refugees from the German slaughter of Czechs in the Thirty Years War - which we will discuss as a likely historical factor in the Treaty of Saint Germain’s figuring, logistical and historical calculation that the Sudetenland should remain part of Bohemia. But for now, we just need to mention that these three cities, Poznan, Gniezno and Leszno would be among those audaciously retaken by Pilsudski and the Poles in the Greater Poland Uprising of 1918-19….. and confirmed though correctly by Versailles as Polish, would cause great consternation and will to revenge on the part of Hitler and the Nazis.

In fact, those who were partisans or military intelligentsia in this uprising were targeted by the Nazis two decades later, killed in places like Poznan’s Fort VII.