Into the Reich: The Red Army’s Advance to the Oder in 1945 with Prit Buttar (Osprey, 2025)

Now, as the Red Army moves further and further into Polish territory, the question of Polish statehood, which was a little controversial the previous year with the Warsaw Uprising, how does Stalin kind of deal with this situation as it unfolds as it regards to what you call the Polish question from the Soviet perspective?

To look at this actually from the Polish perspective, the Polish Home Army had come up with a plan in the second half of 1944, which was that whenever the Red Army approaches a Polish city, the Home Army should try to drive the Germans out, seize control of the city, so they can then welcome the Red Army as allies, but not as liberators.

And even though they had no illusions that this would make any military difference, politically and symbolically, it was very important.

This didn't succeed in any of the cities in eastern Poland, and it came to its ultimate disastrous conclusion in the Warsaw Uprising, as a result of which the Home Army didn't really attempt anything like that in the cities further west.

Instead, a lot of those Polish units had either disbanded or gone to ground.

Some of them were attempting to infiltrate their way further west in the hope that they might eventually be able to meet Western Allied forces advancing from France.

The father of one of my colleagues when I was a doctor was...

As a teenager, he had crossed the Carpathian Mountains into what was then Czechoslovakia and eventually walked along the spine of the Carpathians all the way to link up with American forces entering Czechoslovakia from the west.

And he was, you know, of a group of Home Army fighters who did this.

So Stalin's plan now is very much anybody who has any loyalty to the Polish government and exile in London is to be treated as an enemy.

They are to be disarmed.

Ordinary rank and file can be given the choice of going into a prison camp or joining the Red Army's Polish army units.

which are fully integrated into the Red Army.

Or, you know, like I say, they can go off to Siberia.

Officers, yeah, they're all going to be arrested.

They're all going to be sent off east because, yeah, they're not trustworthy.

So for most of Poland, although Soviet accounts are full of how they were welcomed with open arms by Polish citizens, the reality was this was very much exchanging one occupation for another.

And it's worth remembering that in the 1940s, every single pole either was old enough to remember First World War and pre-First World War Poland when it had been partitioned between Russia, the Germans, and the Austro-Hungarians, or their parents were certainly old enough to remember that.

So memories were still very, very fresh of the old Russian occupation, and now here's the Red Army, and guess what? It's another occupation.

There were some Polish communists and pro-communist partisans who welcomed the arrival of the Red Army.

The great majority of Poles really saw it for what it was, which was just a different occupation.

Now, there was also the Yalta Conference that occurred in February.

So this is… Kind of going on at the same time, which, of course, finalized the division of Europe that you mentioned between the Soviet occupation zones and the Western allies.

And did this have any impact on the older offensive or what was happening or influence any decision making?

I don't think it had a direct effect on how military operations unfolded.