Why did the Allies not declare war on the Soviets when they invaded Poland?
but on Germany?
Heinz Guderian presides over the German-Soviet military parade in Brest-Litovsk (present-day Brest, in Belarus), on September 22, 1939.
To his right, Generalleutnant Mauritz von Wiktorin - later discharged from the Army after the July 20 plot - and to his left, Soviet tank commander Semyon Moiseevich Krivoshein. On September 22, a joint parade of German and Soviet troops paraded through the occupied Polish city of Brest. The operation was actually a show of force before the Nazi high command ordered the mobilization of its forces behind the new German-Soviet border established and signed within the framework of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That pact included a secret protocol that was discovered and published by the British after the end of the war. The USSR denied the existence of this secret protocol for more than 40 years, until it finally recognized it in 1989. In it, Hitler and Stalin shared Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.
Regarding Poland, the pact stated that “the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR will be limited by the line of the Narew, Vistula and San rivers”. The USSR invaded Poland from the east on September 17, 1939. On September 22, the Germans and Soviets met in the Polish town of Brześć Litewski (today Brest-Litovsk, in Belarus). The commander of the German forces was General Heinz Guderian, then in command of the XIX Army Corps.
Russian nationalists and communist users began denying the parade's existence in September 2009. They claimed that the alleged parade had actually been a withdrawal of German troops from that city, monitored by the Soviet commanders.
They tried to try another argument: to compare that joint parade with the Japanese and German surrender ceremonies to the Americans.
But it is clear that these are not comparable cases, starting from a most elementary fact: at Brest in 1939, the Germans and the Soviets were not surrendering to each other, but were celebrating their victory over the Poles.
At the height of the attempts to manipulate what was clearly an invasion of a sovereign nation, a Russian communist complained that the partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin was described as "occupation", when in Belarus they call it "reunification".
But the Allies did not declare war on the Soviet Union as well, because that would be equivalent to foolishly converting the [temporary] Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and Russia into a full alliance between the two. Fighting against two great states (three, soon, with Italy!) instead of one would have been a militarily ruinous decision for the allies, which, at the time (with the exception of Poland), were only Great Britain and France.
As much as the allies did not like the eastern invasion of Poland by the Russians, they had to put up with it, because the situation was what it was. (The "moral" rings did not fall off, it must be said, at the end of the First World War, to split German Prussia in two, and hand over a piece of it, just for the sake of it, to a restituted Poland (subjected, until then , to the Russian Empire), in order to create an economically viable firewall (exit to the sea) to prevent revolutionary contact between the Russian soviets, which had taken power, and those of Berlin that were spreading, in a threatening way for the capitalist order, throughout the German territory.
They also put up with it, later on, in 1944 (the same allies that some believe are guided by principle, by a beautiful extramaterial morality...), not to help and cruelly let the Polish rebels, who rose up against the German occupation, die during the insurrection. of Warsaw, since this disturbed Stalin's plans, very snubbed, he flatly refused when they asked him to allow the British planes to land, which had to drop food and ammunition, on the Polish insurgents, on the banks of the Vistula occupied by the Russian troops. In short, what I have come to say is that declarations of war are not made for moral or principled reasons.
t the dawn of the Second World War, the interests of the powers involved prevailed over any other consideration, measured, always, with great care.
These calculations are not, of course, exempt from error, many historians argue about whether or not Roosevelt yielded a great deal to Stalin in Yalta (remember that the latter had, at that time, almost within range of half of Europe under his tanks and that, at past bull, it's always easy to talk...), but from there to committing the madness of simultaneously declaring war on the Third Reich and the USSR, there is an abyss.
