POLAND IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 329their fondest dream to be accepted into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It was gratifying
for me to see that the working-class, peasantry and labouring intelligentsia were begin-
ning to understand Marxist-Leninist teachings... Despite all the efforts of the Polish
rulers to distort our doctrine and to intimidate the people, Lenin's ideas were alive and
thriving in the Western Ukraine.
At the same time, we were still conducting arrests. It was our view that these arrests
served to strengthen the Soviet state and clear the road for the building of Socialism on
Marxist-Leninist principles; but our bourgeois enemies had their own interpretation of
the arrests, which they tried to use to discredit us throughout Poland.^8
For Krushchev and his like, the aggrandizement of Soviet power was all that
mattered. The end justified the means.
For the entire currency of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which lasted from August 1939
to June 1941, Poland provided the common ground where German and Soviet pol-
icy could merge most closely. At the time of the fall of France and of the Battle of
Britain, Soviet oil flowed westwards to fuel the engines of the Panzers and the
Luftwaffe.'German machinery and arms flowed eastwards to replenish the ailing
Soviet economy. The new German cruiser, the Lutzow, was sold to the Soviet
Navy, and renamed the Pietrov Pavlov. In January 1941, the USSR bought the
District of Suwatki for 7,500,000 dollars in gold.^9 The Soviet press praised the
victories of the German army 'over the decadent forces of capitalism and imperi-
alism'. Nazi propaganda praised the achievements of the great Stalin. Pravda
explained that the Red Army had moved into Western Byelorussia and Western
Ukraine 'to liberate our brothers of the same blood'. Der Voelkischer Beobachter
rejoiced that the German army was realizing Hitler's dream of greater Lebensraum
for the German race in the East. The NKVD and the Gestapo worked in close col-
laboration. German communists from Russia were handed over to the Gestapo in
exchange for Russian emigres and Ukrainians from Germany. Both sides looked
on Poles and Jews with undisguised contempt. The 'racial enemy' of the one was
virtually indistinguishable from the 'class enemy' of the other.^10
In the first two years of the war, the Nazis prepared their ground in Poland
with methodical precision. No sooner had Hitler held his victory parade in
Warsaw on 5 October 1939 than Reicbsfuebrer-SS Heinrich Himmler saw the
opportunity to put his racial theories into practice, and gave vent to his deeper
thoughts on this subject:
The removal of foreign races from the incorporated eastern territories is one of the most
essential goals to be accomplished in the German East ... In dealing with members of
some Slav nationality, we must not endow these people with decent German thoughts
and logical conclusions of which they are not capable, but we must take them as they
really are ... I think it is our duty to take their children with us... We either win over
the good blood we can use for ourselves ... or else we destroy that blood. For us, the end
of this war will mean an open road to the East ... it means that we shall push the bor-
ders of our German race 500 kilometres to the east.^11
Travelling round the country in his 'Special Train Heinrich', Himmler drove his
minions forward in their tireless efforts to classify and segregate all sections of