Soviet and German forces set up brutal occupation regimes in their respective spheres and forcibly transferred hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to forced-labor sites. By the time the Red Army entered Poland from the east, most of the resistance had been quelled. The Wehrmacht encountered stiff armed resistance in western Poland but rapidly consolidated its hold and inflicted severe reprisals against the communities that tried to resist. In Britain, where the public did not know about the secret provision to the British-Polish defense accord, the failure to declare war on the USSR was controversial at the time, seeming to give carte blanche to the Soviet Union for its conquests.
But neither the British nor the French government declared war against the Soviet Union. Similarly, France, which also had signed a bilateral defense treaty with Poland that expressly applied only to Germany, declared war against Germany hours after Britain did. However, the protocol, as we now know, applied only to defense against Germany, not against any other country.
Great Britain, which had signed a bilateral defense treaty with Poland earlier that year, declared war against Germany as required by a secret protocol to the treaty. Under the terms of this pact, the German Wehrmacht moved into western Poland on 1 September 1939, and the Soviet Red Army moved en masse into eastern Poland sixteen days later.
The war in Europe began on 23 August 1939, when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a pact that created a partnership between them in dividing up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Roughly two-thirds of those who died were non-combatants. Although precise numbers of those killed in the six years of warfare from 1939 to 1945 are impossible to tabulate, the total deaths attributable to the war exceeded 70 million, more than in all other wars in history combined. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II-the end of the fighting in Europe in May 1945 and the end of the fighting in Asia in September 1945.
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