What was the Polish attitude towards the Spanish Civil War?

Who did the Polish state favor in the Spanish Civil War?

  • Republicans

    Votes: 1 3.6%
  • Nationalists

    Votes: 17 60.7%
  • Neither- its relations with any side were purely commercial

    Votes: 10 35.7%

  • Total voters
    28
Did the Polish government have a greater ideological or geopolitical sympathy with the Spanish Republic or the Spanish Nationalist? I would think that as a right-of-center authoritarian government of a heavily Catholic country, there would have been more sympathy for the Spanish Nationalists.

However, IIRC, Poland sold arms to the Spanish Republicans and not Nationalists. Was this reflective of a larger political leaning toward the Republic, or just an apolitical transaction for Polish arms exporters?
 
Some in Poland felt the republic, like themselves had come out of a reactionary opression, albeit home grown. There was a sense of common identity.
 
I think the poles sold to the republicans for money not politics. The Poles would absolutely not like the republicans killing nuns and priests
 

thaddeus

Donor
wonder if their policy (if you want to use so strong a term) was to mirror the French position? (to basically support the Republican side)
 
I think the poles sold to the republicans for money not politics. The Poles would absolutely not like the republicans killing nuns and priests

As far as I recall, Anthony Beevor states that the attacks on nuns and priests were largely confined to the so-called Red Terror, which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the coup, when law and order completely collapsed. The victims of the terror were killed by vigilantes and not on the orders of the republican government.
 

Brunaburh

Banned
As far as I recall, Anthony Beevor states that the attacks on nuns and priests were largely confined to the so-called Red Terror, which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the coup, when law and order completely collapsed. The victims of the terror were killed by vigilantes and not on the orders of the republican government.

It's also worth remembering that in many places priests were involved in identifying reds to be murdered, and on occasions even pulled the trigger.
 
"As mostly Catholic nations that viewed themselves at the frontiers of Europe, Spain and Poland had maintained amicable, but distant, diplomatic relations since the independence of the Polish state in 1919. With little trade between the two nations, and little common culture or shared national interests beyond a shared faith, neither was very relevant to the other. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, this distant irrelevance changed a little. Along with nearly every nation in Europe, Poland signed the Non-intervention Agreement in 1936, promising not to send or sell military equipment to either side in the conflict. Clearly, however, Polish Catholic sympathies were with General Francisco Franco and the Nayionalists. Franco, who believed he was fighting a religious crusade against anticlerical, atheistic communism, and church-burning anarchists, gained support in Poland. So enthused was one Polish writer about the Nationalist cause that he sent two specially dedicated copies of his book, The Political Program of World Jewry, to Franco and General Jose Moscardo Ituarte, one of the Nationalist heroes of the Spanish Civil War. While Polish anti-Semitism had little echo in Spain, the Spanish Civil War had greater impact on Poland.

"During the civil war, many Spanish Catholic and monarchist refugees found sanctuary in Polish diplomatic stations, or stayed in Poland until the end of the conflict, protected by the Warsaw government from deportation to the Republican zone and likely imprisonment or execution. Both the Polish government and the Red Cross offered as much assistance as possible to these Spanish exiles, sixty-five of whom were able to return home in May 1939, when conditions once again became safe after the Nationalist victor. Supportive Poles even organized a special committee of prominent citizens to send medical aid and funds to the Nationalists, and chapters of the Polish Red Cross contributed to this effort.

"Poland was supportive of Franco's cause, lending early support to the rebels during the Spanish Civil War, a feeling reciprocated after the Nationalist victory in 1939. Poland agreed to recognize the Nationalists as the legitimate government of Spain in October 1938, five months before the still-fighting Spanish Republic collapsed. In response to the Nationalists' victory. the Polish press was filled with praise for Franco and his defeat of the Soviet-backed Popular Front government. While some Polish newspapers complained that the Spanish press went out of its way to present the Nazi perspective concerning the Polish Corridor and Danzig. there does seem to have been genuinely warm feeling in the Hispano-Polish relationship. In early September 1939, following Germany's attack against Poland, the Spanish government expnessed formal regret at the Gennan invasion. Despite wide. spread pro-German sentiments in the Falange and Franco government, Falangist newspapers covered the one-sided conflict with remarkable objectivity. notwithstanding Polish complaints that the Spanish press did not always reprint the declarations of the Warsaw cabinet..."
SPAIN AND THE NAZI OCCUPATION OF POLAND, 1939-44
WAYNE H. BOWEN
International Social Science Review
Vol. 82, No. 3/4 (2007), pp. 135-148

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41887323?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior:c12f7ddc64e9731bb2f069fd4ef38bfa&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Now I know someone will say: But didn't the Republic get lots of arms from Poland? Yes, a number of countries despite "non-intervention" sold arms to the Republic--and made a big profit out of doing so. (This does not mean that "non-intervention" did not hurt the Republic. "Arms could not 'always be obtained for gold or hard currency': on the contrary, the Republicans rarely obtained more than a fraction of what they needed and even then only after long delays and at a terrible cost...they were faced by a wall of blackmail wherever they turned: by ministers of government, chiefs-of-staff and other officers and officials in more than thirty countries who demanded bribes of between £5,000 ($25,000) and £45,000 ($275,000) a time, in 1937 money, for their signatures on dubious export licenses. Below them were officials down to harbour- and station-masters who not only demanded bribes but found pretexts to delay transportation in order to charge accumulating 'storage fees,' of which one, it may be remembered, rose to as much as £10,000 ($50,000). How often, too, the ministers and officials changed their minds, found ways to withhold delivery of the material and to refuse to return the money! And below them again were the arms dealers, brokers and other go-betweens. Yet such behaviour appears trivial beside that of the Soviets, whose defrauding of the Spanish government of millions of dollars, by secretly manipulating the exchange rates when setting the prices for the goods they were supplying, belied everything they professed to stand for..." Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War, pp. 250-251.) I don't have Howson's book with me now but one review of it says "The only significant arms came from Poland, where the generals' sympathies with Franco did not prevent them selling arms to the Spaniards in order to finance their own rearmament. They drove a hard bargain. 'By selling junk to the Spaniards at fantastic prices, we were able to restore the Polish Bank to solvency.'... https://tinyurl.com/ybedcs2r
https://tinyurl.com/ybbcc2ah
 
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thaddeus

Donor
Did the Polish government have a greater ideological or geopolitical sympathy with the Spanish Republic or the Spanish Nationalist? I would think that as a right-of-center authoritarian government of a heavily Catholic country, there would have been more sympathy for the Spanish Nationalists.

wonder if their policy (if you want to use so strong a term) was to mirror the French position? (to basically support the Republican side)

SPAIN AND THE NAZI OCCUPATION OF POLAND, 1939-44
WAYNE H. BOWEN
International Social Science Review
Vol. 82, No. 3/4 (2007), pp. 135-148

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41887323?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior:c12f7ddc64e9731bb2f069fd4ef38bfa&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Now I know someone will say: But didn't get the Republic get lots of arms from Poland? Yes, a number of countries despite "non-intervention" sold arms to the Republic--and made a big profit out of doing so. Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War, pp. 250-251.) I don't have Howson's book with me now but one review of it says "The only significant arms came from Poland, where the generals' sympathies with Franco did not prevent them selling arms to the Spaniards in order to finance their own rearmament. They drove a hard bargain. 'By selling junk to the Spaniards at fantastic prices, we were able to restore the Polish Bank to solvency.'... https://tinyurl.com/ybedcs2r
https://tinyurl.com/ybbcc2ah

thanks @David T for the reference books!

my point was they tried to conform their official policy as neutral or tacit support for Republic to conform to French policy while sympathies were with Nationalist side.

if it was not for Polish Corridor issue might their have been German-Polish relations develop in Spain? similar to German-Italian alliance?
 
I usually don't make political commentary, but the Spainish rightist accusations of the rape of Nuns and murder of Priests sounds a lot like the Germans defending them selves at Nurenberg by claiming the Soviet army and police were guilty of rape and murder too.

Back on topic; I remember how my fathers generation & older, who were adults during the Spanish Civil War were still confused about it thirty years later. I suspect the Poles were just as baffled as my Indiana relatives and acquaintances.
 
Back on topic; I remember how my fathers generation & older, who were adults during the Spanish Civil War were still confused about it thirty years later. I suspect the Poles were just as baffled as my Indiana relatives and acquaintances.

? Why would Poles be baffled like Americans?

On OP: While Polish government was sympathetic to Nationalists, it was no reason to not sell arms to Republicans. Though IIRC it was tried to sell PZL-11 to Nationalists thru dummy order by Nicaragua, but it didn't work out. Also I think Nationalists let Polish military mission to inspect captured Soviet tanks.
 
OK, I have Howson's Arms for Spain now. Here is what he says about Poland (pp. 105-113);

"With an increasingly unreliable France as their only ally, the Poles had decided that their best hope of defence was to build up their armed strength. The difficulty was paying for it. After the fighting for independence had come to an end with the driving back of the Russian Bolsheviks in 1920, the Polish army had found itself in possession of a dismaying variety of French, Russian, German, Austrian, Italian, British and American armaments which it had captured, bought or been given. Since 1930 it had made efforts to standardize by replacing old weapons with new from the state arsenals at Radom and Warsaw and by importing new, or old but refurbished, material from Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia...

"The Poles had expected to meet at least some of the cost of rearmament by selling off the 'old stocks' of arms and munitions, but, apart from Saudi Arabia and a few Chinese warlords, there had been no customers"--until the Spanish Civil War came along. (The only area where Poland not only successfully designed but exported up-to-date weapons in the early 1930's was aviation, thanks to the great designer Zygmunt Pulawski. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Puławski)

"[As of 1936] Colonel Beck, the foreign minister, was trying to construct an intricate arrangement of pacts and treaties in the hope of placating the Germans and Russians without alarming Britain and France, and, when the civil war broke out in Spain, the Polish government had been the first in the world to declare, on 23 July, an arms embargo against both sides. Nevertheless, the colonels sympathized wholly with General Franco, and saw to it that nothing critical of the Nationalists or favourable to the Republicans was published in the press or broadcast on the radio. Their arms sales to the Republicans would therefore have to be kept a dark secret indeed and to this end Beck insisted that negotiations with Spaniards must never be conducted directly but only indirectly through a chain of foreign intermediaries, preferably those with whom SEPEWE [Syndicat Exporti Przemyski Wejennego or "Export Syndicate of War Industries," a nominally private but actually government-owned and controlled company involved in arms dealing] already had good relations. He also reserved the right to stop any transaction that might spoil his foreign policy. However, once it was decided that bulk of the sales must be to the Spanish Republicans [1] things moved quickly and preparations for delivery were already under way when the Polish government signed the Non-Intervention agreement on 26 August. The shipping side of the traffic was handled through the naval counterpart SEPEWE, the Polska Agencja Morska (PAM)...

"It is extraordinary to relate that on 6 September 1936 Leon Blum advanced a loan of 2,000 million Ffr. (c. £59 million, or $95 million), to be paid over four years, precisely to help the Poles finance their rearmament. He hoped thereby to stem the Polish drift towards Germany, which increasingly worried the French since the non-aggression pact signed by Hitler and Beck in 1934. One would have thought that this huge infusion of money might have caused the Poles to reconsider the dangers of their policy on Spain, but obviously it did not...

"It seems that the prices recorded in the SEPEWE account-books and preserved in the archives are those of the original standing price list, before Ostrowski had increased them, and that the prices paid by Republicans were between 30% and 40% higher. The undeclared surplus would then be 'laundered' abroad; indeed, one of the deponents refers to the payment of such a sum into a bank account in Finland.

"The list in Appendix II shows that armaments to the value of about $24 million (£4,800,000) were sold to Spain by the end of September 1937, of which only about 2%, or about $518,000, represented sales to the Nationalists. According to Sokolowski [who headed SWPEWE] sales stopped in March 1938, though it seems that a few deliveries were made during the summer, presumably of material that had been held up in Poland. It became a practice of the Polish authorities at Gdynia, Danzig not being used after January 1937, to hold goods in the warehouses on one pretext or another in order to charge the Republicans higher storage fees, some amounting to tens of thousands of pounds.

"A great deal of money was consumed as well by the intermediaries the form of commissions and various other charges...

"Another deponent, Wladyslaw Cmela, writes that 'when Colonel Beck and lgnaci Moscicki [the Polish president] approved the export of arms, they did not do so without an interest' and goes on to say that during the course of the Spanish war both 'received large provisions from SEPEWE.' Cmela names as his authority for this allegation Andrjez Dowkant, the vice-director of the state arms factories, whom he describes as 'an honourable man' who had become indignant at the turn events were taking. It was one thing to sell off old and useless material, even to the Spanish Republicans, but quite another to sell brand new weapons during a programme of urgent rearmament, when the state factories were as yet unable to meet the requirements of the Polish army itself. No less baffling, therefore, is the offer by the Polish government to build a series of fifty P.Z.L.P.37 bombers for the Republicans. The P.37 Los was one of the most advanced aircraft of its time and its very existence was still top secret when the offer was made in July 1937...

"Although many details remain obscure, it is clear that the regime of the colonels' group in Poland, which called itself 'Moral Renewal' (and was ideologically close to Franco), became the second largest supplier of arms to the Spanish Republic after the Soviet Union. The colonels wanted the money to pay for rearmament, in addition to the huge French loan...The shifts to which they had to resort to ensure secrecy, however, presented innumerable opportunities for corruption and, as the dangers gathered round Poland on all sides and the more perceptive foresaw the inevitable catastrophe, the temptations to some to cream off money to provide means of refuge abroad must have been irresistible. During the Second World War, those involved sent their testimonies to the committee set up by the Sikorski government in exile to inquire into the causes of the Polish defeat in September 1939 and either blamed one another or justified the selling of worthless material at high cost to the Spanish Republicans as an act of patriotism. As Stefan Katelbach, the Polish arms trader who became Daniel Wolf's principal agent, boasted in his deposition, 'by selling junk to the Spaniards at fantastic prices, we were able to restore the Polish bank to solvency.'"

[1] "Economic imperatives dominated the decision-making. The Spanish White government had no money and was in any case being supported by the government politically allied to it. The Red government, on the other hand, had plenty of money but lacked sufficient reserves of war material and, in view of the difficulties in procuring arms, would have to pay high prices for them in hard currency. So far as I remember, political considerations were not important"--Wladyslaw Sokolowski, director of SEPEWE
 
One might think that Czechoslovakia, the world's leading arms exporter, whose president Benes sympathized with the Republic, would have helped more. However, in a democracy it was harder to provide "cover" for arms shipments to get around the Non-Intervention Committee than it was in authoritarian Poland. "The Social Democrat ministers and politicians whom Asúa [envoy of the Spanish Republic] saw during the next few days all promised help in the matter of procuring material. Benes and [Foreign Minister] Krofta warned, however, that after reports in the press that some Czechoslovakian arms, supposedly ordered by Mexico, been taken by the ship Azteca to Bilbao instead (Appendix II), a ban had been imposed on further arms sales to Mexico. Any arms purchases by the Spanish government must be made legally and with the authorization of the national defence committee, most of whose members, they thought they should mention, belonged to the right wing of the Agrarian Party...." Howson, Arms for Spain, p. 154.
 
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