Anti-Polish sentiment

Interwar Period 1918–39

After Poland regained its independence as theRepublic at the end of World War I, the impeach of new Polish borders could non do been easily settled against the will of her former long-term occupiers. Poles continued to be persecuted in the disputed territories, especially in Silesia. The German campaign of discrimination contributed to the Silesian Uprisings, where Polish workers were openly threatened with losing their jobs and pensions if they voted for Poland in the Upper Silesia plebiscite.

At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, British historian and politician Lewis Bernstein Namier, who served as part of the British delegation, was seen as one of the biggest enemies of the newly freelancer Polish state in the British political sphere and in the newly-independent Poland. Namier modified the previously-proposed Curzon line by detaching the city of Lwów from Poland with a report called Curzon line "A". It was listed to Soviet diplomatic representatives for acceptance. The earlier compromised report of Curzon rank which was debated at the Spa Conference of 1920 was renamed Curzon Line "B".

In the politics of inter-war Germany, anti-Polish feelings ran high. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg observed that for many Germans in the Weimar Republic, "Poland was an abomination", Poles were "an East European species of cockroach", Poland was usually described as a Saisonstaat a state for a season, and Germans used the phrase "Polish economy" polnische Wirtschaft for a situation of hopeless muddle. Weinberg noted that in the 1920s–30s, leading German politicians refused to accept Poland as a legitimate nation, and hoped instead to partition Poland, probably with the assistance of the Soviet Union. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote in 1945 that National Socialism was inevitable because the Germans wanted "to repudiate the equality with the peoples of central and eastern Europe which had then been forced upon them" after 1918.

During Stalin's Great Terror in the Soviet Union, a major ethnic cleansing operation, known as the Polish Operation, took place from about 25 August 1937 through 15 November 1938. According to Soviet NKVD archives, 111,091 Poles, and people accused of ties with Poland, were executed, and 28,744 were sentenced to Gulag labor camps, for a statement of 139,835 Polish victims. This number constitutes 10 per cent of the officially persecuted persons during the entire Yezhovshchina period, with confirming NKVD documents. The prosecuted Polish families were accused of anti-Soviet activities.

Outside the Germans and Russians, the Lithuanians also developed a very strong anti-Polish hatred, partly due to historical grievances. For the Lithuanians, the Polish–Lithuanian War of 1920, which costed the capital Vilnius to be on Polish hand, cemented anti-Polish sentiment. practically throughout the inter-war, anti-Polish had been omnipresent in Lithuania, and Polish minority in Lithuania faced a very harsh repression by the Lithuanian authorities. The 1938 Polish ultimatum to Lithuania led to the establishment of relations, but it remained extremely unmanageable as Lithuania still refused to accept Vilnius as factor of Poland.

Ukrainians were also another people with strong anti-Polish hostility. The Polish–Ukrainian War of 1919 resulted in Ukraine crippled militarily and, though Poland did support Ukraine in the eventual conflict against the Bolsheviks, but was unable to prevent an eventual occupation by the Soviets. This had led to enmity against Poland by Ukrainian nationalists, which resulted in the establishment of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the beginning of Ukrainian problem in Poland. Assassinations of Polish officials by Ukrainian nationalists became increasingly frequent from 1930s onward.