One of the biggest “oops” for Polish nationalists is when confronted with how following the Munich Agreement - under which Great Britain and France allowed Nazi Germany to carve up Czechoslovakia - Poland sent 35,000 soldiers to aid in the split of the country into several fascist satellite states. Ironically a year later one of those fascist satellites sent 50,000 soldiers to help Nazi Germany invade Poland: the first Slovak Republic.



Established on March 14th 1939, after Germany’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, this fascist puppet republic was headed by Jozef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest and leader of the Slovak People’s Party. During secret discussions on July 20–21, 1939, the Slovak government agreed to partake in Germany’s planned attack and invasion of Poland. They also agreed to let Germany use Slovak’s territory as the staging area for its troops.



On August 26, the Slovak Republic mobilised its army and created a new field army, named “Bernolák”, which comprised of 51,306 soldiers. The attack started on September 1, 1939, at 5:00 a.m. At the start, Poland had a problem with the idea of treating Slovaks as their enemies, they even dropped leaflets requesting them to halt the invasion.



Needless to say all these narratives pushed forward by Polish identarians that Poland was a “victim” of the second world war seek to hide that the Polish Republic presided by Ignacy Mościcki was very much a fascist state or a quasi-fascist state, and in recent years post-socialist governments have sought to criminalise any mentions or association of pre-socialist Poland’s involvement with mass genocide of national minorities like Jewish Poles, and even use sites like the Auschwitz concentration camp to present anti-communist propaganda and blame actions like the Katyn massacre (which was carried out by Nazi Germany) on the Soviet Union.

