That’s a book on migrations and deportations, not a book on casualties, it doesn’t seem to support a claim of “hundreds of thousands murdered” which you made in your previous comment, could you please elaborate?

Again, you’re conflating murdered with deported

It most certainly includes direct casualty numbers as well, for Poland and many other conflicts.

Great, please name one of them that doesn’t imply complete occupation of Poland by Nazis

I just can’t envision an alternative reality

Well, I think that’s the main issue here. Siding with the nazis, attacking Poland in the rear when they were fighting the nazis, committing horrible crimes against the Polish population and POWs … You really, really cannot imagine not having to do even one of those

Well I’m not sure if that’s from the book you suggested, but if it is I must say the language is a tad bit romanticized lol. Might I suggest better sources

I don’t know if the other three chapters you suggested get any better but in your quote it only argues that collaborating with the nazis was “their only option” if you first agree to start from the premise that they *checks notes* “just had to claim those territories” to which they “had a far better right”

Imagine if the UK or the US had allied with the nazis and attacked Western Europe in the back, out of fear and begging them for spoils… (as some politicians argued, I might add)?

I get that the book you want me to read claims, like the previous poster, that the only option Russia had was to secretly team up with the nazis and attack the Poles from the rear

But my question is not so much to repeat that but to support it with arguments

Could you paraphrase the parts of the book that would be relevant?

please tell me what was the alternative to Soviet occupation in Eastern Poland, once Poland rejected a mutual defense agreement against Nazis with the Soviets

There were several alternatives, actually. But most of them would start with Russia not attacking them in the rear after they moved their troops west to fight off the nazis

can you provide a source for that? I know about the Katyn massacre and about other events in which Nazi collaborators/Bourgeois Polish nationalists were killed (as well as some innocent civilians), but AFAIK the numbers don’t go that high

Yeah sure, here’s one that estimates between 250k and 1.5m (but which I believe also includes post-war)

But I presume that if you’re the type that already convinced themselves that all these murdered Poles “must have deserved it” in one way or another, then that number probably couldn’t be high enough anyway

Not to defend the flawed comparison with Trump’s treason, but that’s a very useless take on the M-R pact…

Stalin could have

• not promised the nazis to attack the Poles from the rear
• not attacked the Poles from the rear
• not murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles after high-fiving the nazis after having succesfully attacked the Poles from the rear

I think all of these alternatives would have been more desirable than, well, actively teaming up with the nazis

edit: list layout