Figure 1.--Much of the most intense World War I fighting on the Eastern Front was fought on what had been historic Poland. Here a Polish family flees the fighting in 1914. Notice that the father is absent. |
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Views of the War are strongly influences by one's country. Americans generlly think of Belgians when the issue of refugees comes up. But other countries were overun creating large numbers of refugees. In the Balkans this was the Serbs. On the eastern front it was the Poles. Much of the war on the Eastern Front was fought in Poland, meaning primarily the area of Poland seized by the Tsarist Empire. This was the great bulk of pre-partition Poland. Most of the heaviest fighting on the Eastern Front took place in Poland. This included the first year of the War. German forces drove on warsaw. ussian forces nearly reached Kraków in Austrian Poland before being forced to retreat (1914). In the Spring, heavy fighting occurred near Gorlice and Przemyśl, to the east of Kraków in Galicia (1915). The Germans advanced and finally seized Warsaw. By the end of the year almost all of Poland was in German hands. The battered and retreating Russian forces looted and destoyed what they could not carry away. The idea was to repeat the scorched earth policy employed on Npoleon'd Grand army in 1812. All of this would have been bad enough on the Polish people. The Russians suspected the Poles of siding with the Germans. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were evicted from theur homes and deported. [Horne and Kramer, p. 83.] The Russians struck back with another offensive in Galicia, the Bruselav Offensive. This dealt a serious blow to the Austrians. The Germans had to intervene to dave the situation. Some 1.1 milliom civilans and soldiers are believed to have perished. [Gawryszewski] The situtiom for the civilans was desperate. Some 1 million Polish refugees are believed to have fled eastward to escape the fightging during the fighting in Poland. The Germans transported several hundred thousand Polish civilians west to labor camps in Germany. [Gawryszewski] Tsarist authorities deported some 0.8 million Poles to the East. [Bideleux and Jeffries, p. 186.]
Bideleux, R. and I. Jeffries. A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (Routledge: 1998).0
Gawryszewski, Andrzej. Ludnosc Polski w XX wieku (Warsaw: 2005).
Horne, John N. and Alan Kramer. German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (Yale University Press: 2001).
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