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Chapter 3: Sisterhood and Infatuation [Act 3] Intricacies (5)

Stauffenberg, Wilkes and others clapped their hands when they heard this, praising Eric's clever plan. Petzel also nodded convincingly, thinking that the handsome young man in front of him was really extraordinary: compared to the cheers of others about the current good situation, this army colonel seemed unusually calm, not only analyzed the war situation between the East and the West concisely, but also keenly smelled the crisis in the Polish war, and designed to defuse it, which was indeed a rare military talent among the Junker aristocracy.

It is very regrettable, however, that Eric's plan was not approved by the Wehrmacht High Command at all, because Hitler and others, who were riding on a special train, learned at midnight on 8 September that as soon as a certain German armored division arrived on the outskirts of Warsaw, Soviet Russia could not wait to invade Poland, an already ravaged country, in accordance with the secret agreement of the "Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact," in an attempt to seize the spoils that belonged to it. Forced by the agreement, Hitler had to send Ribbentrop an urgent telegram to the German ambassador to Soviet Russia, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, to test the calculation of Soviet Russia.

On 10 September, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, solemnly conveyed the Kremlin's reply to Count Schulenburg, claiming that "the Soviets will take military action 'in the near future' to 'rescue' the Ukrainians and Belarusians who are 'threatened' by Germany and prevent Soviet Russia from becoming a naked aggressor." He complained about the 'difficult situation' of Soviet Russia -- since General Brauchitsch of Germany had declared that 'military action on Germany's eastern border was no longer necessary,' then Soviet Russia' and no new war could be waged,' and he was not in the least grateful to his allies for not having to bear too many war losses[88].

When Hitler heard the news, he immediately scolded Soviet Russia for being treacherous and shameless, and repeatedly urged all army departments to seize Warsaw in one fell swoop before the arrival of the Russian Red Army. Finally, as Eric had predicted, in order to lift the siege of Warsaw and reverse the decline, the Polish army skillfully used the Soviet-German contradiction to organize firepower, and a counterattack named "Poznan Counterattack" suddenly began.

In the evening of the same day, Major General Kutlzeba led about 200,000 men of 12 divisions of the Polish "Army Group Poznań" to withdraw all the way to the banks of the Buzura River, a tributary of the Vistula River, and launched a fierce attack on the flank of the main German army in the south from the east, in an attempt to break through the blockade of the German Eighth Army and get in touch with the Polish troops stationed in Warsaw. The sudden battle caught the corps by surprise, causing its main force, the 30th Division, to suffer heavy casualties and was forced to switch to the defensive.

Exegesis:

[88] The above events refer to The History of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Scheiler; For the full text of the Russian reply, see the Compendium of German Foreign Policy Essays, vol. 8, pp. 4, 33, 34, 34, 44, 45 (some of these Nazi-Soviet notes contain "Nazi-Soviet Relations", but the Compendium of German Foreign Policy Essays is more comprehensive); A Brief History of the Second World War (Moscow Military Publishing House - 1958 edition) (fragment); The German Army, 1933-1945 (German) Müller? Gille Brand, some of the text has been changed in a bold way.

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