I have a question that’s been bugging me for a while. In one of the first episodes of ww2, Indy mentioned something along the lines of the Polish national budget was smaller than just Berlin. In a later episode Indy also mentioned that Hitler had not been great for the German economy just before the war (he said something about GDP growth being below average or something along those lines). So my question is this: if the German economy had such shortcomings but was still apparently (if I understand correctly) better than the Polish economy despite German hyperinflation etc, then why was Poland’s economy so bad? Was it a lack of natural resources? The fact that Poland was still a “young nation”?
I don’t know too much about Poland in the interwar period besides the Polish-Soviet war and some diplomatic dealings with Britain and France before the war. Thus I would really like to know what was going on with the Polish economy. Or if I’m just misinterpreting the information.
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Welcome to the forum. I hope, you can get the answers you seek.
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Germany was likely most industrialized nation in Europe. Also, Hitler had instituted a massive military building - which turns out to be included in GDP - so Germany’s GDP would have been higher. Also, Germany’s population (and so, available workforce) was about 2 and a half times that of Poland in 1939. As far as national budgets, I couldn’t find much for Poland except an exceptionally tedious PHD paper that gave a graph… in Zlotis, so I can’t say much into that.
That’s I can give ya…
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Thank you, I’ll go over it. I’ve also been looking for some information today but haven’t found anything substantial other than the Polish economy being a market economy.
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Well it would make sense that the bigger industrial base would contribute to a better economy. Especially if Poland was more agriculture based (I’m not sure if this is the case). The part that confuses me is that Germany had hyperinflation, lots of debt (as far as I know, could be wrong), and not a whole lot of resources like oil and rubber. If I remember correctly though they did have lots of steel manufacturing which contributed to their big industrial base. Despite that though I was still baffled to hear that the Polish economy was so far behind the German economy.
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Interpreting what I read, it seems to me that Poland made some currency decisions that the rest of Europe did not regarding devaluing it’s currency.
By failing to devalue along with the rest of Europe, they managed to reduce the amount of foreign currency they had available so they had little to purchase and invest with. So I would describe it as starving their economy of foreign goods and materials.
I don’t believe Poland had it’s own internal arms industry capable of totally supplying it’s needs so the army is short of modern weaponry.
Developing countries need cash or goods to buy the tools to modernize.
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That would make sense. So basically they had less foreign currency and thus the amount of foreign goods they could buy was limited. So that would mean relying more on being an independent economy which would require lots of natural resources, which Poland evidently didn’t have. Or at least not as much as they needed. They were more or less cut off from the global economy and which had a negative impact on their own economy.
Although I suppose given the circumstances at the time they might have done it out of necessity. I mean they had the Germans to the west and the Soviets to the East with only a small connection to the sea right on the German border. Thus in the event of a war with Germany or the USSR they’d pretty quickly be cut off from foreign trade if, for example, Romania wouldn’t allow traded goods to be moved through their territory. Thus they needed to build an independent economy. But you’d think they’d try to gather enough resources through the foreign trade to at least built a base for an independent economy first.
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You can be an independent economy but you could not compete with the militaries of other countries that way. Probably a no win situation but Poland played a rough game and lost hard. The Central European countries needed to work with each other and they did not.
If they had worked with Czechoslovakia they might have had a much better chance. I don’t know enough to rewrite history but I think mistakes were made.
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Poland was not the only country to maintain the gold standard for a long time though. The Netherlands too maintained a strict austerity policy and maintained the gold standard until september 36 when it was finally abandoned under heavy domestic and international pressure. Even the author of that article still pleads for the principles behind the strict austerity and maintenance of the gold standard, so Poland probably had good reasons to do so as well, even if it caused short-term damage and stagnation in the mean time.
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I certainly am not trying to criticize the Polish economy. My point was that you can’t modernize the military without funding and industry, neither of which Poland has. They did the best they could but could not compete with Germany or Russia.
I did criticize their foreign policy. I think not supporting the Czechs in 1938 was a huge mistake.
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I recommend The Vampire Economy, by Günter Reimann, free to read online, about Germany’s economy during the 1930’s. Poland was a “new” country, after being partitioned three times almost 200 years ago. After the First World War, it fought a series of wars with Russia and its neighbors. Newly independent, an economy in shambles, it was now tasked with uniting a disparate population that had been part of other vanquished empires. Nazi Germany considered Poland an illegitimate state and Hitler vehemently announced that Poland be wiped off the map of Europe, for his lebensraum in the East.
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Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll check go check it out when I get the chance, which will probably be the weekend.
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