World War II Behind Closed Doors

[jpark]

If you enjoy history this documentary series is fantastic.  It reviews world war II with a focus on the documents that revealed conversations / events from previously classified documents in the former Soviet Union.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1329986/

The back and forth between the Nazis and the Russians in using forensic techniques to assign blame for the massacre of thousands of Polish officers and businessmen was very interesting.  

I was very surprised to hear of what sounded like a "genuine" commitment by Russia to support Germany prior to the invasioin of Poland - this was not public before as I understand it.

Winston Churchill is the win, and while this documentary is British (I gather), he seemed to be the only leader truely willing to get his hands dirty and help Poland.  Roosevelt is depicted as attempting to "woo" Stalin for post war cooperation which at one point, involved a failed meeting excluding Churchill.

[Endie]

The fact that the makers got joint-funding from a Polish TV company really showed in this: the amount of time lavished on the Poles was hugely disproportionate for their part in proceedings.  And if you were a Pole, then Churchill's portrayal would have been much more ambivalent in places, given their views on the westward shift, the missing officers and the "infamous scrap of paper".

I watched the whole series and enjoyed it, but did find the "meanwhile, back in Poland" scenes annoying when I knew that they were occurring at the same time as far more momentous, if no more tragic, events and discussions elsewhere.

Roosevelt did, indeed, increasingly and quite deliberately court the Russians and exclude the British as the war went on: if you read Churchill's history of the war his frustration and disappointment occasionally peeks through.  I believe that the meeting in question was in Tehran, and it was preceded by the disastrous waste which was the first Cairo meeting, where Roosevelt and the more pro-China Americans (not, I believe, Hopkins) insisted on spending the whole time discussing Chang Kai-Shek, who they honestly believed was the inevitable leader of a post-war China which would immediately assert itself as the fourth world power.