Since Poland was regarded as the East European state with the most powerful army, it became imperative to tie Poland to Britain as the best way of ensuring Polish support for Romania, since it was the obvious quid pro quo that Britain would have to do something for Polish security if the Poles were to be induced to do something for Romanian security.

When war erupted in Europe in 1939, the Kingdom of Romania was pro-British and allied to the Poles.

* Poles in Romania

Poles in Romania ( 2002 census )

According to the 2002 census, 3, 671 Poles live in Romania, mainly in the villages of the Suceava region ().

There were about 80, 000 Poles living in Romania in 1939, but only about 11, 000 remained in 1949 after Romania lost Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina ( the most important Polish community lived in Czerniowce, now in Ukraine ).

Unlike competing Polish, Russian, Hungarian or Romanian nationalisms in late imperial Austria, imperial Russia, interwar Poland and Romania, Ukrainian nationalism did not include antisemitism as a core aspect of its program and saw Russians as well as Poles as the chief enemy with Jews playing a secondary role.

The Poles argued that they need military control over whole Eastern Galicia to secure the Russian front in its southern part and strengthen it by a junction with Romania.

* Union of Poles of Romania Dom Polski ( Uniunea Polonezilor din România ' Dom Polski < nowiki >'</ nowiki >)

The principal minorities in Romania are Hungarians ( Szeklers and Magyars ; see Hungarians in Romania ) ( especially in Harghita, Covasna and Mureş counties ) and Roma people, with a declining German population ( in Timiş, Sibiu, Braşov ) and smaller numbers of Poles in Bucovina ( Austria-Hungary attracted Polish miners, who settled there from the Kraków region in Poland in the 19th century ), Serbs, Croats, Slovaks and Banat Bulgarians ( in Banat ), Ukrainians ( in Maramureş and Bukovina ), Greeks ( Brăila, Constanţa ), Turks and Tatars ( in Constanţa ), Armenians, Russians ( Lippovans, in Tulcea ) and others.

The Hungarians and Poles had responded to the mobile threat by extensive fortification-building, army reform in the form of better armoured cavalry, and refusing battle unless they could control the site of the battlefield to deny the Mongols local superiority.

Frank is obsessive about ritual and the form of things ; the Wasp Factory and the Sacrifice Poles are protective talismans, and divinatory in intent.

Millions of Poles emigrated to North America and other destinations, and millions more migrated to cities to form the new industrial labour force.

It was only the Polish victory against the Soviets in the Polish – Soviet War ( and the fact that the Poles did not object to some form of Lithuanian independence ) that derailed the Soviet plans and gave Lithuania an experience of interwar independence.

Timothy Snyder states that it is likely the UPA killed as many Ukrainians as it did Poles, as local Ukrainians who did not adhere to the OUN's form of nationalism were regarded as traitors.

In the same year, they joined with Finns, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, and Russian members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party to form an antiautocratic alliance.

At the same time Poles present in Russia also started to form their own units.

Soon Germans craftsmen, traders and colonists in communities began to form committees and paramilitary units to defend their interests and to prevent local Poles from organizing, often joined by local Jews and started to besiege the Prussian King with petitions to exclude their areas from the planned political reorganization.

In the meantime, in late 1611, prince Dmitry Pozharsky was asked to lead the public opposition against the Poles, organized by the merchants ' guild of Nizhny Novgorod, with the respected town butcher ( literally, a meat-trader ) Kuzma Minin overseeing the handling of the funds donated by the merchants to form the Second Volunteer Army ().

As a compliment to the Poles, they decided to give their son a Polish name, Vacslav, but the Russians insisted that the true Russified form, Vyacheslav, should be used, a compromise which pleased neither nation.

The people of that country again form a striking contrast to those of the south ; they resemble Poles ".

He stated: I do not wish to see the realization of Zionism in the form of the new Polish state with Arabs in the position of the Jews and the Jews in the position of the Poles, the ruling people.

Ukrainians, who have faced a series of defeats on hands of both Poles and Soviets, decided that the only way to preserve some form of independence was to ally themselves with one faction and majority of Ukrainian leaders chose Poland as the less imperialistic of their enemies.

The order was abolished with the fall of the Romanovs in 1917 but, unlike other Polish orders awarded by the Tsars, the Order of Saint Stanislaus was not revived by the newly independent Second Polish Republic ( possibly because in its Russian form it was often awarded by the imperial government to those Poles who co-operated with Russia rule making the Order a symbol of subservience to an occupying power ).

In an attempt to retain independence against the superior military might of the three great powers, some Poles joined together to form the Bar Confederation.

However, even after the country was officially converted, the crusades continued up until the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, when the Lithuanians and Poles, helped by the Tatars, Moldovans and the Czechs, defeated the Teutonic knights.

Ethnic Poles still live in those areas, in Lithuania they are the largest ethnic minority in the country ( see Poles in Lithuania ), in Belarus they are the second largest ethnic minority in the country after the Russians ( see Poles in Belarus ), and in Ukraine, they officially number almost 150, 000, but Polish organizations claim that the number of Poles in Ukraine may reach up to 2 million, with most of them assimilated.

During the Second World War, the Nazi German occupiers of western Poland banned the Poles from officially playing any sports games.

16133 ), in matter of fact the Czechoslovak authorities officially regarded their inhabitants as exclusively Slovak, while Poles pointed out that the dialect used there belonged to Polish language.

#: There should be a Provisional Government of National Unity recognised by all three powers, and that those Poles who were serving in British Army formations should be free to return to Poland.

After the war, many members found it difficult to be recognised as ethnic Poles by the new Communist authorities, as some-like the Kashubians ( grandfather of Donald Tusk is an example )-had served as " Germans " in the German Wehrmacht.

The Foreign Legion was initially divided into " national battalions " ( Swiss, Poles, Germans ...).

A similar policy applied to the various ethnic and national groups considered subhuman such as Poles, Roma or Russians.

In February 1613, with the chaos ended and the Poles expelled from Moscow, a national assembly, composed of representatives from fifty cities and even some peasants, elected Michael Romanov, the young son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne.

The attempts to create a Masurian Polish national consciousness, largely originating from nationalist circles of Greater Poland, however faced the resistance of the Masurians, who, despite having similar folk traditions and linguistics to Poles, regarded themselves Prussians and later Germans.

To prevent the Austro-Hungarian problems of different nationalities within one state, the government tried to Germanize the state's national minorities, situated mainly in the borders of the empire, such as the Danes in the North of Germany, the French of Alsace-Lorraine and the Poles in the East of Germany.

At the same time while Pan-Slavism worked against Austro-Hungary with South Slavs, Poles enjoyed a wide autonomy within the state and assumed a loyalist position as they were able to develop their national culture and preserve Polish language, something under threat in both German and Russian Empires.

In 1612 the Poles were forced to retreat by the Russian volunteer corps, led by two national heroes, merchant Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky.

These policies targeted peoples, in particular Jews, as well as Gypsies, homosexuals and handicapped people, ethnic Poles, Russians who were labeled as " inferior " in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk ( or " master race ") of the Volksgemeinschaft ( or " national community ") at the top, and ranked Poles, Russians, Romani, persons of color and Jews at the bottom.

" An office of the Polish Government in Exile wrote to warn Władysław Sikorski that if the Charter was implemented with regards to national self-determination, it would make the desired Polish annexation of Danzig, East Prussia and parts of German Silesia impossible, which led the Poles to approach Britain asking for a flexible interpretation of the Charter.

While his main objective was to give historical legitimisation to germanising of Poles that found themselves under Prussian rule, the praise of a mythical genocide conducted by German ancestors against other national groups would eventually become a means of legitimising claims to further eastern territories.

This contributed to the national tensions among the Poles, Germans and Jews.

Despite its defects, the Second Republic retained a strong hold on later generations of Poles as a genuinely independent and authentic expression of Polish national aspirations.

Initially annexed by Poland in a series of wars between 1918 and 1921 ( primarily the Polish-Soviet War ), these territories had mixed urban national populations with Poles and Ukrainians being the most numerous ethnic groups, with significant minorities of Belarusians and Jews.

However according to their ideology they did not identify as Poles or with Poland, and members of the communist party viewed themselves as Soviet citizens without any national sentiments.

During the build-up to the Russian revolution, however, Lenin and the Bolsheviks found it expedient to promise independence to the various indigenous non-Russian national minorities, notably the Ukrainians and the Poles, in return for their support against the Czarist empire.

There were four main national groups in Konin at that time, namely Poles, Jews, Germans and Scottish people.

Considering the presented historical facts and universally accepted principles of the modern world, as well as the inalienable and indivisible, non-transferable and nonexhaustible right of the Croatian nation to self-determination and state sovereignty, including its fully maintained right to secession and association, as basic provisions for peace and stability of the international order, the Republic of Croatia is established as the national state of the Croatian nation and the state of the members of autochthonous national minorities: Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, Rusyns, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Russians, Bulgarians, Poles, Roma, Romanians, Turks, Vlachs, Albanians and the others who are citizens, and who are guaranteed equality with citizens of Croatian nationality and the realization of national rights in accordance with the democratic norms of the United Nations Organization and the countries of the free world.

In reaction to these measures, the Ruthenians of Podlasie began to identify themselves with the national movement of the Catholic Poles.

During the times of foreign oppression, the Catholic Church remained for many Poles a cultural guard in the fight for independence and national survival.

In a March 2, 1944 article directed to the Ukrainian youth, written by military leaders, Soviet partisans were blamed for the murders of Poles and Ukrainians, and the authors stated that " If God forbid, among those who committed such inhuman acts, a Ukrainian hand was found, it will be forever excluded from the Ukrainian national community.

The Commission ultimately purchased 613 estates from German owners and 214 from Poles, functioning to bail out German debtors often rather than fulfilling its declared national mission.