Himmler's belief that " it is in the nature of German blood to resist " led to his conclusion that Balts or Poles who resisted Germanization were racially superior to more compliant ones.

Initially, Germany hoped to transform Poland into a satellite state, but by March 1939 German demands had been rejected by the Poles three times, which led Hitler to decide, with enthusiastic support from Ribbentrop, upon the destruction of Poland as the main German foreign policy goal of 1939.

That same day, on 21 March 1939, Ribbentrop presented a set of demands to the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski about Poland allowing the Free City of Danzig to return to Germany in such violent and extreme language that it led to the Poles to fear their country was on the verge of an immediate German attack.

Ribbentrop had used such extreme language, in particular his remark that if Germany had a different policy towards the Soviet Union then Poland would cease to exist, that it led to the Poles ordering partial mobilization and placing their armed forces on the highest state of alert on 23 March 1939.

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.

The many ethnic groups such as Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Jews, Italians, and African Americans that began to settle in Chicago in the early 1900s were mostly detached from the political system, due in part to lack of organization which led to underrepresentation in the City Council.

* August 10 – Battle of Nakło: The Poles, led by Bolesław III Wrymouth, defeat the Pomeranians.

Repnin also demanded religious freedom for the Protestant and Orthodox Christians, and the resulting reaction among some of Poland's Roman Catholics, as well as the deep resentment of Russian intervention in the Commonwealth's domestic affairs, led to the War of the Confederation of Bar from 1768 – 1772, where the Poles tried to expel Russian forces from Commonwealth territory.

Individual Poles, both clerical and secular, also offered various forms of aid to the Jewish people. For example, the children's section of Żegota led by Irena Sendler saved 2, 500 Jewish children with cooperation of Polish families and the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate.

The differences between Germans and Poles led to the First & Second Silesian Uprisings, and German resistance against them.

" 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.

The atmosphere of revenge for the Soviet crimes against ethnic Poles led to the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, where a mob of Poles murdered around 300 local Jews in a burning barn-house.

The massacres committed by UPA led to ethnic cleansing and retaliatory killings in kind by Poles against local Ukrainians in both Poland itself and the regions to the east of the Curzon Line.

The London Poles, led by Mikołajczyk, refused to this proposition, even when Churchill threatened to cut off relations with them.

Poles led to the trains under German army escort, as part of the Nazi German ethnic cleansing of western Poland annexed to the Reich immediately following the Invasion of Poland ( 1939 ) | invasion of 1939.

The West Ukrainian People's Republic, led by Yevhen Petrushevych, had tried unsuccessfully to create a Ukrainian state on territories to which both Poles and Ukrainians laid claim.

It was formerly part of the Zielona Góra Voivodeship ( 1975 – 1998 ), a reconfiguration of the old German state of Prussia, the eastern 40 % of which was inherited by Poland in 1945, and led to the expulsion of its native German inhabitants and the repopulation of the city and the environment by Poles.

This led to increasing numbers of Poles being sent to Siberia for katorga, where they were known as Sybiraks.

An Austrian division then crossed the Vistula again trying to pursue the Poles, but was routed on May 2 at Góra Kalwaria in a daring attack led by General Michał Sokolnicki.

Later, the increase in the sheer numbers of Poles led the government to a direct anti-Polish demographic policy.

The state itself was led by German nationalism and Bismarck viewed Poles as one of the chief threat to German power ; as he declared The Polish question is to us a question of life and death and wanted Polish nation to disappear in private going as far as expressing his wish to exterminate Poles As a result the Polish population faced economic, religious and political discrimination the Germanisation of their territories was promoted and in places where Poles and Germans lived a virtual apartheid existed.

The Poles commanded by Piotr Dunin, consisting of some 2000 mercenaries decisively defeated the Teutonic Knights, having some 2700 mercenaries, commanded by Fritz Raweneck and Kaspar Nostyc.

The Poles, encouraged by their success on the first day, deployed all their available cavalry.

This time, Tatar cavalry gained the upper hand, pushing the Poles back to their camp but were then repulsed by heavy fire from the Polish infantry and artillery.

Germans, Irish, Poles, Swedes and Czechs made up nearly two-thirds of the foreign-born population ( by 1900, whites were 98. 1 % of the city's population ).

On 9 October 1334, he confirmed the privileges granted to Jewish Poles in 1264 by Bolesław V the Chaste.

Poles and Lithuanians also brought a group of Samogitian representatives to testify of atrocities committed by the Knights.

In 1226 Duke Konrad I of Masovia summoned the Teutonic Knights for assistance ; by 1230 they had secured Chełmno ( Culm ) and begun claiming conquered territories for themselves under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, although these claims were rejected by the Poles, whose ambition had been to conquer Prussia all along.

98 % of the new inhabitants were Poles expelled from Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union or Polish peasants from central Poland.

The largest group of foreigners are Icelanders comprising 0. 4 % of the population, followed by Norwegians and Poles, each comprising 0. 2 %.

The Congress implemented a new partition scheme, which took into account some of the gains realized by the Poles during the Napoleonic period.

At the time when the futility of armed resistance without external support was realized by most Poles, the various segments of the Polish society were undergoing deep and far-reaching social, economic and cultural transformations.

When it was finally printed, thousands of Poles in Warsaw lined up for as long as eight hours to purchase copies of the work autographed by Kosiński.

On 26 March, in an extremely stormy meeting with the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski, Ribbentrop accused the Poles of attempting to bully Germany by their partial mobilization and violently attacked them for only offering consideration of the German demand about the " extra-territorial " roads.

In April 1939, when Ribbentrop announced at a secret meeting of the Foreign Office's senior staff that Germany was ending talks with the Poles and was instead going to destroy Poland in an operation late that year, the news was greeted joyfully by those present.

Hence, the emphasis on pressuring the Poles to allow the return of Danzig to Germany as a way of peacefully resolving the crisis by allowing Hitler to back down without losing face.

" As intended by Ribbentrop, the narrow time limit for acceptance of the " final offer " made it impossible for the British government to contact the Polish government in time about the German offer, let alone for the Poles to arrange for a Polish plenipotentiary envoy to arrive in Berlin that night, thereby allowing Ribbentrop to claim that the Poles had rejected the German " final offer ".

Most Poles ( about a million ) from Eastern Poland invaded by USSR in 1939 were deported to Kazakhstan.

The Christian army of the Polish duke Henry II the Pious of Silesia, supported by the feudal nobility, included Poles, Bavarian miners and military orders, was decisively defeated by the Mongols.

The unescorted, but armed, ship was carrying 1, 800 Italian POWs guarded by 103 Free Poles, 268 British military personnel from the Desert War in Egypt, and a number of civilians.

He notes that although some Poles, like Antoni Augustyn Deboli, argued for an alliance with Great Britain, king Stanisław August Poniatowski, who controlled most of Polish diplomacy, refused to stand in opposition to Russia, which in hindsight was a major blow for Poland.