Transcript · English → Spanish
Analysis of British Guarantee to Poland
Bien, gran parte de esto se lo debo a alguien llamado
Simon Newman, a quien
nunca he conocido y que escribió una obra extraordinaria, eh, como su, como su
tesis doctoral, eh, titulada La garantía británica a Polonia
de 1939. Y su análisis de lo que ocurrió
y de lo que, lo que pasaba por la mente del Gobierno británico
en el momento en que h- hicimos esta garantía a Polonia
es demoledor.
Y si pueden conseguirlo, lo cual es muy difícil, se lo recomiendo.
Pero lo que recorre toda la obra y lo que me impactó
de la manera en que, ya saben, estando hasta tarde por la noche con un libro,
a veces algo
realmente da un golpe a la mente, fue descubrir que
no solo, porque esto se descubre fácilmente, eh, no solo habíamos,
habíamos
hicimos una garantía a Polonia, que no teníamos intención alguna de cum-
plir.
Eh, no podríamos haber ayudado a Polonia en 1939
aunque hubiéramos querido.
No planeábamos hacerlo. Nuestros líderes militares sabían
que no podíamos.
Nuestros líderes políticos sabían que no podíamos.
Y aun así hicimos esta garantía.
Esa garantía no solo le dio a Polonia el control sobre el momento exacto
y el lugar del inicio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que así fue.
Eso también se sabe. Pero hicimos la garantía porque
temíamos que Polonia llegara a un
entendimiento amistoso con la Alemania nazi, y nos preocupaba que
por tanto no tuviéramos un pretexto para la guerra que buscábamos
porque deseábamos restablecer nuestra posición como gran potencia.
Y esto queda claro en las actas del, eh, del, del, del gabinete
reuniones y debates entre destacadas figuras de la política exterior británica de
la época. Lo atribuiría fundamentalmente a Lord
Halifax, aunque está bastante
claro que Neville Chamberlain estuvo implicado
End of transcript · 299 words · machine translated
Original transcript (English)
Okay, I, a lot of this I owe to somebody called Simon Newman, whom I've never met, and who wrote an extraordinary, uh, piece of work as his, as his PhD thesis, uh, called The British Guarantee to Poland of 1939. And his analysis of what took place
and of the, the, what was going through the minds of the British government at the time that we m- made this guarantee to Poland is devastating. And if you can get hold of it, which is very difficult, I recommend it to you. But the, what runs through it and what shocked me
in the way that, you know, sitting late at night over a book, sometimes something really does deliver a shock to the mind, was the discovery that not merely, because this is easily discovered, uh, not merely had, had we
made a guarantee to Poland, which we had no intention whatsoever of f- fulfilling. Uh, we could not have helped Poland in 1939 if we'd wanted to. We didn't plan to do so. Our military leaders knew
that we couldn't. Our political leaders knew that we couldn't. Yet we still made this guarantee. Not merely did that guarantee give Poland control over the exact time and place of the beginning of the Second World War, which it did.
That's also known. But that we made the guarantee because we were afraid that Poland would come to a friendly understanding with Nazi Germany, and we were worried that we would therefore not have a pretext for a war which we sought because we wished to reassert our position as a major power.
And this is clear from minutes of, uh, of, of, of cabinet meetings and of discussions between major figures in British foreign policy at the time. I would fundamentally attribute it to Lord Halifax, though it's quite clear that Neville Chamberlain was involved
