The British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote in 1945 that National Socialism was inevitable because the Germans wanted " to repudiate the equality with the peoples of ( central and ) eastern Europe which had then been forced upon them " after 1918 . Taylor wrote that : " During the preceding eighty years the Germans had sacrificed to the '' Reich '' all their liberties ; they demanded as a reward the enslavement of others . No German recognized the Czechs or Poles as equals . Therefore , every German desired the achievement which only total war could give . By no other means could the '' Reich '' be held together . It had been made by conquest and for conquest ; if it ever gave up its career of conquest , it would dissolve . " During Stalin 's Great Terror in the Soviet Union , the largest ethnic shooting and deportation operation , known as the Polish Operation , took place from about 25 August 1937 through 15 November 1938 . According to Soviet NKVD archives , 111,091 Poles , and people accused of ties with Poland , were executed , and 28,744 were sentenced to death-ridden labor camps , for a total of 139,835 Polish victims . This number constitutes 10 per cent of the officially persecuted persons during the entire Yezhovshchina period , with confirming NKVD documents . The coordinated actions of the Soviet NKVD and the Communist Party in 1937 – 1938 against the Polish minority living in the Soviet Union was a targeting of 0.4 percent of Soviet citizens by ethnicity . US historian Timothy D. Snyder says : " It is hard not to see the Soviet " Polish Operation " of 1937-38 as genocidal . " Simon Sebag Montefiore presents a similar opinion , Prof. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz , Dr. Tomasz Sommer , and others . In typical Stalinist fashion , the murdered Polish families were accused of " anti-Soviet " activities and state terrorism . Michael Ellman has said in the context of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that Stalin 's Polish Operation " might well qualify as genocide " but because there has been no legal tribunal to try the crimes of Stalinism , there is no authoritative ruling on the legal characterisation
Great Terror
Great Purge
Anti-Polish sentiment