Evaluation of the correctness of the German military intelligence’s findings concerning armament and equipment of the Polish Army in 1939. Part I. Land forces

Abstract

The presented publication is one of several that the author wrote on to the presentation of the knowledge of German military intelligence about the Polish Army in 1939. These publications also attempted to assess the correctness of the findings of the afore-mentioned intelligence. The article is based on archival materials of the 12th Foreign Armies East Intelligence Section of the General Staff of the High Command of the Land Forces of 1939, which developed synthetic elaborations for the top military commanders of the German army, based on the analysis and collective materials from the individual Abwehstelle. For years, the documents analysed were secret and delivered exclusively to the top commanders of the German army and Hitler’s Chancellery. At present, they are entirely non-confidential and available to researchers at the Bundesarchiv-Militaerarchiv in Freiburg. Copies of parts of these documents, in the form of microfilms, can be found, among others, in the Archive of New Files in Warsaw. Due to the considerable volume of the publication, it has been divided into two parts. The presented article constitutes the first part and is devoted to the knowledge of the German military intelligence on the armament and equipment of land forces. The article presents not only the knowledge of the German military intelligence, but also basic analyses concerning the evaluation of the correctness of its findings. The analyses carried out and the generalised records presented in the article show that the German military intelligence did not make gross errors in the presented assessments concerning the armament and equipment of infantry and cavalry. That is, the most important and numerous components of the Polish Army (WP). However, many mistakes were made in the presentation of the armament of the artillery, assuming, among other things, the presence of cannons from the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 in the equipment, which the WP did no longer have in 1939. Perhaps in 1939 the Abwehr, having no current data, used data from earlier years, from the first half of the 1930s, when the WP still had cannons in its equipment. Models of the heaviest artillery weapons were also unknown. On the other hand, the Polish armoured weapons were worked out very well. The article constitutes yet another contribution to the work of learning about the so-far unexplored recesses of our recent history.