The United States and the Recreation of the Interwar Polish Economy, 1919–20

Abstract

Following the First World War, an independent Poland re-emerged on the map of Europe after more than a century of partition and foreign occupation. The material destruction and human losses created by the war were enormous: almost 90 per cent of the national territory had been the theatre of military operations; almost a third had seen heavy and prolonged fighting, 40 per cent of all structures in smaller towns were destroyed, the same percentage of all livestock in the heavily agricultural country had been slaughtered, one third of the land lay fallow. Over one million Poles had been killed by the war. By the beginning of 1919 industrial employment was 15 per cent in the central provinces of the country, and production was paralysed by systematic German requisitioning and looting, as well as the rather less efficient Russian depredations. Raw materials for the metallurgical, textile and machine industries had been removed by the occupiers. Obviously the country would require enormous capital to reactivate the economy, rebuild industrial inventories, replace lost or damaged equipment and replenish livestock. This, of course, is to say nothing of the greatly larger capital needs to integrate the theretofore trifurcated economies of Austrian, German and Russian Poland, again conjoined into a Polish state. After 1919 Poland’s economic position would be further strained by border wars with the Ukrainians, Czechs and Lithuanians as well as a series of clashes with Germany over Upper Silesia. Most important, however, was the major struggle with Soviet Russia of 1919–21. To these costly military efforts we must add the indemnities assigned to