Prelude to war in Poland; Polish army; Smigly-Rydz

Julien Hequembourg Bryan (1899-1974) was an American documentarian and filmmaker. Bryan traveled widely taking 35mm film that he sold to motion picture companies. In the 1930s, he conducted extensive lecture tours, during which he showed film footage he shot in the former USSR. Between 1935 and 1938, he captured unique records of ordinary people and life in Nazi Germany and in Poland, including Jewish areas of Warsaw and Krakow and anti-Jewish signs in Germany. His footage appeared in March of Time theatrical newsreels. His photographs appeared in Life Magazine. He was in Warsaw in September 1939 when Germany invaded and remained throughout the German siege of the city, photographing and filming what would become America's first cinematic glimpse of the start of WWII. He recorded this experience in both the book Siege (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940) and the short film Siege (RKO Radio Pictures, 1940) nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. In 1946, Bryan photographed the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in postwar Europe.

According to Jan Karski in "The Great Powers & Poland 1919-1945": "On May 12, 1936, General Smigly-Rydz was appointed commander-in- chief by the president of the republic. Two months later, on July 13, he was designated by government decree as the "First Person in Poland after the President of the Republic," and state functionaries were ordered to "honor him and obey." November 11, 1936, he was made marshal. From then on, he assumed the role of the national leader more and more obviously. His position made the army completely autonomous, free from any public control." In 1937, Marshall Smigly-Ridz was being hailed as the man who would lead the Poles to victory over Germany. Edward Rydz Smygly [sic] appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, September 11, 1939.

August Cardinal Hlond, the head of the Polish Catholic Church, called for discrimination against Polish Jews unless they converted to Catholicism. Thought to be less antisemitic than many Polish clergymen, Hlond's pastoral letter blasting the Jews for their "harmful morality" revealed the growing influence of Nazi ideology in Poland. Church-sanctioned anti-Jewish policy undermined the tenuous position of Polish Jewry and exacerbated tensions between Jews and Gentiles. Cardinal August Hlond, the Prelate of Poland, was known for making antisemitic pronouncements. He called for a boycott of Jewish shops in Poland as early as 1935 after the death of Jozef Pilsudski.