Hero or villain?

Why does he look like a Slav?

That would have meant that Poland would have been treated even worse by the Soviets.
It would give more pretexts to oppress Poles as collaborators and it would diminish Poland's status as victim of the Nazis.
Poland would get less or even no reparations or territories at all.
A local Polish government would also be forced to fight Polish resistance and this conflict between Poles would cause great resentment and division after the war.

A real life tragic hero.

No, their opinions kept changing depending on the diplomacy. Hitler wasn't above having Slavic allies and Poland was one of the few that had a chance of being a stable ally against USSR.
Even after Piłsduski's death whom he greatly admired.

A hero who lived long enough to see himself become the villain.

Vichy France was a monstrosity..
Watch 'The Sorrow and the Pity'

Fuck Petain.

When will this meme end?

>Hitler wasn't above having Slavic allies

Yes, unless they were Polish. He hated the Poles almost as much as he hated the Jews.

After they refused his alliance. Then he attacked Poland and not France.

Most unfairly maligned Frenchman of all time.

>he doesn't know about Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost

I know. What does it have to do with Poland? Where're you from?

>What does it have to do with Poland?

"In 1941 it was decided to destroy the Polish nation completely and the German leadership decided that in 10 to 20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.[18] A majority of them, now deprived of their leaders and most of their intelligentsia (through human losses, destruction of culture, the ban on education above the absolutely basic level, and kidnapping of children for Germanization), would have to be deported to regions in the East and scattered over as wide an area of Western Siberia as possible. According to the plan this would result in their assimilation by the local populations, which would cause the Poles to vanish as a nation.[16] By 1952, only about 3–4 million non-Germanized Poles (all of them peasants) were to be left residing in the former Poland. Those of them who would still not Germanize were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist."

>Where're you from?

I'm from Russia, why are you asking?

1941 so after April 1939 when Hitler changed his views on Poland. Before that date he was ready for multiple options. Alliance with Poland, in which scenario Poland would serve as a buffer zone between Germany and USSR durring the attack on France or as an ally in the invasion on the USSR itself. The other scenario involved an allaince with USSR to quickly neutralize Poland. Which is of course what happened.
Basically Hitler had ambitious plans and wanted to fight on one front at a time. Originally.

But on April 6, 1939 Polish foreign minister Józef Beck visited London. Poland agreed on British proposition of an alliance and guarantee of the independence. From then on Hitler knew he could not count on Poland and was furious because of it.

user, you can't just swing from "wanting to ally with a nation" to "wanting to exterminate their ethnic and cultural identity off the face of the earth" in the span of a year. He had always planned to kill off the Poles, especially since the Polish-German traitors started compiling lists of intellectual Poles who needed to be shot years before the war began.

>What does that have to do with Poland?
Are you a Croat or something? Do you know what the Germans have been doing with polish turf since the crusades?

And yet that's what he planned. But everything went downhill after Piłsudski's death (a man he admired a great deal though the feeling wasn't mutual) in 1935. But before that everyone was surprised at the apparent improvement of the German-Polish relationship as during the Weimar Republic their relationship was marked by various incidents and tariff wars.

The so-called German option has become very popular what-if scenario in Poland many claiming that this would've been more desirable all things considered as the destruction of the Soviet government was more important to Polish self-interest.

Hitler kept his options open as his reaction to Polish-British pact showed.

villain. willing collaborator and gave up without a fight. allies had to fight their way to Hitler's bunker before victory. french leadership was unprincipled, sympathetic towards fascism and weak. i hope there's a hell for petain to rot in.

>actual collabo
>petain isn't a collabo

Do you have a single fact to back that up? In what way to Petain meaningfully resist the Nazis?

Hitler kept open the possibility of allying with the Soviets
But it wasn't the Soviets who broke the pact
Really now you'd trust a promise from Hitler?

I'm not too knowledgeable on this, but from what I know about him, I would call him a necessary evil who was probably the least evil and best possible option for france at the time. As one user said above, he was a good man in ww1 who was dealt a shitty hand in ww2.

Would my opinion on him be somewhat accurate?

Soviet Union was more important to Hitler than Poland. More powerful and larger. That was the lebensraum. Poland was insignificant enough to be their little helper. Don't you know that Hitler had the Slovakian state as his ally from the very beginning? And Croatia. And then there was ROA. If anyone asked they were "honorary Aryans." German scientists would undoubtedly find some link that would make Western and Southern Slavs more Aryan. Eastern Slavs were a bigger problem as they lacked a strong Teutonic connection. But anything to help the cause.

Oh yeah Hitler is gonna get his lebensraum by annexing land on the other side of some other country
This isn't a paradox game, 3rd degree border gore like that doesn't fly.
Wanna know how much Hitler wanted to expand into Slovakia and Croatia? I'll give you a hint: very little. How much did he want to take back historically German land after a war to defend German minorities on Poland? I simply assume a little more than fucking up the croats.
Eastern Slavs? Like poles?

Poles are Western Slavs. The territory of the II Republic of Poland lacked regions like Sudetenland and in the event of a pro-German puppet government it didn't matter anyway. Way too much work with that Polish-German chessboard on the border.
The truth remains that Hitler considered an alliance with Poland as a possible option and we could argue (although I don't like alternative history) that it would've been for the better. Perhaps it would. Maybe in the end both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would've been destroyed. We don't know and it's not nearly as interesting to me as the fact that the possibility of different alliances existed.

btw did you know that the corridor to East Prussia was originally an idea proposed by the Polish government?