Poland consolidated its forces tonight against the threat of expanding Germany.
The Cabinet decided to float a loan to develop the nation’s war aviation and passive defense. The amount of the loan will depend on the response it meets. Subscriptions will open on April 5 and will continue for one month. Two kinds of bonds will be issued — 100-zloty five percent bonds repayable by lot over a 15-year period and 20-zloty three percent bonds for laborers and artisans, repayable in five years. The latter will be made available in blocs of no more than four to a person. Both kinds will be purchasable on the installment plan will be tax-exempt.
Meanwhile, men and women in all walks of life demonstrated spontaneously their readiness to fight to keep the independence Poland regained after the Great War. No less than 19,000 persons in many parts of the country joined in displaying their militant determination to defend the Fatherland against foreign menace.
At Cieszyn and other cities in the Silesian region annexed from Czecho-Slovakia last September big crowds chanted the Rota, an anti-German anthem. At Lwow 8,000 war veterans passed a resolution declaring they were calmly awaiting “the forward-march order.” The country must become “a great armed camp with each Pole at his post, rifle in hand,” they asserted.
At Poznan 10,000 farm workers proclaimed their readiness “to shed the last drop of blood fighting any who would strike a blow against Poland’s honor and interests.” Speakers at the rally significantly recalled the 1919 uprising against German occupation.
In this capital, 1,500 delegates of the Polish Labor Federation announced that they and the millions of workers whom they represented would spring to arms at the first evidence of an attack on the nation’s sovereignty. The Women’s Organization for Military Preparedness voted at its annual congress in favor of military training for women and establishment of women’s defense battalions.
The General Assembly of Incapacitated War Veterans wired Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, Poland’s “first personage,” that if the country needed them “we will not hide behind our invalids’ papers but will shoulder our rifles in the Fatherland’s defense.”
Notice was taken here of a foreign report that Germany had served an ultimatum on Poland demanding the return of Danzig, transfer to the Reich of Bogumin (Oderberg) in Polish Silesia and permission to build a German highway across the Polish corridor.
Polish officials dismissed the report, however, as “so fantastic that there is no need to deny it.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
