I consider myself an amateur historian of sorts, but I was in a very interesting discussion with one of my coworkers yesterday. She was born in Poland and suggested that Poland has historically always been oppressed by other armies. And in doing so they were always blameless and taken advantage of, and never resorted to the sort of violence against others that has been historically enacted on them.
ex: "The 1939 September Campaign" and the "Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte" Children work camps. But that they have never dont anything of the sort to others.
While I'm sure that they never matched the scale as the 20thc Germans, I refuse to believe that a nation over 1,000 years old has never used tactics that today we would find inexcusable.
My point is that war has always been horrible and brutal and no nation is excused in this. The problem is I just don't know enough about Polish history to help bolster my point.
Are there examples of Poles being as ruthless in war as every other nation state?
Party on dudes. -Guy1000
In "White Eagle, Red Star," Norman Davies' work on the Polish-Soviet War, he discusses atrocities committed by both the Poles and the Soviets on the local populace where they fought (for instance, he notes several instances of Jews living in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine being persecuted by Polish troops for suspicion of being Communist sympathizers).
Interestingly enough, one of the most 'ruthless' acts of the Polish state in its history occurred right after World War II. A cry for vengeance and a newfound distrust of Germans led the Poles to deport somewhere around 8 million German people between 1945 and 1950. This is often downplayed because Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are seen as far more malicious nations during this period. This is especially true in relation to Poland itself; the Polish people experienced unspeakable horrors from both countries.
If you want to read some interesting accounts of Polish history, in which there are numerous mentions of Polish misjudgments and atrocities, you should look for books by Norman Davies and Neal Ascherson - specifically White Eagle, Red Star by Davies and The Struggles for Poland by Ascherson.