Both Stalin and Hitler Wanted Poland's Independence Destroyed

But Stalin shared Hitler's desire to break the power of Polish nationalism and he had been at least as adamant that no independent Polish state should remain after the country's partition. Both men wanted in effect to revert to the traditional Russo-German approach to the Poles. But there was nothing traditional about the means they adopted: soon Poland became a kind of grim laboratory case for the study of comparative totalitarianisms.

--Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 96-97.