1111 For Auschwitz 75th anniversary, Israel joins Putin in blaming Poland for outbreak of WWII, whitewashing Stalin for deal with Hitler

For Auschwitz 75th anniversary, Israel joins Putin in blaming Poland for
outbreak of WWII, whitewashing Stalin for deal with Hitler

Newsletter published on January 21, 2020

(1) Battle for Auschwitz: Shamir is defending Stalin, blaming Poland for
WWII
(2) Battle for Auschwitz: Israel Shamir says "Poland intended to attack
Russia as a junior partner of Hitler"; no evidence provided
(3) For Auschwitz 75th anniversary, Israel joins Putin in blaming Poland
for outbreak of WWII, whitewashing Stalin for deal with Hitler
(4) Putin brands Poles as allies of Hitler
(5) German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934 was abrogated by Hitler in
1938 when Poland was his next target

(1) Battle for Auschwitz: Shamir is defending Stalin, blaming Poland for
WWII
- Peter Myers, January 21, 2020

Israel Shamir's article Battle for Auschwitz (item 2) depicts Poles as
accomplices of the Nazis, and denies Stalin' role in starting World War II.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact broke up the Anti-Comintern Pact between
Germany and Japan (at that time occupying Manchuria and Inner Mongolia),
thus freeing the USSR from having to fight on two fronts; instead,
Hitler was the one who had to fight on two fronts.

Secret clauses provided that Poland be split between Germany and the
Soviet Union, and that north-east Europe be partitioned between the two.
This initiatated WWII, giving Hitler a geeen light to take western
Poland. Stalin waited a few weeks, until the West had declared war on
Germany. He then took eastern Poland, without the West declaring war on
him. Clearly, Stalin was equally responsible, with Hitler, for war
breaking out; but he was much more cunning than Hitler.

The Soviet Union denied the secret clauses in the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact, until 1989, in the Gorbachev era. They were published soon after.

"'I have deceived him. I have deceived Hitler,' cried Stalin joyfully
after the Pact had been signed. (Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs, Chasidze
Publications, 1981) Stalin had indeed deceived Hitler in a way that
nobody had deceived anyone else throughout the whole of the twentieth
century. Only a week and a half after the Pact had been signed Hitler
had a war on two fronts. That is to say, from the very outset of
hostilities Germany fell into a situation in which it could only lose
the war; or, to put it another way, on 23 August 1939, the day the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, Stalin had won the Second World War
even before Hitler came into it."
  - Victor Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?,
Hamish Hamilton, London, 1990, p. 46.

There is no need for Putin and Shamir to deny Stalin's role in starting
the war, or to defend him.

Larouche writers (Lyndon Larouche, Webster Tarpley, F. William Engdahl)
and Yockeyists (eg Kerry Bolton) side with Stalin and deny or minimise
his crimes.

(2) Battle for Auschwitz: Israel Shamir says "Poland intended to attack
Russia as a junior partner of Hitler"; no evidence provided

The Battle for Auschwitz

by Israel Shamir

20 Jan 2020

https://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-battle-for-auschwitz/

On Friday, January 17, 2020, three thousand salvos shook the earth of
the Russian capital city; the sky over Moscow had been emblazoned by
glorious fireworks. This was the repeat of the memorable salute given
seventy-five years ago, on January 17, 1945 by 24 salvos of 324 heavy
cannons at liberation of Warsaw by the Red Army. Ruined Warsaw had been
saved from total loss.

This could be an excellent occasion for display of friendliness between
the two Slavic nations. The Poles could remember 200,000 Russian
soldiers and officers killed in action at Warsaw, and say: they died so
we may live. They could thank Russia for the bountiful lands and great
cities that were torn out of defeated Germany and presented to Poland:
Danzig became Gdansk, Stettin became Szczecin, Breslau became Wroc?aw,
and Posen became Poznan´. They could thank Russia even for passing to
the Ukraine the Ukrainian-populated lands that were under Polish rule
between the wars, the rule that ended in a big massacre of the resident
Poles by Ukrainian nationalists.

Gratitude is not a strong feature of the Polish national character: the
Polish government ignored the event. Instead, the Poles destroyed the
memorials and tombs of Russian soldiers. It was mighty annoying, but
much less important than Warsaw’s decision to establish the US radar
system of a European missile shield on its soil, the system that made a
sudden US nuclear strike on Russia a very tangible possibility. Poland’s
effort to undermine Russia’s pipeline to Germany; Poland’s invitation of
US armour to take positions on its eastern border; Poland’s endless
hostility to Russia in the Europarliament made the Russians to view this
old founding member of the Warsaw Pact as its enemy No. 1 in the
European continent.

You won’t be amazed that the Russians had used a good opportunity to pay
tit for tat. This opportunity came from the Jewish offensive against
Poland. The Jews attacked this anti-Communist eastern bulwark of the
West from two sides at once, powerful US Jewry and the mighty Jewish
state. Or almost at once. American Jews began the operation by pushing
through the obsequious Congress Bill S774. This bill told Poland to
cough up $300 Billion to American Jewish organisations.

Under this American law, all property that once belonged to a person of
Jewish descent in Poland must be transferred to American Jewish
organizations. One third of Warsaw, half of Krakow, much of residential
property in Poland belonged to Jews before the war – and now it was
going ‘back’ to US Jewry. The law created a unique situation – what
belonged to a Jew remains forever in Jewish hands. And lawsuits cannot
be brought against these "Jewish hands". That is, if a Jewish citizen of
Poland died leaving debts, these debts disappeared. But if he died
intestate, then the house goes to Jewish American organizations. They
can evict the resident Poles, or make them pay a rent for what they
thought was their own apartments.

S774 is a brilliant idea. It revives medieval Polish Jewry – a state in
a state. In pre-war Poland this was not the case; Polish Jews were
Polish citizens, and if a Polish Jew died without leaving any heirs, his
escheated property went to the Polish republic, as did the property of a
Catholic or Orthodox Pole who died intestate. American Jews decided to
turn the Holocaust into the biggest property snatch of the 21st century,
by reverting to the 16th century ideas. They will take in their own
hands all the property that belonged to the Polish citizens of the
Mosaic Law before the war.

This peculiar idea was not to be applied in the US or England. If an
American (or British) Jew dies without appointing heirs, the property
will be transferred to the state. But for Poland, they conceived a
complete restitution. If it will work with the Poles, it may work
elsewhere; the Jews won’t be ordinary citizens of their countries, but
rather members of supranational Jewry. The debts will be their private
affairs, but their assets will be of the Jewry. Brilliant, isn’t it?

The Poles didn’t like S447. There are demonstrations against the law,
there are calls to oust the American ambassador, who added insult to
injury by congratulating Polish Jews on Hanukkah while forgetting to
send Christmas greetings to the Catholic Poles, the vast majority of the
nation. At that time, Israel came to support the US Jews. They demanded
that Poland repent for being nasty to Jews, to accept partial
responsibility for the Holocaust and pay. Israel pumped out many
billions from Germany, but these billions have already been used up.
Poland had paid nothing to Israel. The Bolsheviks who ruled after-war
Poland did not think that the Zionists should be paid; they considered
Poland a Nazi victim, not a beneficiary. Now there were no more
communists, so please pay, said the Jews.

Israel and American Jews keep the pressure on Poland. They call
Auschwitz a "Polish concentration camp", which offends the Poles very
much. They say that many Poles helped the Nazis to realise the "final
solution to the Jewish question." Poles made a law forbidding saying
that; the Jews took to chanting it on the streets.

The conflict is coming now to the fore, with the 75th anniversary of
Auschwitz liberation (by the Red Army, by the way: President Obama’s
uncle didn’t fight in Poland, despite this silly claim of the previous
American president). It will be celebrated in two places: in Jerusalem
and in Auschwitz. In Jerusalem, all important dignitaries will gather:
the French President, the US Vice-President, the German Chancellor, the
Russian President Putin. The Polish president Andrzej Duda was invited,
too – but not as a speaker, just an also-present guest. He preferred to
skip the occasion altogether and to visit the much more modest Auschwitz
celebration at the site of the camp.

President Putin is aware of the Polish controversy, and he decided to
show the Poles that their relentless hostility to Russia just does not
pay. A few weeks ago on December 24, at the meeting of the Russian
Ministry of Defence, Putin presented certain documents of the World War
Two period, attesting to the rabidly anti-Jewish attitude of the pre-war
Polish leadership. For instance, Jozef Lipsky, the Polish ambassador to
Nazi Germany until 1939, told the Germans that the Poles would erect a
monument to the Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler in Warsaw if he were to rid
Poland of its Jews. "Such an anti-Semitic pig!" – exclaimed Putin
indignantly.

The Poles made a miserable attempt to reinterpret the damning words,
saying that the Polish ambassador had meant to save Jews by sending them
to safe Africa, for instance, to Madagascar, to the harmless lemurs, in
cooperation with Zionists, and so he was a Zionist pig, rather. It did
not play well.

But Putin had more papers and more proof in his vaults. He produced a
report dated late 1944-early 1945, when pro-London Polish militants of
AK had made an attempt to take over Warsaw from the Germans before the
Red Army’s arrival. The report said that the AK fighters systematically
killed all the Jews who survived the German suppression of Warsaw Ghetto
uprising (1943). It could explain why the Russian army did not think it
is their sacred duty to help the AK militants.

Russians were always rather good and tolerant to Jews. There were no
pogroms in Russia – only in Poland, the Ukraine and Moldova, the
independent states once parts of the Russian Empire. The Russians saved
millions of Jews, including millions of Polish Jews who were allowed to
move to Russia. No other country accepted so many Jewish refugees as
Russia did, by a long chalk. The Jews paid this back with black
ingratitude by helping the West to carry out its psy-war against Russia.
Masha Gessen and Leonid Gozman are typical pro-Western and anti-Russian
Jews who won’t be alive but for Russian courage and generosity.

Still, Russia is good for Jews. They are an integral part of modern
Russian elites; Jewish centres occupy prime real estate sites in Moscow
and elsewhere. Relations with Israel are also rather good, despite the
low-key confrontation in Syria. While visiting the Auschwitz forum in
Jerusalem, Putin will also unveil a new memorial to the Soviet Jews who
perished during the cruel Leningrad siege. Netanyahu is particularly
friendly to Putin, and this personal friendship allowed them to avoid an
all-out war for Syria.

Israeli liberals, enemies of Trump and Netanyahu, are definitely unhappy
about this development. They would prefer that Jerusalem accommodate
Warsaw, even for the tiny price of overlooking the ethnically-cleansed
Jews of Poland. But they are not ruling Israel, yet, though their main
newspaper, Haaretz, is as anti-Putin as any Western media.

The Poles are screwed-up. They thought the Jews connected to the US
would support them against Russia, but Jews have their own calculations
and interests. If the Poles thought the Russians would never discover
their vulnerabilities, they were mistaken. It is true, the Russians had
kept so many damning documents of the period in their sealed archives;
but that was when Warsaw was an ally of Moscow. Now it makes no sense at
all, and Russians do present terrible proofs of violent Polish
anti-Jewish attitudes.

They corrected the whole narrative of the war. While Poles like to begin
the history with Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, subsequently presenting the
USSR as an ally of Nazi Germany assaulting innocent and pure Poland; in
the new Russian narrative (and in reality), the treaty between Poland
and Nazi Germany preceded the Molotov pact by many years. Poland
intended to attack Russia as a junior partner of Hitler. That is why the
western border of Poland (with Germany) was totally unfortified and
undefended, as opposed to the heavily fortified Eastern border with the
USSR. But for this strategic miscalculation of Polish between-the-wars
leadership, the Germans won’t be able to defeat Polish army within two
weeks.

The Russians provided documents showing that half a million Poles served
in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. These prove that the Polish leadership was fond
of German Nazis, not least because of their anti-Jewish attitudes.
Hitler personally attended the memorial service of Polish First Marshall
Jozef Pilsudski in Berlin, in 1935.

Indeed, the tricky Poles had tried to play the West against Germany, the
Germany against the USSR, and they ended with their country in ruins.
Instead of learning their lessons and understanding that such intrigues
are not healthy for a mid-size country, they repeated it after the Cold
War, by trying to become the cutting edge of the Western assault upon
Russia. The Auschwitz Forum in Jerusalem proves again that this policy
leads to a new disaster.

A special resolution of the Polish Sejm – the lower house of the Polish
parliament – condemned both "provocative" and "false" statements by
Russian President Vladimir Putin, about the role of Poland in the
beginning of World War II. "Two totalitarian regimes – Nazi Germany and
the communist USSR – unleashed this war", the resolution emphasizes,
which was adopted without a voting procedure on Thursday, January 9,
while Poland is innocent.

This mantra worked all right for a long time; while it was necessary to
accuse Russia and to delegitimise the Soviets. But now the Jews want to
have their share of fun, incidentally at the expense of Poland. For
Russia it is a change for the better. Jews are a valuable ally. With
Putin in the Yad va-Shem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and the Polish
president Duda not among those present, Polish voices won’t be heard.

I recently received a letter from a Polish nationalist Dr Ignacy
Nowopolski; he writes – we the Poles need to go back to the Warsaw Pact
protection, otherwise the Jews and Germans will fleece us.

"They started to accuse Poland of precipitating WWII and the Jewish
holocaust… From 1989 on, the Western corporations were busy designing a
strategy for effective robbery of the post communist societies’ wealth…
The West brought immense misery to countless people around the world…
The imperial media have been able to convince people in the
post-communist countries to voluntarily join the newly established
atheistic paradise of the EU. Today, after over three decades of
functioning in the Western sphere of influence, young Polish generations
accept being the second-class EU citizens as normal as the Universal Law
of Gravitation.

…anti-Russian sentiments in Poland and other Central European countries
are mere demonstration of imprudent tendencies in their societies. In
order to survive, these nations must overcome mutual animosities, which
currently enable their enemies to successfully employ ancient divide et
impera strategy. The answer is in the creation of some sort of
"Euroslavia" in cooperation or even confederation with Russian
Federation" – i.e. going back to the Warsaw Pact.

Such a sentiment on the lips of a hard-line Polish nationalist is a sign
of profound change of heart. If and when such people would occupy the
old Viceroy Palace, Poland would make peace with Russia and prosper. US
soldiers, tanks and radars would go back to Virginia. Russian military
memorials would get freshly painted. Russians are easy to forget old
grievances; they still have a warm spot in their heart for the Poles,
"the French of the East". Then Russia would support Poland against
third-party claims, as she did for many years. But meanwhile, let the
Auschwitz Forum be a useful lesson for Poland – do not stir hostility in
the East by the orders from the West.

On the photo – a demonstration of the Poles against restitution
subtitled "Neo-Nazi protest" in an American newspaper. Only a neo-Nazi
would prefer to remain the owner of his apartment when it could be given
over to a Jewish American organization.

Putin, who did not attend the 70th anniversary events, was invited to
this year’s ceremonies, but declined; the Russian ambassador to Poland
is on the list of invited guests.

(3) For Auschwitz 75th anniversary, Israel joins Putin in blaming Poland
for outbreak of WWII, whitewashing Stalin for deal with Hitler

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-dirty-politics-behind-israel-s-capitulation-to-putin-s-wwii-revisionism-1.8406565

The Dirty Politics Behind Israel's Capitulation to Putin's WWII Revisionism

Hosting event marking 75th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation, Israel's
Holocaust remembrance authority is now facilitating the Kremlin campaign
to blame Poland for the outbreak of WWII – and to whitewash Stalin's
handshake with Hitler

Ofer Aderet

Jan 16, 2020 12:53 PM

At the end of this month, days apart, two international ceremonies will
be held to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation
from the Nazis: the first at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the second at
the site of the concentration camp itself in Poland. World leaders,
prominent Jewish figures and Holocaust survivors have been invited to both.

Holding more than one ceremony dedicated to a major anniversary is not
that unusual, but there is more than that going on here. Behind the
desire to honor the memory of the victims lie other, less honorable
interests. Internal Jewish community politics, diplomatic skirmishes,
historical disputes and games of power and ego have all come to be
involved in the event at Yad Vashem in particular – a commemoration of
atrocity that could be assumed to be untainted by extraneous considerations.

One indication that outside factors would indeed contaminate the
Jerusalem event was the highly unusual decision by Polish President
Andrezj Duda to turn down the invitation to attend the ceremony. He
questioned why Yad Vashem was holding an international event seemingly
in competition with the commemoration already planned at the Auschwitz
memorial site; and he announced that he would not participate because
the organizers refused to give him one of the slots for foreign
dignitaries to give a speech.

Yad Vashem’s exclusion of Duda from the speaker list would have been
more easily justifiable were all the speakers at the ceremony Holocaust
survivors or WWII historians. But U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, the
presidents of Russia, France, Germany and Israel, as well as Britain’s
Prince Charles, and Prime Minister Netanyahu all been invited to speak
at the event.

The explanation proffered by Yad Vashem, that all the speakers are
"heads of states that brought about the world’s liberation from the Nazi
occupation" leaves something to be desired. If this were truly the
guiding rule, then representatives of Germany and Israel should clearly
not be speaking at the ceremony. Nor, if that is the criterion, is it
clear that the president of France, whose Vichy regime collaborated with
the Nazis until the summer of 1944, would deserve this honor.

The Polish government, however, from its place of exile in London,
joined ranks with the Allies, and Polish troops fought against Nazi
Germany in all kinds of frameworks. Isn’t this reason enough to include
its top official on the list of speakers at the ceremony commemorating
the liberation of Auschwitz?

So the reason behind the decision not to allow the Polish president to
speak at the event clearly lies elsewhere – and in places that could
potentially detract from the distinguished nature of the event that the
organizers are aiming for.

One might assume that it is the Israeli government that is behind an
event of this magnitude, one that involves world leaders and is being
held at Yad Vashem. But in fact, the force behind it is someone unknown
to most Israelis: Moshe Kantor, a Russian-Jewish billionaire and
oligarch who is president of the European Jewish Congress.

His people say that he is the one who "proposed and planned" the event
and is "responsible for the program and its content" and that it is
because of him that dozens of world leaders will be in attendance. If
that’s so, then what role do Israel's Foreign Ministry, the President’s
Office and Yad Vashem, all also listed as organizers of the event, have?
Kantor’s people say that he "harnessed" them to his plans. Needless to
say, not everyone is thrilled with this portrayal of things.

Is there any connection between the fact that Kantor is close with the
Kremlin (so much so that he has been called "Putin's man") and the
choice to allow President Putin to speak but to deny Duda, the Polish
president, the same privilege? No one will openly admit as much, of
course, but anyone who’s been following the diplomatic tensions between
Russia and Poland, which reached a peak last month, may be wondering who
had an interest in standing by the Russian president at this time and
shunning his Polish counterpart.

For months now, Putin has been waging a blatantly anti-Polish campaign,
claiming, in part, that Poland played a part in the outbreak of World
War II and that it collaborated with Nazi Germany. Soviet/Russian-Nazi
German cooperation, which culminated in the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact that divided Poland between the two occupying countries, is now
being depicted by Putin as unavoidable and something that was actually
meant to help Poland.

MFA Russia
@mfa_russia
  ?Today attempts are being made in a number of western countries to
equally blame both Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union for the II
World War breakout. Many of these countries are turning a blind eye to
number of facts.#WWII #History #Commemoration #USSR #Germany #Poland

Georgette Mosbacher
@USAmbPoland
  Dear President Putin, Hitler and Stalin colluded to start WWII. That
is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict.

This distortion of history led to a justified Polish fear that Putin
would use the platform he is given at Yad Vashem to perpetuate
anti-Polish revisionism - while the Polish president would be forced to
look on from the audience, unable to defend himself, his country and the
historical record. For this reason, too, Duda’s request to join the list
of speakers is warranted.

Bear in mind that the Polish government, too, is not above distorting
history or involving political interests in the memory of World War II.

When the Israeli and Polish prime ministers issued a joint statement
aimed at defusing the crisis over Poland’s new "Holocaust law," senior
Yad Vashem historians argued (contrary to the stance of the
institution’s chief historian, Professor Dina Porat, head of the Kantor
Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry) that it was marked
by "grave errors and deceptions" - distorting history and insulting the
memory of the Holocaust. The controversial part of the statement was the
claim that many Poles helped save Jews during the Holocaust and that
Poles were only minimally involved in persecuting Jews.

Poland did not invite Putin to the ceremonies it held on September 1 to
commemorate the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.
Representatives from the U.S. and Germany were invited and also spoke at
the event about Polish suffering during the war. And Putin, not
surprisingly, has not been invited to the ceremony to be held at
Auschwitz in Poland on January 27.

Now add to this already complicated equation the internal politics of
the Jewish world, particularly the rivalry between the two contenders
for leadership of prestigious diaspora institutions – Ron Lauder,
president of the World Jewish Congress, and Moshe Kantor, head of the
European Jewish Congress. The two are not cooperating with one another:
Lauder is not attending the Yad Vashem event but will attend the event
at Auschwitz four days later.

As the world’s most important institution for preserving the memory of
the Holocaust, Yad Vashem has a duty to keep as far away from all the
politics, diplomatic and organizational, as possible and to ensure its
only considerations are professional, historical and commemorative.

But the decision to allow Putin but not Duda to speak could be perceived
as Yad Vashem and the Israeli government taking Putin’s side – a move
that in this context amounts to tacit support for Putin’s distorted
narrative concerning the division of Poland at the start of World War II
and the whitewashing of the Soviet Union's handshake with Hitler.

Yad Vashem would have been far better off staying away from all this, by
openly disavowing Putin’s recent statements and giving his Polish
counterpart the chance to be heard too.

(4) Putin brands Poles as allies of Hitler

https://www.rferl.org/a/memory-wars-polish-and-russian-fight-over-world-war-ii-shifts-to-auschwitz/30386948.html

'Memory Wars': Polish, Russian Fight Over World War II Shifts To Auschwitz

January 20, 2020 08:53 GMT

By Mike Eckel

Auschwitz -- the Nazi death camp in Poland where more than 1 million
Jews, Poles, and other people died -- was liberated by the Red Army on
January 27, 1945.

This much, Poland and Russia can agree on.

But not much else when it comes to World War II. Or a growing number of
prewar, and postwar, Cold War events, for that matter.

And they certainly can’t agree on the proper way to mark the 75th
anniversary of Auschwitz liberation, or which countries’ presidents
should have a place of honor, and where, and how.

For years, Russia and its former Soviet satellite have locked horns over
how to properly interpret the war years and their aftermath, a
reflection in part of President Vladimir Putin's efforts to champion
Soviet war victories, and, more broadly, Soviet accomplishments.
Poland’s nationalist ruling party has made confronting Russia, and
defending aspects of Polish history, a prominent plank of its guiding
philosophy.

But Polish-Russian skirmishing has risen to a new crescendo in recent
weeks, in the run-up to the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation.

Invited to official Polish ceremonies to be held at Auschwitz on January
27, Putin declined, according to organizers. Instead, Putin was
scheduled to travel to Jerusalem four days earlier, to attend an
alternative commemoration -- hosted by a Kremlin-connected tycoon.
Poland’s president was invited to Jerusalem but backed out because he
would not be allowed to speak.

"I am extremely upset and worried about the new situation in relations
between our countries," said Natalia Lebedeva, a prominent Russian
historian and expert on Soviet-Polish relations.

"I am afraid that this is not just a war of words, but something more
serious," she told RFE/RL in an e-mail.

Cold History

Warsaw’s animosity toward its eastern neighbor is rooted in centuries of
rival empires and invading armies who have seen what is now modern
Poland as an invasion route, or simply an appendage to more powerful
empires.

For centuries, the territory of modern-day Poland had been carved up
between Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World
War I, an independent state -- the Second Polish Republic -- was
established, but lasted only until 1939, when Moscow and Berlin signed a
nonaggression pact that also included a secret protocol providing for
Poland to be carved up again.

That agreement, part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, took effect when
World War II started, and Nazi and Soviet armies invaded Poland.

Though the agreement was published in the West after the war, its
existence was denied by the Soviet Union for decades, until 1989; the
declassified Soviet document was published in Russia in 1992.

Last year, the pact, and the secret protocol, drew new scrutiny on the
70th anniversary of its signing, on August 23, 1939.

Poles, and most Western historians, labeled the pact treacherous.
Russian officials, however, sought to rationalize it, publicizing
archive documents that they claimed showed that it was Hitler, not
Stalin, who pushed for the pact and that the Soviet Union had no choice
but to sign it in order to buy time and ensure its security.

The comments jarred with more conciliatory comments Putin himself made
10 years earlier, in an article he penned for a Polish newspaper, in
which he called the pact "pointless, harmful, and dangerous."

'A Triumph Of Soviet Diplomacy'

During his first two terms as president in the 2000s, Putin made clear
that he felt Soviet history had been unfairly distorted. In 2005, he
called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the century."

But the trend accelerated after he returned to the presidency in 2012,
following a four-year hiatus as prime minister. And it grew further
after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula in 2014, which is
considered hallowed ground for the Kremlin.

Last September, the European Parliament passed a resolution that blamed
the 1939 nonaggression pact for the outbreak of World War II. Russia
responded with weeks of angry criticism of the resolution. Russia’s
culture minister called the 1939 pact "a triumph of Soviet diplomacy."

On December 19, during his annual marathon news conference in Moscow,
Putin said it was "totally unacceptable and inaccurate" to blame both
Hitler and Stalin for sparking the war.

He also revisited the Kremlin argument that Stalin was forced to sign
the pact, only because Britain and France had betrayed Moscow by signing
the 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler.

One day after the news conference, at a meeting with heads of former
Soviet states, Putin gave an hour-long history lecture about the war.

On December 25, he targeted Poland’s prewar envoy to Nazi Germany,
telling Russian defense officials that, according to Soviet records, the
envoy asked Hitler to expel the country’s Jews to Africa, and promised
to build a monument to the Nazi leader in Warsaw if he did.

"That bastard! That anti-Semitic pig," Putin said.

That appeared to be the last straw for Warsaw. On December 29, Prime
Minister Mateusz Morawiecki issued a blistering, 1,300-word statement
criticizing Moscow.

"Today, when certain individuals wish to trample the memory of these
events in the name of their own political goals, Poland must stand up
for the truth -- not for its own interests, but for the sake of what
defines Europe," Morawiecki said.

And then there’s Auschwitz: the network of Nazi facilities, officially
known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, that is now synonymous with the genocidal
ideology of the Nazis. In all, more than 3 million Polish Jews were
killed during the war, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Red Army moved into the southern Polish town and liberated the camp
on January 27, 1945 -- the event is now marked as International
Holocaust Remembrance Day.

As with past years, Poland will host a ceremony at Auschwitz on January
27; this year, more than 100 survivors of the camps will also attend, as
will heads of states and dignitaries from nearly four dozen countries.

Putin, who did not attend the 70th anniversary events, was invited to
this year’s ceremonies, but declined; the Russian ambassador to Poland
is on the list of invited guests.

"Each country makes a decision about their own delegation to the
commemoration event," Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the ceremony
organizers, told RFE/RL. "That means the decision about the Russian
delegation is taken independently by Russia which chose to be
represented by its ambassador to Poland."

Instead, Putin will attend an event held on January 23 at Jerusalem’s
Yad Vashem memorial, organized by the World Holocaust Forum, an
organization founded by a Russian Jewish businessman, Vyacheslav Kantor.

Known more widely as Moshe, Kantor heads the European Jewish Congress.
He is also, as of 2018, on the U.S. Treasury Department’s so-called
"oligarchs list" -- a tally of nearly 200 businesspeople and political
figures alleged to have close ties to the Kremlin.

Polish President Andrzej Duda had been invited to attend, but backed
out, after organizers refused his request to speak during the ceremonies
"before or after Vladimir Putin."

"It is a prerequisite that, as a representative of the country which had
the most citizens murdered at Auschwitz, I can speak about historical
truth," Duda said.

Memory Wars

For decades, one of the most painful aspect of Russia-Polish history was
the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Polish military officers and civilians at
Katyn Forest. In 1990, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that it
was the Soviet secret police who carried out the execution.

In recent years, Russian and Polish historians had collaborated, in a
semiofficial capacity, in an organization called the Polish-Russian
Group for Difficult Issues. The academics published joint articles
examining different parts of the two countries’ overlapping history.

But, said Slawomir Debski, a Polish historian and head of the Polish
Institute of International Affairs, after the 2014 Crimea annexation,
there was a shift in how Russia sought to reinterpret 20th century history.

"The Russian side lost interest in any historical dialogue whatsoever,"
Debski told RFE/RL.

In 2015, in an interview in the Russian government newspaper Rossiskaya
Gazeta, Andrei Artyzov, the head of the Russian State Archives,
deflected blame away from Russia or the Soviet Union.

"The historical memory war is not our choice," Artyzov told the
newspaper. "It was not us who started the war."

Polish politics have also taken a more nationalistic turn, under the Law
and Justice party, which won an outright parliamentary majority in 2015.
In 2018, Duda signed into law a measure that made it illegal to say that
Poland was complicit during the Holocaust.

After an outcry from the United States and the European Union, lawmakers
removed the criminal penalties, instead calling for fines.

More recently, the Polish parliament on January 9 passed a resolution
against what it called the "manipulation of facts and a distortion of
history by Russian politicians aimed at discrediting Poland and
worsening Polish-Russian relations."

Top Russian lawmakers responded days later, asserting that it was Poland
who was rewriting history.

On the anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of Warsaw, on January
17, Russian officials held a fireworks display over Moscow. Poland's
Foreign Ministry responded, criticizing what it said were Moscow's
attempts at rewriting history and calling on Russia to "accept its
difficult past."

"We respect soldiers’ blood sacrifice in the fight vs Nazism, but in
1945 Stalin's regime brought [Poland] terror, atrocities, and economic
exploitation," Poland's Embassy in Moscow said in a post on Twitter.
"The Red Army liberated Warsaw from the Nazis, but did not bring freedom
to the Poles!"

Lebedeva, who is renowned for her research on the Katyn killings, said
she was shocked that Russian lawmakers in their speeches were making no
mention of the Katyn massacre, and others that occurred in 1940,
rhetorical attacks, she said, "which are not only directed against
Poland, but also, to a certain extent, are aimed at restoring the cult
of Stalin."

"Shouldn’t our country repent for these killings?" she told RFE/RL.
Lebedeva said her opinions were her own and not that of her employer,
the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World History.

"I think that this would be important not only for the restoration of
historical truth, but so that in our country something like the
repressions against our own and other peoples that [took place] during
Stalinist rule don’t reoccur," she said.

(5) German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934 was abrogated by Hitler in
1938 when Poland was his next target

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Polish_Non-Aggression_Pact

German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact

The German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact was an international treaty
between Nazi Germany and the Second Polish Republic that was signed on
January 26, 1934. Both countries pledged to resolve their problems by
bilateral negotiations and to forgo armed conflict for a period of 10
years. The pact effectively normalised relations between Poland and
Germany, which had been strained by border disputes arising from the
territorial settlement in the Treaty of Versailles. Germany effectively
recognised Poland's borders and moved to end an economically-damaging
customs war between the two countries that had taken place over the
previous decade.

Before 1933, Poland had worried that some sort of alliance would take
place between Germany and the Soviet Union to the detriment of Poland.
Therefore, Poland made a military alliance with France. Because the
Nazis and the Communists were bitter enemies of each other, a hostile
Soviet-German alliance after Hitler came to power in 1933 seemed very
unlikely.[1]

One of the most noted of Józef Pilsudski's foreign policies was his
rumoured proposal to France to declare war on Germany after Adolf Hitler
had come to power, in January 1933. Some historians speculate that
Pilsudski may have sounded out France on the possibility of joint
military action against Germany, which had been openly rearming in
violation of the Versailles Treaty. France's refusal might have been one
of the reasons that Poland signed the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact.
[...]

Pilsudski used Hitler's rise to power and international isolation of
Germany's new regime as an opportunity to reduce the risk that Poland
would become the first victim of German aggression or of a Great Power
deal (especially the Four Power Pact). Germany's new rulers seemed to
depart from the traditionally-Prussian anti-Polish orientation.
Pilsudski regarded the new chancellor as less dangerous than his
immediate predecessors, such as Gustav Stresemann, and he saw the Soviet
Union as the greater threat and even opposed French and Czechoslovak
efforts to include the Soviet Union in a common front against Germany.

The Poles insisted on stating that it did not nullify any previous
international agreements, in particular the Franco-Polish Military
Alliance. Nevertheless, by easing Poland's disputes with Germany
bilaterally, the treaty weakened France's diplomatic position against
Germany.

To allay any fears of a war against the Soviet Union, on May 5, 1934,
Poland renewed the Soviet–Polish Non-Aggression Pact, which had been
first signed on July 25, 1932. It was extended until December 31, 1945,
ignoring Hitler’s repeated suggestion to form a German-Polish alliance
against the Soviets. [8]

Poland was able to maintain friendly relations with Germany for the next
five years but also with France and Britain. However, it may have also
led to foreign policy inattentiveness regarding the activities of the
crumbling League of Nations and ignoring the collective security schemes
proposed by French and Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s. [...]

German policy changed drastically in late 1938, after the annexation of
Sudetenland sealed the fate of Czechoslovakia, and Poland became
Hitler's next target. In October 1938, German Foreign Minister Joachim
Ribbentrop presented Poland with the proposition of renewing the Pact in
exchange for allowing the Free City of Danzig to be annexed by Germany
and the construction of an extraterritorial motorway and railway through
the Polish Corridor, with Germany accepting Poland's postwar
borders.[11] Since Poland refused, Hitler rescinded the Pact
unilaterally on April 28, 1939,[12] during an address before the
Reichstag, as Germany renewed its territorial claims in Poland. After
another few months of rising tension, and following the execution of the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, which
contained a secret protocol by which Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide
Poland between them, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939,
initiating World War II.

This page was last edited on 1 January 2020, at 11:41 (UTC).

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