Putin, Polish PM Morawiecki in spat over who’s to blame for World War II

‘They are almost blaming the Soviet Union, along with Nazi Germany, for causing the Second World War, as if they have forgotten who attacked Poland… and the Soviet Union,’ Putin lamented.

By LAHAV HARKOV
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladmir Putin: About three years after his country hacked the US presidential 2016 elections, there are still cyber vulnerabilities at the highest levels for countries like Israel, the US and within the EU. (photo credit: TNS)
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladmir Putin: About three years after his country hacked the US presidential 2016 elections, there are still cyber vulnerabilities at the highest levels for countries like Israel, the US and within the EU.
(photo credit: TNS)
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki have been quarreling over who is to blame for World War II.
The most recent chapter in the saga is Morawiecki accusing Putin on Sunday of trying to distract from international pressure on Moscow.
“President Putin has lied about Poland on numerous occasions, and he has always done it deliberately,” Morawiecki‘s letter read. “This usually happens when Russian authorities feel international pressure related to their activities... [on the] contemporary geopolitical scene.”
Morawiecki pointed to the EU imposing sanctions on Russia again because of its annexation of Crimea, further restrictions on Moscow by the US, and Russian athletes being banned from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for doping.
The spat began with a recent European Parliament resolution that blamed the August 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact for the outbreak of WWII eight days later. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin secretly agreed to divide Poland and the Baltic states between Germany and the Soviet Union, leading to the Wehrmacht invading Poland from the west, south and north on September 1, 1939, and the Red Army occupying Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia from the east on September 17, 1939. Stalin subsequently deported 1.7 million Poles and 200,000 Balts to the Soviet Union, many to the gulag.
Putin argued that Western appeasement of Hitler brought about the war, saying last Tuesday that the European Parliament resolution was “sheer nonsense,” and that the Soviet Union was forced into the non-aggression agreement to stave off a German attack because Britain allowed Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia.
“They are almost blaming the Soviet Union, along with Nazi Germany, for causing the Second World War, as if they have forgotten who attacked Poland… and the Soviet Union,” Putin lamented.
He also said documents show that Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin at the time, who he called “scum” and an “antisemitic pig,” had promised a statue would be built of Hitler in Warsaw if he got rid of Poland’s Jews.
According to Putin, the ambassador “expressed full solidarity with Hitler in his antisemitic views.”
Putin also said he would “unveil and publicize archival materials” from World War II, which Russia calls the Great Patriotic War.
“We will continue to talk about the events, the facts of the Great Patriotic War, to unveil and publicize archive materials in their entirety,” Putin said.
After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the latter fought the war on the Allies’ side. About 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died to free Europe from the Nazis’ grip, although exact figures are disputed.
Invaded by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Poland considers both countries to be aggressors responsible for the suffering and death of millions of Poles.
The Polish Foreign Ministry summoned Russian Ambassador to Poland Sergey Andreev on Friday and told him Poland opposes Putin’s “Stalinist historical narrative,” which he called “a mockery of the millions of victims of Stalinist totalitarianism.”
Morawiecki said in his letter that Putin “is well aware that his accusations have nothing to do with reality, and that in Poland there are no monuments of Hitler or Stalin.”
“Our country was the first to experience the armed aggression of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia,” Morawiecki wrote. “Resistance to these evil powers is not only the memory of Polish heroism – it is something much more important. This resistance is the legacy of the entire now free and democratic Europe that fought against these two totalitarian regimes... Poland must stand up for the truth.”
Morawiecki said Hitler and Stalin “were not only allies but in fact friends” who repeatedly cooperated.
“Without Stalin’s complicity in the partition of Poland... the Nazi German crime machine would not have taken control of Europe,” he wrote. “Thanks to Stalin, Hitler could conquer new countries with impunity, lock Jews from all over the continent in ghettos and prepare [the] Holocaust – one of the worst crimes in the history of humankind.”
Morawiecki listed Stalin’s many crimes against humanity.
“I believe that Russians are a nation of free people and that they reject Stalinism, even when President Putin’s government is trying to rehabilitate it,” he wrote.
The dispute between Putin and Morawiecki also comes as Poland has argued that its people played no significant role in the Holocaust. Warsaw takes particular offense at the phrase “Polish death camps” being used to describe concentration camps located in what is now an independent Poland but was then occupied by the Nazis.
Earlier this year, Morawiecki canceled a planned trip to Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “Poles cooperated with the Nazis.”
In 2018, Poland enacted a law making it illegal to accuse Poland or the Polish People of being responsible for WWII or the Holocaust. The legislation originally carried a jail sentence, which was then canceled. Many Israeli officials condemned the law, including President Reuven Rivlin, who said Poland and the Poles had a hand in the extermination” of the Jews in the Holocaust.