Russia-Poland feud over World War II history clouds Auschwitz anniversary

NBC News ^ | Jan 2020 | Associated Press

[CondoleezzaProtege]

WARSAW, Poland — Over the next several days, world leaders will gather twice to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of Nazi Germany’s death camps.

That there will be two competing ceremonies — one in Jerusalem on Thursday and the other at the Auschwitz site in southern Poland on Monday — underlines how politically charged World War II remains...

Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. But the country had also signed a nonaggression accord with the Nazis shortly before the war began in 1939, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It contained a secret protocol in which the totalitarian powers agreed to carve up Eastern Europe.

Two years later, Germany turned on Kremlin leader Josef Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, bringing the Soviets into the war on the side of the Allies. Millions of Red Army soldiers lost their lives in the eventual defeat of Adolf Hitler's Germany.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to shift wartime blame to Poland over anger that historical memory in the West has begun to focus more on the Soviet role in triggering the war and less on its role in defeating Germany.

...Western historians see those allegations as a cynical ploy to minimize Soviet responsibility as Moscow today seeks to glorify what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War and more generally a Stalinist era that included mass killings of opponents at home and suffering imposed on Eastern Europe during decades of communist rule.

In recent days, Poland's government has been defending the nation's record, recalling how its wartime government-in-exile sought to save Jews by warning the world, and listing cultural and economic damage that Poland suffered after Soviet troops took control of its territory at the end of World War II.

[Grzegorz 246]

10k ? They sent to Siberia nearly a million people murdering a significant part in the process. All together, while being an ally of the 3rd Reich, they invaded half a dozen of countries, including Finland, and murdered millions. They were holding joint parades and supplied the 3rd Reich with huge amounts of natural resources long after Auschwitz had been launched.

Why Israel invited that KGB trash letting him spread the whole “we liberated...” propaganda and why some soviet shit is allowed to be posted even here, is really beyond me.

[Grzegorz 246]

Go get a better job.

[NorseViking]

Soviet distrust towards some parts of the Polish society was understood.
The problem is in a fact that Polish elites developed a doctrine according to which the existence of any Russian state was viewed as a threat to Poland regardless the form of government Russia has.
Especially pitiful is a fact that this doctrine appeared immediately after Russia granted independence to Poland and a year later Poland waged aggressive war to implement it.
Why do you think Russia should tolerate it?
The moment the opportunity appeared to fix the problem they did it. Some people have been killed or imprisoned which is not to be supported but these were the standards of the era.
All in all Poland wasn’t destroyed but remained as a nation and allowed to maintain ethnic identity. The Soviets rebuilt it after war and added territory to it.
Would Poland alow it to Russia if it was capable to dominate?
It is extraordinary stupid for a small weak country to exercise geopolitical ambitions of the proportions they tried to exercise in interwar period.
A country doing it is begging for extinction.
Russia won’t cease to exist simply because someone in Poland wants it.