Posted on 09/26/2015 5:52:11 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The Russian ambassador to Poland has prompted outrage here for putting some of the blame for World War II on Poland, creating a new spat amid deepening tensions between the nations.
Ambassador Sergey Andreev of Russia on Friday described the Soviet Union’s 1939 invasion of Poland as an act of self-defense, not aggression. Poland’s Foreign Ministry responded on Saturday, saying the ambassador “undermines historical truth” and seemed to be trying to justify the crimes of Stalin, then the Soviet leader.
World War II began after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sealed a pact in 1939 that included a secret provision to carve up Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Germany soon invaded Poland from the West, followed by a Soviet invasion from the east 16 days later. Millions of Poles were killed in the war.
(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.nytimes.com ...
Just curious as to what country you were educated in?
Wow!!! finally the truth comes out!!!!
/s
Tag for lulz. Good grief.
Poland was a threat to the Soviet Union — it had defeated the Soviets in 1920 and turned back the communist tide. If the Poles had allied with the Germans, the USSR wuld have been decimated or worse
???????????????????????
was it over when the germans bombed pearl harbor???
Seems like I struck a nerve, and deservedly so. Yes, I was 100% wrong. And I knew better. Came in from the field too tired last night and got Hitler’s invasion of Russia confused with his invasion of Poland.
Like everything, one should not oversimplify
That bit of Czechia was Cieszyn
For centuries, this was a mix of Czechs and Poles (both are West Slavs and their languages are somewhat mutually intelligible - kind of like the French and the Franco-Swiss
Anyway, at the end of WWI, the German, Austrian and Russian empires collapsed and everywhere was a free-for-all
Cieszyn was a mix of Poles and Czechs -- it is also one of the only 3 areas where an army can easily march across the Carpathian range, so very important strategically (it's also the largest such pass and the easiest) and yet the local administrators of Cieszyn came to a good agreement of how to split this -- they did so amicably. But this was not satisfactory to the politicians in Prague or Warsaw -- Cieszyn was and is rich in mining items. And the Western nations arbitrarily divided the land, giving the majority of the land to the Czechs even the places which were 90% Polish
The Poles and Czechs had skirmishes over this but to no avail until 1938.
The Poles wanted to deny the Germans the Cieszyn pass and they took itwhen the Germans took most of the Czech Republics mountain area
Was it right to do this? Morally ambiguous (it was polish majority yet this was participating in the slicing up of another country) but strategically good (though it didn't help them in the end
The Poles were militarily weaker than the Germans yes, but their strategies were to fall back to the mountain areas in the south and east (most of Poland is flat and after WWI, there was NO natural land barrier between Poland and Germany (no river, no mountain) — neither on the west nor on the north-east
That’s an outright lie. Germany did not attack Poland until after they invaded France and other countries. Only when the Luftwaffe could not beat the RAF did Hitler turn to Poland. The war was well under way long before Russia got into it.
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I’m assuming you have confused the actions of September 1939 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
You may want to give it a google.
Thanks for the clarification.
The same part that the Czechs stole from Poland in 1920, while Poland was busy saving Europe from Bolshevism.
Germans were in Slovakia, so they attacked the mountain areas from there.
Once the Nazis took the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, for all intents and purposes ceased to exist as a viable state. The Nazis only made if official a few months later.
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