Free Republic

An Associated Press correction last week and reactions to it show that the question of whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at the dawn of World War II remains a hot-button issue for many Russians and eastern Europeans. The correction was issued to an article about a Holocaust commemoration in the Ukrainian city of Lviv that originally called the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “former allies.” The AP concluded that the pact reached on Aug. 23, 1939 by the German and Soviet foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov didn’t constitute a formal alliance, thus the...

Observances commemorating the 79th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II were held in Poland at dawn on Saturday. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki attended observances held on Westerplatte in on the Baltic coast, where on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein began shelling a Polish military depot in the first battle between Polish and German soldiers of WWII. Sirens wailed and the Polish national anthem was played at a monument honouring those who defended the Polish coast. Observances were also held in central city of Wieluń, the first Polish town to be bombed by...

By the late spring of 1945, Germany had lost a war, its honor and millions of dead. There was more to come. The Allies had decided that the country's east should be carved up between Poland and the Soviet Union and that its German inhabitants should be moved to the truncated Reich. There they would encounter Sudeten Germans, Czechoslovakia's second largest ethnic group, now also scheduled for deportation. In August 1945, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed at Potsdam that these transfers, which had in any case already begun, should be "orderly and humane."