Published: 3 January 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THE ISRAELI AND GERMAN ambassadors in Warsaw joined the US envoy Monday in weighing in against claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Poland bears part of the blame for the outbreak of World War II.
“Dear President Putin, Hitler and Stalin colluded to start WWII. That is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict,” US Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher had said earlier on Twitter in English and Polish.
The Russian Embassy countered with a tweet saying: ”Dear Ambassador, do you really think that you know about history any more than you do about diplomacy?”
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi German troops invaded Poland. Two weeks later, the Soviet Red Army also attacked embattled Poland from the east, in what Poles still refer to as a “stab in the back.” Days earlier, Germany and Russia had signed a pact with a secret protocol to carve up Poland and the Baltic states between themselves. Some six million Poles lost their lives during the whole of WWII.
Recently, Putin has argued that collusion between Western powers and Adolf Hitler paved the way for World War II. He also cast Poland as an anti-Semitic country that welcomed Hitler’s plans to destroy Europe’s Jews.
FULL STORY Israeli, German envoys take a stand against Putin’s claim Poland started WWII (Times of Israel)
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Auschwitz, the director's cut: how Poland is rewriting the Holocaust narrative (Haaretz)
Polish rock band Trupa Trupa are confronting the Holocaust with their songs (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Sochi, Russia, September 12, 2019. (Shamil Zhumatov/Pool Photo via AP)
