Envoys reject Vladimir Putin’s World War II slant on Poland

The US, Germany and Israel have weighed in against claims by Vladimir Putin that Poland started World War II.

Mateusz Morawiecki said Vladimir Putin was telling ‘deliberate lies’. Pictures: AFP

The US, German and Israeli ­ambassadors in Warsaw have weighed 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 said on Twitter in English and Polish.

The Russian embassy countered with a tweet: “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 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. About six million Poles lost their lives during WWII.

Mr Putin has recently 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.

German ambassador Rolf Nikel and his Israeli counterpart, Alexander Ben Zvi, took a stand on Monday to blame the war’s outbreak on the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Polish historian Mariusz Wolos told the Onet website that Mr Putin was aiming at “creating discord between Poland and the US and the international Jewish diaspora”. He said Mr Putin was trying to erase Stalin’s alliance with Hitler from history.

British historian Roger Moorehouse tweeted to say Mr Putin’s words “provoked a much better popular understanding of the pact’s true nefarious ­nature and significance”.

On Sunday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki protested against Mr Putin’s comments, saying they were deliberate “lies” and Mr Putin was trying to deflect attention from recent political failures by Russia.

Poland did not invite Mr Putin to ceremonies in Warsaw on September 1 marking the 80th anniversary of the war’s outbreak. He is also unlikely to attend January 27 observances of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied Poland.

Relations between Russia and Poland have been tense since ­Poland threw off Moscow-­controlled communist rule 30 years ago and began moving closer to the West. Poland has since joined NATO and the EU.

Poland has also been making efforts to reduce its dependence on Russian gas and oil and has opposed Nord Stream 2, a ­Russian-German gas pipeline under construction to transport Russian gas to western Europe, bypassing Poland and Ukraine.

AP