Poland started Second World War says Russian Ambassador

The Russian ambassador to Poland, Sergei Andreev, has stated that Poland is partly responsible for the Third Reich's invasion in 1939 and that the Soviet Union had to invade Poland 16 days later as an act of self-defense. In an interview broadcast on the private TVN station, Andreev reportedly said: “Polish policy led to the disaster in September 1939, because during the 1930s Poland repeatedly blocked the formation of a coalition against Hitler’s Germany. Poland was therefore partly responsible for the disaster which then took place.”
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/29646381/poland-co-responsible-for-wwii-says-russian-ambassador/
The Russian ambassador made no mention of the secret pact between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union to divide Poland between the pair. The Russians are not the only people who are hopelessly indoctrinated to believe their own propaganda, it must be said.


Soviet and German foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop who signed the non-aggression pact in 1939

 

Partial Apology
Russian Ambassador to Poland Sergey Andreev has partly apologized for saying recently that Poland bears some responsibility for the outbreak of World War II. Andreev now says it was a "poor interpretation." The Ambassaor went on to observe, "If we talk about the policies of the Polish government in the 1930s, however, Poland, unfortunately, became a victim of its own policies."
https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/09/28/russian-ambassador-to-poland-partly-apologizes-for-blaming-poland-for-starting-wwii
For a professional diplomat, this guy really doesn't know when to quit.


Ambassador Sergey Andreev

 

Taking into account current stage of relations between our countries he said the most offensive issue - truth... Poland policy is one of the reasons why this country has left alone between two agressive countries in 39. Buy the way he has never said "Poland started the war"... only "its policy lead to disaster in 39". It is like to say Russia is also responsible for disaster in 41, it was not ready for Hitler actions and make bad choise with agreement with Hitler.

 

It can be debated how much Poland might have acted differently but, it must be admitted, that no matter how appeasing the Poles might have been to Hitler, nothing was going to stop his landgrab, planned in advance with the Soviet Union, to remove Poland from the map. The job of a professional diplomat is to smooth relations between countries, not make them worse.

 

Sorry but I think everything is possible... Of course we will never find out the truth but how knows... if Poland instead of playing big boss games with territories of Czhechoslovakia with Hitler supported thin coalition between USSR and West what have been happend than... Hitler was an evil monster but not an idiot to start war on both fronts at one time...

 

You forget Hitler did start a war on two fronts in 1941 by foolishly invading the Soviet Union. Nothing was going to stop The Germans from adding Danzig and western Poland to the Reich in 1939.

 

and job of diplomat is to lobby national interests of his country...it is not necessarry in smoothing relations may be one day such job will make Russian diplomat to say indirectly "Do not play big boss games"

 

Hitler started war after defeating of France and of almost all other continental Europe contries except Africa Germany has no other significant ground war theartes in June 41... again Hitler was mad bad not an idiot, he has choosen the ideal monent for attack on USSR

 

That was his biggest blunder.

 

may be... but he was as near to the total destruction of Russia as nobody before him since Tataro-mongol yoke... and all his thoughts about our weaknesses were right, except our mentality and roads

 

Hitler underestimated the number of fresh reserve troops from Siberia and the Russian capacity to manufacture tanks and weaponry. Russia was not as weak as he thought. Hitler also guessed it was only a matter if time before the Soviet Union attacked Germany.

 

it is a theme for a long long discussion)) the main thing - we have won and protect our land for our childrens

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without "s" at the end)

 

The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact

Seventy-five years ago, Red Army troops smashed into Poland. Masters of deception and propaganda, they encouraged locals to believe that they were coming to join the battle against Hitler, who had invaded two weeks’ earlier. But, within a day, the true nature of the Nazi-Soviet collaboration was exposed.

The two armies met at the town of Brest, where the 1918 peace treaty between the Kaiser’s government and Lenin’s revolutionary state had been signed. Soldiers fraternised, exchanging food and tobacco – pre-rolled German cigarettes contrasting favourably against rough Russian papirosi. A joint military parade was staged, the Wehrmacht’s field grey uniforms alongside the olive green of the shoddier Soviets. The two generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, had a slap-up lunch and, as they bade each other farewell, the Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow “after the victory over capitalist Albion”.

These events are keenly remembered in the nations that were victims of the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty: Romania, Finland and, most of all, Poland and the Baltic States. But they don’t occupy anything like the place in our collective memory of the war that they deserve.
Almost everyone in Britain knows that the Second World War started when Hitler sent his panzers into Poland. Stalin’s mirror invasion 16 days later, while not exactly forgotten, is not nearly so central in our narrative.

Which is, if you think about it, very odd. The Nazi-Soviet Pact lasted for 22 months – a third of the duration of the entire conflict. We remember, with pride, that we stood alone against Hitler. But in reality, our fathers’ isolation – and commensurate heroism – was even greater than this suggests. I can think of no braver moment in the war than when, having already declared war on Hitler, we prepared to open a new front against Stalin, too. British commandos were on the verge of being deployed to defend Finland, while the Cabinet toyed with various schemes to seize the USSR’s oil supplies in the Caucasus.

In the event, such plans were overtaken by developments. Still, for sheer, bloody-minded gallantry, it was an unbeatable moment, beautifully captured in the reaction of Evelyn Waugh’s fictional hero, Guy Crouchback: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

Why do we downplay that memory? Largely because it doesn’t fit with what happened later. When Hitler attacked the USSR – to the utter astonishment of Stalin, who initially ordered his soldiers not to shoot back – it was in everyone’s interest to forget the earlier phase of the war. Western Communists, who had performed extraordinary acrobatics to justify their entente with fascism, now carried out another somersault and claimed that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had only ever been a tactical pause, a moment when Stalin brilliantly stalled while building up his military capacity. Even today, the historiographical imprint of that propaganda lingers.

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

The full extent of their conspiracy is exposed in The Devils’ Alliance, a brilliant new history by Roger Moorhouse. Moorhouse is a sober and serious historian, writing with no obvious political agenda. Calmly, he tells the story of the Pact: its genesis, its operation and the reasons for its violent end. When recounting such a monstrous tale, it is proper to be calm: great events need no embroidery. What he reveals is a diabolical compact which, if it stopped just short of being an alliance, can in no way be thought of as a hiccup or anomaly.
The two totalitarian systems traded in all the necessary commodities of war: not just oil and vital chemicals, but arms and ships. They exhibited each other’s cultural achievements, performed each other’s music and films, stressed their joint hostility to Western capitalism.
The idea that there was an unbridgeable gap between Soviet Communism and National Socialism, which is nowadays so widespread, would have seemed curious at the time. To be sure, there were some in Moscow, and a few more in Berlin, who believed that there must eventually come a reckoning with their “real” enemy. But theirs were minority voices. Many more gladly went along with the idea that the two socialist systems were joined in battle against “decadent Anglo-Saxon liberalism”.

The coincidence in doctrine between the Nazis and the Soviets was obvious to the “decadent” Anglo-Saxons, too. The day after the Soviet invasion of Poland, a Times editorial observed that “Only those can be disappointed who clung to the ingenuous belief that Russia was to be distinguished from her Nazi neighbour, despite the identity of their institutions and political idiom, by her foreign policy”.
Nor was it only the “decadent liberals” in the Anglo-Saxon world who took this view. The first Briton to be tried for espionage was a Newcastle communist named George Armstrong, who had supplied German agents in Boston with information on the Atlantic convoys. He had been motivated by Molotov’s appeal to Leftists serving in Allied navies to desert as soon as they reached a neutral port.
Why, then, have we, if not exactly denied the episode, crammed it into a corner of our minds? In his Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh, largely through gentle subtext, told the story of how Soviet sympathisers in the West used the alliance with the USSR to rehabilitate its doctrines. Hayek, writing in 1944, devoted the greater part of his Road to Serfdom to refuting the idea that Nazism and Communism were opposed ideologies, well aware of how fervently this idea was being promoted.

He was right; but he made little impact. If you want to see how successful the propagandists of the time were, look at the reaction you get today when – as I did recently – you recite a few unadorned facts that point to the socialist nature of fascism.

Why did the Molotov-Ribbentrop carve-up come to an end? Not, as you might think, because of any doctrinal incompatibility between the two participants but, as Moorhouse demonstrates beyond doubt, for strategic reasons. Hitler had hoped that Stalin could be encouraged to turn his energies southward, falling on India “to co-operate with us in the great liquidation of the British Empire”. But Russia, then as now, was focused on her western rather than her southern neighbours. It was Stalin’s hunger for Bulgaria that Hitler found intolerable and that led to Operation Barbarossa.

Does any of this still matter? Yes, it matters immensely. First, and most obviously, it matters to the countries that were the victims of the carve-up. It was protests on the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that led to the ultimate independence of the Baltic States. It is important, too, to understand the shameful consequences of the pretence that Stalin was somehow not in the same league as Hitler. As late as the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, governments around the world, including in the West, were using a mealy-mouthed formula to regret the deaths of the Polish officers murdered at Katyn without directly blaming the Soviets.

Even today, we are so fixated on Hitler that we miss what was happening elsewhere at the time. How many journalists have lazily compared Putin’s annexations in Georgia and Ukraine to those of the Nazi leader? Putin is attacking neighbouring states, this is bad, so he must be like Hitler, right?

Except that there is a far, far better parallel. When Hitler seized his half of Poland, he didn’t pretend to be other than a conqueror. Part of his zone was incorporated into the Reich, the rest placed under military occupation. But Stalin? Here the story becomes eerily apt to our present age. Stalin claimed to be acting to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian minorities in Eastern Poland. Having seized his portion of land, he organised rigged elections, which produced new parliaments, which promptly petitioned to be allowed to join the USSR. Sound familiar?

It’s this lop-sidedness in our folk memory that we need to address. While Nazism is well understood as the monstrosity it was, there is often a lingering sense that Communism was well-intentioned, even though it went wrong. The merest connection with fascism bars a politician from office; yet those who actively supported the USSR are allowed to become ministers and European Commissioners.

Wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt is not regarded in the same light as wearing an Adolf Hitler tee-shirt; but it should be.

Don’t get me wrong. Every atrocity is unique in its own terrible way. The Nazi Holocaust haunts us for good reasons. Years after I saw it, I still find this image rising, unbidden, in my mind. Happily, though, no one, beyond a deranged fringe, denies the nature of Nazism. The same is not true of the Soviet tyranny.

Even now, Russia refuses to accept that its annexation of the Baltics was an “invasion”. Forty-seven per cent of Russians have “a positive view of Stalin” (just imagine how we would react if 47 per cent of Germans had “a positive view of Hitler”). To deny the magnitude of the Nazi genocide is, in several countries, a criminal offence; but to signal, with your idiotic Che tee-shirt, that you are all for breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, is radical chic. Germany has come to terms with its past and become a valued ally. But Russia?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...e-left-was-to-disregard-the-nazi-soviet-pact/

 

You know the words may hurt, especially in such amounts and especially such obvious propaganda Just a few thoughts for you - reader before I go to bad:
1. For 22 months you were not stand against Hitler. You have just tried to stay alive on your island when he ate all UK continental allies in a few weeks.
2. Stalin tried to create coalition with West or Hitler. Whom we need to blame that Czechoslovakia (USSR ally) was eaten by Hitler? Silence was the answer of the West to Stalin re this issue. After this USSR became ally of Hitler in respect to division of East Europe. Again whom we need to blame for such situation?

 

3. It is a pity that journalist who wrote this .... has no opportunity to speake with 30 mln civilians died in this war with definition "not a human due to nationality". I think it will help to understand the difference between regimes of Stalin and Hitler.
4. top of the hill in a TRUE story Hitler attacted USSR due to Stalin 's hunger to Bulgaria instead of India reread if you think that it is your imaginarium

 

Stalin.

 

This long (too long) post comes from the Barclay Twin's Telegraph, a mouthpiece for right-wing conservatism. The Telegraph pushes a line in every single news report, editorial, and feature article, that amounts to a great fiction. It should rightly be regarded as the Tory Beobachter, reeking with the reactionary English Establishment, promoting the views of the tax-exile twins, "Sir" David and "Sir" Frederick Barclay. I mention this because I believe it is important to consider the source of information, and in this case, a reason to dismiss the propaganda which passes for historical analysis.

Setting aside the risible fiction, still held in England today, that the English heroically stood alone against Germany in 1940 for the propaganda it is and for the reason mentioned by fleur in Post # 52, namely that England lost its allies in a puff of smoke and was effectively out of the war, we can dismiss the rewriting of history in the false notion that there was a " coincidence in doctrine between the Nazis and the Soviets" in their contempt of and plan to bring to ruin "the 'decadent' Anglo-Saxons." This is pure invention for consumption of the Barclay Twin's Telegraph readers. It is the type of fantasy that English conservatives want to believe even though there is no historical, documentary, or rational reason to hold such an opinion. This attempt to portray the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as an agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany with which both countries had identical motivations, and primarily because they hated the English (spare us!), defies reason.

The article is completely spurious in promoting a notion that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a meeting of the minds and intentions of the Soviets and the Germans. It was not.

 

True or False:

The treaty included a secret protocol that divided territories of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries.

 

This is true.

 

) for what? for pragmatic deal with Hitler after refusal of West to form coalition? UK and France political decisions legitimate such things. Stalin was not a good guy but in this he has done the same that Poland has done with Czechoslovakia - strengthen his positions his mistake was not a pakt his mistake was inability to update the army to the need level before the war... Look in the mirror "good guys")) you were the biggest colonial empire in this period why USSR can not do the same?

 

The English got along fine with the Bolsheviks once Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. They had pretended that they declared war on Germany because of the German invasion of Poland but became allies with the Soviets who invaded Poland also.

 

Well they have done a right thing - form coalition with Russia to survive. Russia has the same reason to contact with London. As many others nations which prefere to unite rather than die.

There were no good and bad countries among allies... Ignorance and inability to recognize the real danger for everyone - that is why all coalition countries paid a bloody price. Every country has its own sins...

And it is not bad to speak about such sins. However, people who are trying to rewrite the History by identification of good guys and bad guys have no brains

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and no honor

 

Attacking Russia when he did was insanity. His failure to defeat Britain first meant Germany was doomed as it required cutting forces in half.

Setting aside his mistake of not pursuing Germany's atomic bomb program or developing long range bombers, not invading Britain even if 250,000 soldiers lost in the crossing meant Germany could never actually win the war and left German forces divided on three fronts - the Atlantic coast, African/Southern Europe and Russia.

In terms of invading Russia itself, the decisive mistake was not telling people and armies of the Ukraine "you are free, we are here to liberate you." This would have reignited the Russian internal civil war and put Russia armies against each other. However, Hitler's racist/genetic views has become crippling of logic and rationality.

 

1 paragraph. Hm let me think... if I do not try is this the same as "failure to do smth"? I do not deny input of UK in WOW, but half of forces sounds strange. Here is my guess. I think smth about 80% German forces (except naval and air forces) were in the Eastern front in 1941. Add German allies which also participated in Eastern front. And I do not compare quality of occupation forces (in France for example) and forces at the front. Thus you will receive one of the biggest and strongest invasion army in the world...

2 paragraph. Agree re nuclear bomb. If Hitler quickly won in the Eastern front (his plan) invasion in UK would be a matter of weeks...

3 paragraph. There were no Ukranians armies. Im USSR there were no divisions based on national principles. As for separation of nations - I ve already said in one of my posts Hitler was mad but not an idiot. He used this instrument through propaganda and partly ukrainians, tatars and others were fight against Russia. His mistake was cruel of his doctrine "no life for other nations", including mass killings of civilians. This was the reason for fierce resistance against Germany.

 

Those Damn Poles - Always Starting Wars

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/215467/