"Dear President Putin, Hitler and Stalin colluded to start WWII. That is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict," US ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher tweeted on Monday - in both English and Polish, suggesting that her message of "collusion" was intended more for domestic consumption than for the Russian head of state.
"Dear Ambassador, do you really think that you know about history any more than you do about diplomacy?" the Russian embassy in Warsaw responded, in English. This likely referred to the fact that Mossbacher used to be the CEO of a cosmetics company before President Barack Obama appointed her to a diplomatic commission in 2015. She was sent to Warsaw in September 2018 by President Donald Trump.
Comment: Zing!
Within an hour, none other than the German envoy in Warsaw saw fit to chime in, repeating Berlin's official position, which - not surprisingly - echoed that of Poland and the US.
"The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact served to prepare the criminal invasion of Nazi Germany against Poland. The USSR together with Germany participated in this brutal division of Poland," Ambassador Rolf Nikel wrote, in Polish.
Comment: The GALL of a GERMAN ambassador to chime in on the Big Lie. But then, Western countries are all servants to the Big Lie...
The 1939 non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is often referred to by the names of their respective foreign ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov. It was inked on August 23, just a week before the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Modern Warsaw has argued - and got the US and the EU to agree - that this somehow caused the Second World War, and that the Soviets are just as guilty as the Nazis of invading Poland, since their troops entered from the east on September 16. Germany then invaded the Soviet Union less than two years later.
While modern Russia has rejected and condemned much of the legacy of the Soviet Union, its overwhelming role in defeating Nazi Germany in WWII is a line in the sand for Moscow - and revising history to assert moral equivalence between the German Reich and the USSR is simply unacceptable. That is what the Russian ambassador to Warsaw told his hosts when he was summoned on Friday, in the previous installment of the ongoing quarrel.
Poland had taken offense to last week's remarks by Putin about Jozef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin (1934-39), whom the Russian president called "a bastard and anti-Semitic pig." This was based on Lipski's own words from 1938, when the envoy told Hitler that the Poles would "erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw" if he carried out the plan to expel European Jews to Africa.
The same year, Poland joined Germany in partitioning Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference, when Britain and France agreed to carve up that Eastern European country to appease Hitler, despite - or because of? - the Soviet offer of security guarantees to Prague.
Lipski's remarks are a matter of public record and no one is contesting their veracity - which is why neither Warsaw nor its NATO allies are talking about them, choosing to repeat Polish talking points in service of a very modern argument about an "aggressive" Russia.
Soviet troops liberated Poland from the Nazis in 1944, and installed a pro-communist government in Warsaw after the war. After the collapse of communism, however, Warsaw went from being a vassal of Moscow to being one of Washington - and engaging in questionable historical revisionism to make the past better fit the present.
That is how Germany's Angela Merkel found herself as an honored guest at the September 1 commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the war's outbreak, while Putin was not even invited. A far bigger insult is the decision not to invite the Russian president to the upcoming January 27 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army's 1st Ukrainian Front.
Poles were no saints in the years prior to 1939, there was strong antisemitism there, authoritarian right wing regime and lots of internal problems. Taking over small border parts of Czechoslovakia after Munich in 1938 was a political error but there was a sound justification for this action. These areas were previously grabbed militarily by Czechs during Polish-Soviet war of 1920 where Poland was too weak to fight on 2 fronts. In the end the whole dispute was stupid for both countries as they were natural allies for German and Soviet aggression and with Poland's manpower and Czechoslovakian developed industry they could do a lot more together.
Ambassador Lipski's remarks about monument to Hitler maybe are historically accurate but in the end they're just babbling of stupid politician (Polish right wing regime in late 30s was composed of monumental idiots). The actual facts are as follows:
- Poland was given offer of joint war with German against Soviet Union. They REFUSED.
- Ribbentrop-Molotov pact had secret parts which were plain and simply plans for joint aggressive war against Poland TOGETHER by Germany and USSR and partitioning its territory after win.
- On September 1st, 1939 Germany launched full scale invasion despite non-aggression pact and without being provoked.
- On September 17th USSR launched full scale invasion from the east.
- Nazi Germany and USSR became close partners until June 22nd 1941 when Germany attacked Soviets. Until literally last day there were food and supplies transport going from USSR to Germany to fuel their war efforts on other fronts.
One more note about "liberation" by Soviets from Germans. It was changing one occupation into another. Objectively a little bit easier for the people, no questions about that. Germans' plans were to biologically annihilate the Poles (and most of other Slavs), Soviets simply wanted to be masters and rulers so instead of exterminating the whole nation they only did it to the pre-war elites (lawyers, army officers, politicians, administration officials etc.)
As a closing note one more personal remark about resurgent cult of Stalin in modern Russia. It disgusts me how a nation can worship a criminal who killed millions of its own people. Who starved to death millions of Ukrainians, worked to death millions people in camps, during the war sent to death millions of common soldiers by incompetent leadership and finally who killed immediately (or sent to GULAGs for slow death) countless thousands of its own POWs who somehow managed to survive the hell of German war imprisonment.