Poland in New Zealand

“I was astonished and concerned to read recent statements by representatives of the Russian Federation, including those in Wellington, about the causes and course of the Second World War. Reminiscent of propaganda from Josef Stalin’s totalitarian era, these falsifications of history to discredit Poland do a grave disservice to the victims of two totalitarianisms.

The death tolls inflicted by Nazism and Stalinism are well-known—as is responsibility for the most murderous conflict in the history of humankind. Poland was not involved in carving up Europe with Germany. Nazi Germany’s ally in 1939 was the Soviet Union.

(…) Germany and the USSR both violated treaties in September 1939 when they invaded Poland. This was directly in accord with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August and its secret protocol under which Eastern Europe was divided into German and Soviet spheres of interest. The protocol violated the independence of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania.

On 22 September 1939, a great military parade was held in Brest-Litovsk, celebrating Nazi Germany’s and Soviet Russia’s joint defeat of Poland. Such parades are not organised by parties to non-aggression pacts, but by allies and friends. On 28 September 1939, the Soviet Union signed another treaty with the Third Reich, the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, sanctioning the division of Polish territory between the two invaders.

For a time, Hitler and Stalin were not only allies but friends. Without Stalin’s complicity in the partition of Poland, and without the natural resources that Stalin supplied to Hitler, the Nazi war machine would not have taken control of Europe so easily. The last trains with supplies left the USSR for Germany on 21 June 1941 – just one day before Nazi Germany attacked its ally. Thanks to Stalin, Hitler was better able to conquer new countries with impunity, confine Jews from all over the continent in ghettos and unleash the horrors of the Holocaust.

Amongst the most reprehensible of Soviet atrocities during that period was the murder in 1940 of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war in Katyń and other sites, in violation of war-time conventions.

To suggest that the Soviet Union invaded Poland, occupied half its territory and shipped a million civilians, including children, to forced labour camps in order to prepare for Hitler’s invasion is a blatant falsification of history.”, writes Ambassador Zbigniew Gniatkowski.

 

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