Why Poland's Geography is the worst? - the video just posted

[Jaga]

This video was just posted three weeks ago and it had so many visitors already - about why Poland is so difficult to defend.

[pieter]

I love this video, one of the best video's about Poland I ever saw. Very clear, very accurate, very historical and very interesting. Thank you for posting. More of these kind of video's please.

[kaima]

Interesting video, Jaga. Well presented.

Kai

[kaima]

I am not sure where the thread on Russia v. Poland on history of WW2 is, but this also seems to fit here ...

Revisiting the Russian perception of Poland’s role in WWII
By Polska Fundacja NarodowaJanuary 24


Allen Paul, an American historian, is the author of the book “Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth.” Roger Moorhouse, also an eminent historian, wrote “The Devil’s Alliance: Hitler’s Pact With Stalin.” Below, they share thoughts and perspectives on Polish history.



We cannot accept historical lies like those in the KGB and NKWD textbooks


By Allen Paul

Russians have a long tradition of blaming the victims by saying, for example, that they are “enemies of the people.” This is how they defined the Polish officers murdered in Katyń in 1940.

The Second World War would not have started if Germany and the Soviet Union would not have signed a common pact on August 23, 1939 – together with a secret protocol speaking of dividing the conquered states between them. This accord opened the way for these countries to attack Poland on September 1, 1939 and September 17, 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a form of agreement between Berlin and Moscow, but a trade agreement was also signed on this occasion. It was the basis for the flow of natural resources and agricultural products from Russia to Germany. This pact was much more important in the context of the outbreak of World War II than the Munich Pact signed on September 30, 1938 – mainly because it opened the way for the Russians and Germans to attack Poland and annex its territory.

Before this pact was signed, the Soviet Union and Germany used very harsh rhetoric against each other, making strong accusations. It seemed that they were divided by such a deep ideological dispute that their cooperation was out of the question. However, when it turned out that they share a common goal – the division of Poland between them – they quickly changed their attitude, practically overnight. Both countries treated the existence of Poland as a threat to themselves. Therefore, when an opportunity arose to erase this country from the map, they immediately found a common language in the matter.

The attack of the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939 took place under the false argument that Poland had lost the ability to defend its own citizens. General Semyon Timoshenko, who commanded the Red Army troops crossing the Polish eastern border that day, said that the Soviet troops were entering in order to “liberate” the Polish population. Except that was not a genuine argument. The Russian actions amounted to no liberation. Moreover, Poland was losing the war against the Third Reich – in the third week of fighting its army was retreating on all fronts – but it was not crushed yet.

Stalin believed in this pact so strongly that, until the last moment, he believed the Germans would not decide to attack the Soviet Union – so when the Third Reich moved against the USSR on June 22, 1941 it achieved a full surprise effect. It seemed to Stalin that his country’s cooperation with Germany was mutually beneficial, that the Nazi state needed Soviet natural resources too much to decide to make such a move. In 1941, he found out how wrong his calculations were.

Today, Russia is repeating the mendacious arguments of Stalin’s times. For example, it says that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact only served to defend against possible aggression from Poland, France, and the UK. This is an old argument drawn from textbooks written back in the times of the KGB and NKVD, which we have already learned by heart. Russians have a long tradition of putting the blame on the victims by saying, for example, that they are “enemies of the people”. This is how the Polish officers who were captured during the war in 1939 and murdered in Katyń in 1940 were described.

The massacre of Polish soldiers and officers in Katyń was a direct consequence of this pact. It was another element of Stalin’s strategy that was aimed at making Poland as defenseless as possible. Katyń became the most dramatic form of demonstration of how this strategy was to be implemented.

Killing Polish officers with a shot to the back of the head was only one of its elements. Another was the mass deportations of the population from the parts of Poland occupied by the Russians deep into the Soviet Union. They started in 1940 and lasted until the day of the German attack on the USSR. Four major operations of this type were carried out, resulting in the exile of between 700,000 and one million people (more precise data are not available). They ended up in Siberia, Kazakhstan, or near the Arctic Circle in the European part of the Soviet Union. This is a little known consequence of the accord that Germany and the Soviet Union signed on August 23, 1939, which proved so traumatic for many Poles.



Insolence of Putin’s Russia


By Roger Moorhouse

There is no grain of truth in the accusations aimed at Poland that its cooperation with Hitler led to the outbreak of World War II.

The Stalin-Hitler Pact (in Poland called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) was crucial to the circumstances in which World War Two broke out. This pact enabled Hitler to launch his invasion of Poland in September 1939, in the knowledge that he would not be directly opposed by any outside powers. Only the British and French had pledged to aid Poland, and they were not willing or able to effectively project their military power to assist Poland directly. So, only Stalin could have halted Hitler’s ambitions, and – by agreeing to the Pact – he chose not to.

At first sight it does indeed appear that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were on different sides, ideologically. But it is important to realise that they shared a number of strategic goals in 1939. Both were revisionist powers, hoping for the Versailles system that had been in place since the end of the First World War to be smashed. Both had lands that they had lost and wanted to regain. Both were fundamentally anti-Polish; viewing that country almost as the embodiment of their post-WW1 humiliation. And, crucially, both were happy for war to break out once again on the continent of Europe. So, there was a natural alignment between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as long as they could put aside their ideological differences – and this they managed to do in August 1939.

For Germany, the Pact was only a temporary expedient: a way for Hitler to get himself out of the diplomatic impasse that he had created and isolate Poland. But it also gave Germany a potentially vital economic deal to supply raw materials (especially oil) and secured Hitler’s rear so that he could attack westward in 1940. The Soviets saw the Pact as a vitally important economic opportunity – to benefit from German technical expertise. It is often forgotten that the 22 months of the Nazi-Soviet relationship saw 3 extensive and wide-ranging trade treaties between the two.

There is not a single blade of truth in accusations that Polish cooperation with Hitler helped start World War Two. This is an old Soviet line of argument, now shamefully reheated by Putin’s Russia, which deliberately obfuscates the Stalin-Hitler Pact – which was officially titled as a non-aggression pact – with pact which Poland signed with Germany in 1934, suggesting Stalin was only doing the same thing.

The Polish-German non aggression pact was just that – an agreement not to go to war with one another. Such agreements were common in Europe in the 1930s. The Stalin-Hitler Pact certainly called itself a non-aggression pact, but its key details were included in the Secret Protocol, in which the tw sides agreed to divide up central Europe between them. So, the “German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact” was in reality actually the opposite on a non-aggression pact. It was an agreement between two countries to open hostilities against a third country, namely Poland. Comparing the two pacts is historically illiterate.

The issue of whether the horror of World War Two, in which one in five Poles were killed, could be avoided is one of the most enduring questions of modern Polish history. It is perhaps natural to look for ways in which Poland’s fate in that conflict could have been improved, policies that might have lessened the hideous human and material costs. An arrangement with Germany might have done that. Poland might have been in a position analogous to Hungary, for instance, as a member of the Axis and an ally of the Nazis. Perhaps in that way, the death toll might have been lessened.

But we have to think deeply about what that would have meant. Poland in that scenario would have been obliged to not only be an active collaborator in Germany’s military adventures – not least among them the invasion of the Soviet Union (whenever that would have happened) – it would also have been obliged to have been an active collaborator in Germany’s racial ambitions, especially the extermination of Europe’s Jews, a sizeable proportion of which lived on Polish soil. Poland might have avoided some of its wartime casualties by following this course of action, but it would have been profoundly morally stained in the process.

As regards the outcome of the war, the Stalin-Hitler Pact was less immediately influential, as by that time the constellation of power had shifted – after the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 – and in those circumstances Central Europe was always going to be “liberated” and then occupied by the Red Army. It is instructive here that the fate of Poland at the end of the war – as the only country in the region which had fought on the side of the Allies from the first day of the conflict – was indistinguishable from that of Hungary, for instance (which had been allied to Germany) or Czechoslovakia, which had been dismembered prior to the war.

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This content is paid for and provided by Instytut Nowych Mediow and Polska Fundacja Narodowa and published by WP BrandStudio. The Washington Post newsroom and WP BrandStudio were not involved in the creation of this content. Learn more about WP BrandStudio.