Posted on September 1, 2009 - by Venik

Poland marks second world war anniversary

World must not forget, says Polish PM at dawn ceremony at site of Nazi Germany’s opening assault on Poland 70 years ago
Live blog: events marking second world war anniversary

The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war was marked this morning with a dawn service on the Baltic coast, close to the site where the conflict began on 1 September 1939.

In the ceremony at the Westerplatte peninsula, the site of Nazi Germany’s opening assault on Poland, political and religious leaders spoke of the struggle against Hitler’s forces.

It began at 4.45am, the time at which the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled a tiny Polish military outpost to spark the beginning of the war, which lasted for nearly six years and caused the deaths of more than 50 million people.

“Westerplatte is a symbol, a symbol of the heroic fight of the weaker against the stronger,” said the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski. “It is proof of patriotism and an unbreakable spirit. Glory to the heroes of those days, glory to the heroes of Westerplatte, glory to all of the soldiers who fought in world war two against German Nazism, and against Bolshevik totalitarianism.”

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, warned of the dangers of forgetting the war’s lessons.

“We meet here to remember who started the war, who the culprit was, who the executioner in the war was, and who was the victim of this aggression,” Tusk said.

“We meet here to remember this, because we Poles know that without this memory, honest memory about the truth, about the sources of world war two, Poland, Europe and the world will not be safe. We remember because we know well that he who forgets, or he who falsifies history, and has power or will assume power, will bring unhappiness again, like 70 years ago.”

Later in the day, around 20 European leaders and officials including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, his French counterpart, François Fillon, and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, will take part in a larger service on Westerplatte.

Today’s meeting takes place amid swirling tensions over who – apart from Hitler – was responsible for starting the second world war. Over the summer the Baltic states, led by Lithuania, blamed Hitler and Stalin equally for the conflict. The claim provoked a furious reaction from Moscow, with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, on Sunday dismissing it as “quite frankly, a flat-out lie”.

Russia is today releasing documents from the secret archive of its foreign SVR intelligence service which are likely to blame Poland. The Kremlin says that Poland was a Nazi ally and a willing accomplice to Hitler’s partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

In a letter to Poles published in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza yesterday, Putin struck a conciliatory tone. He described as “immoral” the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, which saw Hitler and Stalin carve up eastern Europe under a secret deal.

“Without doubt the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact can be fully condemned,” Putin wrote. But he also pointed the finger at France and Britain for signing the Munich agreement in 1938, making a Nazi attack eastwards on Russia more likely.

While Poland’s relations with Russia remain tense, Putin called for “joint grief and forgiveness” in the hope that “Russian-Polish relations will sooner or later reach such a high level of true partnership” as Russian-German ties.

Angela Merkel welcomed her invitation to the events, pointing to it as a “signal of reconciliation” between Germany and Poland. She called 1 September “a day of mourning for the suffering” that Nazi Germany brought on Europe and of “remembrance of the guilt Germany brought upon itself” by starting the war.

Writing on his Foreign Office blog, David Miliband said: “We have a duty to remember the sacrifices, including of Poles fighting in and alongside British forces, and to learn the right lessons – about confronting racism and xenophobia, about standing up against tyranny, and about building international co-operation.

“This will be a poignant return to Poland for me, as my mother survived the war in hiding in Poland before coming to the UK in 1946.”

Poland alone lost some 6 million citizens in the war, 3 million of whom were Jews.

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