Academia, International, Military, Politics

Russian Ambassador: Poland Responsible For German-Russian Invasion in 1939

225px-adolf_hitler_cph_3a48970stalinRussian Ambassador Sergey Andreev has caused an outcry in Poland after stating that Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 was an act of self-defense prompted by the failure of the Poles to join a coalition against Hitler. It was a bizarre claim was not only politically disastrous but historically moronic. The Russians have often omitted from their accounts of the heroic Russian war with Germany that they were first and foremost an ally of Hitler and sought to carve up Europe with him. it was only when Hitler betrayed Stalin that the Russians fought against Germany in its invasion.

250px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H27337,_Moskau,_Stalin_und_Ribbentrop_im_KremlThe Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was non-aggression pact containing a secret protocol dividing Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland between the two dictators. Had Hitler not invaded Russia, Russia was committed to a non-aggression pact and the subjugation of its neighbors to dictatorship. It was a disgraceful chapter in Russian history that the Putin government appears eager to rewrite. Indeed, adding to this ignoble history, was the betrayal of Polish freedom fighters in the Warsaw uprising and the massacre of Polish intellectuals by the Russians in Katyn Forest.

The invasion of Poland was a joint operation between Nazi Germany and Russia — with the German invasion occurring one week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Andreev insisted “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.” It is an untrue and dishonorable statement from a country that contributed to the death of millions in Poland.

There is an irony in these efforts to shift blame, including Poland’s own checkered history in dealing with Hitler. The German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact was signed in 1934 and pledged to avoid armed conflict for ten years. Later, it was suggested that this pact was the result of a refusal by France to declare war on Germany when Hitler began to rearm his country and violate the Treaty of Versailles. When France refused, Poland moved ahead with its pact with Hitler, though historians are divided on this relationship between France’s decision and the decision of Poland to join Hitler in its own agreement. None of this however offers any excuse or rationalization for Russia to carve up Poland and other countries in coordination with Hitler.

Regrettably, Putin has reasserted many of the worst Soviet-era powers and practices, including propaganda and historical revisionism. Just in case pictures can speak a thousand words, here are the Germans and Russians congratulating each other on the invasion of Poland and carving up the country:

Spotkanie_Sojuszników

80 thoughts on “Russian Ambassador: Poland Responsible For German-Russian Invasion in 1939”

  1. Putin is making Obama look like a rank amateur. Although that is “damning w/ faint praise.”

  3. Paul

    W’s daddy was old school CIA and the grandfather helped finance Hitler well after the US and Germany were at war. Satan turns up in the darndest place, yup.

  4. @ Nick the Speak
    Re: Putin’s tattoo which as you positively assert, “It’s tattooed on his buttocks.”

    Which you no doubt have seen in your part time proctology practice or whatever your “profession” wherein you would have access to the “beary” buttocks of husky bared chested males.

    1. John Smith – I do not know if Putin is Satan, but he is old school KGB and evil.

  9. During the Czechoslovakian crisis in 1938, Soviet Union also offered help to Czechoslovakia providing that Soviet Army will be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory.

    Both countries refused to allow Soviet Army to use their territories for “transit” of troops.

    If the mobilisation of the Soviet Union’s southern group of armies could be justified by Czechoslovakian crisis and Soviet intention to send Soviet Army there, the northern group was clearly destined to gain control over entire Poland.

    The disposition of the Red Army along Polish border at the time is clearly indicating that Stalin was planning to conquer Poland using Czechoslovakia as a propaganda excuse.

    Why he did not proceed with this plan? Well, The Red Army was not ready for such an action. The Stalin purge of Armed Forces decapitated the Armed Forces and command structure.

    The other possibility was that at this stage, the Red Army would be almost certainly stopped by the Polish Army and Stalin could not take the risk to repeat the great defeat of Red Army during 1919-1921 Soviet-Polish war.

    It took another 3 years of hard training and the disastrous Barbarossa campaign before the Red Army was forged into a formidable world class fighting force capable of defeating the German Army at Stalingrad.

    So Russian Ambassador Sergey Andreev is creating mischief and bending the truth.

    As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “Nothing in Politics happens by accident but when it does you can bet that it was planned”.

    So what is he really up to?

    1. Prof NP, I find your contention that the Soviets offered to help Czechoslovakia unbelievable, though one cannot be absolutely sure given Stalin’s desperation for allies against Hitler. It is ludicrous to think that the Soviets would let Poland or other country control the logistical life line for the Red Army. You also forget that north of Poland was EAST PRUSSIA, and thus a good concentration of troops was needed to offset this front. This contention is a new one on me.

      Of far more import is the FACT that Chamberlain had gotten a secret communication from the German military that they would stage a coup against Hitler if he stood firm against his demands. The reason was that the Czechs had massive fortifications on their border with Germany and the Wehrmacht would have been defeated had they tried to attack. That was the whole reason the Sudetenland was given to Czechoslovakia so that they would have natural terrain advantages to defend the new borders. Once the Sudetenland was given up, the Czechs had no real defense against a German invasion, thus their capitulation when Hitler and Poland dismembered the rest of the country.

      It is truly amazing that one can fathom the intentions of Stalin by his troop dispositions given the fact that one would naturally want troops near ones borders in case of an attack. So I find that a bit odd to say the least. Of course, when the real attack came, Stalin had ordered all units to be on guard against thinking Hitler would ever invade, and thus all warnings were disregarded and the front lines units were destroyed with over one million casualties.

  12. I am just an anonymous nobody, but what did Former Assistant Treasury Secretary from the Reagan administration say in 2014?

    “Dr. Paul Craig Roberts says the U.S. has plans for nuclear war with our rivals. Dr. Roberts explains, “Washington not only has war plans for launching a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia, and also possibly China, but Washington has a cadre of people who advocate nuclear war. We have people running around Washington saying things such as ‘What’s the good of nuclear weapons if you can’t use them.’ . . . These weapons are so lethal that if just one percent of the inventory of the U.S. and Russia were used, the death toll would be at least 2 billion people.”

    Ah, but dontcha know, he is anti-Israel and doubts 9-11, so he MUST be lying!

  13. heres a blast from the past. Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine

    Poland released a soviet war game from the seventies that posited a NATO first strike on Warsaw Pact forces in Poland. Well those naughty commies! how dare they plan to repel NATO aggression! Do we really think that they were imagining that such a thing was posible, considering that now NATO has swallowed up Poland and the Baltics and is sticking its nose into the Ukrainian tent?

    If Americans could understand how dangerous a game our war pigs were playing, we would maybe get up off the couch and say something about it.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html

    “Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has accused the West of breaking promises made after the fall of the Iron Curtain, saying that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe violated commitments made during the negotiations over German reunification. Newly discovered documents from Western archives support the Russian position.”

    Hey Dmitry! nobody cares! nananana! Putin is a dictator! etc etc etc. Axis of evil, democracy, etc etc~! Freedom fries and apple pies!

  14. And all our chattering on this blog will duly be ignored. It’s nice we get to have a safety valve. It will help us feel less mad about our dawning realization we are all serfs and American democracy is a lie.

    1. John Smith – Stepin Fetchit (stage name) was a fine comedian who has gotten a lot of bad press because people don’t really watch his material any more. I am not sure what you meant by combining his name in lower case (and misspelling it) but I feel it was derogatory. And racist!

    2. The war mongers always need a villain. It’s Putin one day and ISIS the next. It’s all propaganda. The entire cold war and domino theory was. I think false flags by our government go all the way back to the war of 1812. Just after we became a nation state. We also had a central bank then.

  16. Hitler orchestrated an attack on a German radio post/station by soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms. So what? Hitler went from orchestrating convoluted arguments based on demographics and the histories of various German populations in newly minted countries and recently expanded countries, convinced idiots like Chamberlain, to playing dress up to eventually just going for the throat like invading the USSR. None of it means anything. Rommel had given his consent to waxing Hitler and had agreed to support the new government which was made up of statesmen and military commanders that he knew.

  17. Couple of things 1) Hitler claimed the Poles attacked him. 2) Rommel was not involved in the plot against Hitler. Several officers who were around him were though.

  18. As time goes by what really happened is obscured by the ‘history’ written and taught by one’s ‘side’. WW2 was caused by the energy of the German people as they first found their country when Napoleon combined the small states into one, in order to better rule it, and continued as they expanded and won victories through the Franco Prussian wars to WW1. Most, if not all, major powers expand until they are checked by other expanding or expanded powers. WW1 was perhaps the last war decided on the battle field. The majority of Germans did not experience defeat directly but only reluctantly from a distance. The turmoil that was Germany as it attempted to pay back reparations, weather the depression, and hold high a collective head was the opportunity for someone promising what the German people had enjoyed, almost had, and lost, power and position in the world.

    All the rest was pretty much maneuvering by the participants, some trying to stay out of war and some designing it. WW2 was the result of Napoleon’s conquest of an area composed of multiple non threatening dukedoms, princedoms, and other doms. When Blucher assisted Wellington at Waterloo, the German people became the German people that continued on until they were pummeled into rubble at the end of WW2.

    Perhaps that run was the lesser of the two evils. If the French military command had more than half a brain and had stopped the Germans at the Ardennes they would have come back again later, maybe with jets, rockets, and nukes. They might have been met with jets, rockets, and nukes and Europe would be a wasteland today. WW2 was the biggest wake up call to humanity. If the world remembers?

    1. All governments appear to, by nature of human self preservation of those involved, expand on their confiscatory roles since this is how in reality, they get the money. Of course all in the name of the public good. If you believe you are a good leader and have good leadership around you, you attempt to expand both the confiscation and social policies you think best. Those that benefit will of course be your proponents and those that are the greatest victims of the confiscatory nature of government will be the opponents.

      “Here is what I would do if I was the Benevolent Dictator”. How many times have you heard that one.

      Only the wise man however knows that it is impossible to know what is in the best interest of the majority. All others only guess and usually for the wrong reasons. Your friends need that construction project or the electronics project to build the smart bombs.

      As the confiscation and spending expands, the greater the potential for the misallocation of those resources. As long as the going is good and there is little resistance, all is well in paradise.

      However, as with all hierarchies, as they get larger, the bureaucratic red tape and costs expand, until eventually you have a military police state so heavy handed in it’s policies, that physical conflict becomes inevitable. The Wei Mar Republic is a great example, but there are many others including now the U.S. and a number of it’s western allies.

      We are now in so much debt, (personal, business and government), that the financial markets (millions of businesses and individuals) acting in their own self interests, no longer feel confident in doing business as usual. just look at the volatility index over the last 8 years. It’s been a wild wild west.

      They, the participant in reality, no longer trust the system despite the main stream media pounding us daily that every is going to be just fine.

      After 2008 and the subsequent years of continued financial irresponsibility, the world, at least from the United States perspective, will never be the same.

      We will “never”, at least in the next 30+ years, again be at the level of prosperity (for the majority) we once were. Sadly, it is mathematically impossible under the current social and economic policies of this country. Until we substantially alter our course, we will continue to decline with each economic up turn followed by and even greater down turns and will continue to decline towards the bottom of the bell curve cycle. How and what happens is unknown, but for the majority is doesn’t usually end well, before we are able to again shake the tyranny of government from it’s hierarchal tree.

  19. Randyjet…..you left a few things out. Latvia, Estoniia, Lithuania, Belarus, etc. Were NOT part of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. The Bolsheviks took power in 1917, and attempted to annex those countries in a Westward offensive.
    Lenin, Stalin and co., and perhaps you, felt “entitled” to annex those counties. The populations of those countries, and of nearby Poland, were not too crazy about being annexed by the Bolsheviks. Nor was the international community.
    You left out these little details in your postings.
    The German-Russian invasion of Poland, by the two biggest mass murders of the 20th century, started something call WWII. If you enjoyed the kickoff to that unpleasantness, then perhaps you got an even bigger laugh out of what followed
    As far as I know, Poland rejected overtures from both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form an alliance. As I mentioned, they had non-aggession pacts with both countries. The Poles seemed to rely on French and British support to bail them out if attacked. After the fall of France in 1940, their “best last chance” against both Hitler and Stalin was gone.
    Revisionist historians have claimed that Poland might havebeen saved, at least temporarily, by accepting alliance with either Germany or the Soviets.it seems pretty clear that they were trying to avoid conflict with either, and their belief that France would come to their rescue, and maybe the British as well.
    If you want to try the make the point that the Soviets were “entitled” to Poland, as well as the countries I listed above, go ahead. As I stated, Hitler apologists could claim that Adolf was merely reclaiming territory ceded to Poland after WWI.

    1. Tom, I left out those countries since they were not germane to the discussion, but since you insist I will touch on them. This will take some time. All those countries you mentioned were part of the Russian empire, including Finland. As Lenin once stated, Russia was a prison house of nations, which he detested and fought against Russian chauvinism in the new Soviet government. After the fall of the Tzar, all of the former nations of the Russian empire declared their independence and civil wars ensued in most of them. The German government along with the allies of WWI sent troops and military aid to overthrow the popular governments which had been established by their people and which were Red in most of those countries. The Latvian regiment for example had been one of the major units which led the Bolshevik revolution and the Red Army. In Finland, the Reds had most of the country and people, but with outside military aid and troops, the Whites won. Led by the well known Finnish “paytriot” Mannerheim who had been a czarist general killing off Finnish patriots during his whole career. He barely spoke Finnish since it was not his native tongue. I will not go into all the nations involved since it will take way too long. They also killed off about 20,000 Finnish Reds too. This was common throughout the nations in which the Whites took control.

      The allies viewed the threat of revolution as being the main threat, and so they intervened militarily. I don’t see you denouncing the aggression against the ordinary folks of those countries by outside powers, especially the Germans. People like you forget the first invasion of Hungary by the west, NOT the Soviets. When the communists won power legally in Hungary, the west invaded to overthrow the government of Bela Kun which was the second communist government in the world. The white terror murdered tens of thousands of supporters of the communists to make sure that there would be few opponents to the Horthy dictatorship. The fact is that most of those Baltic countries had governments who were imposed by outside nations and they were not democratic.

      The original Soviet constitution also had a provision that allowed for secession by any of the member republics, and this was carried over into the Stalin 1936 one. Thus Gorbachov when the nations of the Baltics decided to secede had no legal leg to stand on. He deserves to be viewed as an exception to the rule of lawyers being bad people I think. In fact, Lenin was opposed to the idea of imposing governments on the republics by the Soviet Union and this is what caused Lenin to ask that the next Party Congress remove Stalin from his post as General Secretary of it. Unfortunately Lenin was deathly ill and was too physically weak to follow through on getting Stalin out. As one of Lenin enemies, Churchill noted, The second worst misfortune for the Russian people was Lenin’s birth, their worst was his death.”

      1. Randyjet..

        Those countries became germane to the discussion with your claim that Poland invaded the Soviet Union.
        As far as the West invading Hungary, I am not aware of an Western country invading Hungary. As allies if Hitler in WWII, the Hungarians were overun by the Soviets.
        So I’m not sure what Western “invasion” of Hungary you mean. Of course, the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 to put down the revolt against Soviet domination.
        I happen to agree with the thrust of this column…that blaming the Poles for getting invaded is “historically moronic”.
        You and the Russian ambassador have a different view.
        Apologists for Soviet Union atrocities, their alliance with Nazi Germany, and the dual invasion of Poland are, fortunately, fairly rare in Western democracies.

        1. Tom, your ignorance of history of that area is astounding. Also you continue the slander that I blame the Poles for WWII or starting it. Once again, I will state for the record, Hitler alone is responsible for that war. The FACT is that the anti-communist crusade the western powers were counting on from Hitler contributed to his being allowed to re-arm, and the FACT is that the Poles refused Stalin’s request for an anti-Hitler pact with Poland. I suggest you do some research on Hungary and its history, and look up Bela Kun and his short lived government which was overthrown by Romania, and other western powers who supported crushing his government. The FACT is that Poland DID in fact invade the Soviet Union in 1921. They also invaded and took a good chunk out of Lithuania, including its capital Vilnius which was only returned to it thanks to the Red Army and Stalin.

          Stalin was desperate to get some allies against Hitler, and when he was refused by all, he did the only thing any rational person would do which is get a non-aggression treaty with Hitler. Stalin went overboard to placate Hitler and committed more crimes doing that. The list is endless on that score alone. Bela Kun was indeed murdered by Stalin.

          The fact is that according to the Soviet Constitution all the republics were legally allowed to leave. Of course, that does not mean that was reality since the law meant nothing in the Stalinist states. They also had freedom of speech, press and religion, sort of like how our Constitution was ignored in the majority of states regarding those rights as well, until the Warren court. When I was growing up in the 50s, those rights were simply on paper during the McCarthy years and were void for all practical purposes. The Soviet Union thanks to Stalin had as its leader the General Sec. of the CP USSR. It is like the head of the GOP or Democratic Party being the leader of the USA, not the President. Sort of tells you how much the law meant there.

          1. randyjet – Hitler was anti-Communist as much as he was anti-Semitic. Stalin was allowing Hitler to secretly rebuild his army and air force in the Soviet Union, however he was not rationale.

      2. Randyjet..
        I think that was the same Bela Kun of Hungary you mentioned who was executed by Stalin.
        As far as your claim that Soviet republics were free to leave the Soviet Union, that is preposterous.
        Nor were the satellite counties “free to leave” the Soviet orbit…
        The Soviet miltary proved that more than once.

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