OSCE insults - Russia strikes back: The case against Poland

Friday July 3 2009, the Parliamentary Assembly of OSCE passed a resolution comparing Stalinism with Nazism. For Russia the distortion of history for political ends is unacceptable. This profound insult to the country that lost over 26 million souls, as it stemmed the Nazi tide, responsible for 90 per cent of Wehrmacht casualties, cannot go unanswered.

OSCE insults - Russia strikes back: The case against Poland

In occupied Poland the status of Volksdeutsche had many privileges but one big disadvantage: Volksdeutsche were conscripted into the German army. The Volksliste had 4 categories. No. 1 and No. 2 were considered ethnic Germans, while No. 3 and No. 4 were ethnic Poles that signed the Volksliste. No. 1 and No. 2 in the Polish areas re-annexed by Germany numbered ~1,000,000 and No. 3 and No. 4 ~1,700,000. In the General Government there were ~120,000 Volksdeutsche.

Between 1918 and 1924, Poland invaded all of its neighbors with the exception of Germany. It was an aggressor before it even became a fascist state. A military coup of 1926 made it, after Italy, Europe's 2nd fascist state. The German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact was an international treaty between Nazi Germany and the Second Polish Republic signed on January 26, 1934. German ambassador, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, Polish leader Józef Pilsudski, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Józef Beck, Polish Foreign minister, met in Warsaw on June 15, 1934, five months after signing the Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact.

Poland backed and allied itself with Hitler in 1937 and 1938 when the Nazis moved to invade Czechoslovakia. Hitler, in the Munich Conference of 1938, represented not only Germany's claims on the Sudetenland but also land claims of Hungary and Poland. After Poland annexed Czechoslovakia’s Tesin district, Hungary took some of Czechoslovakia’s Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia region, claiming that it had been stolen from Hungary after World War One by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

Abandoned by its allies and threatened with civil war, the Prague government hoped that Germany, Hungary and Poland would be satisfied with their immediate territorial demands. Instead of guaranteeing the new borders, Hitler took advantage of the country’s internal divisions. He encouraged Slovakia to declare independence, so that he could more easily take the remaining Czech region. As enticement, in March 1939, Hitler promised Slovakia that if it declared independence, he would protect it – from Hungary and Poland.

Hitler gave Slovakia a choice: "On one hand, the autonomous Slovak Government could continue to exist according to the statute granted to it in the previous autumn by the Prague Government – in which case Germany would settle accounts with the Czechs and leave the Slovaks to the mercies of Poland and Hungary. Alternatively, if Slovakia demanded immediate independence from Prague, the Reich would offer all-powerful protection to the new state, and would shield her from the territorial greed of Warsaw and Budapest."

Poland invaded Ukraine twice, first against Ukrainian nationalists and then against Soviets. It also invaded Belarus and took the western provinces from Belarus and Ukraine that were then recaptured by the Soviet Union after Poland's fall to Germany in 1939. Poland also invaded Lithuania capturing and holding its capital city, Tallinn. Then Czechoslovakia as described previously. Finally it invaded and captured several key villages around Danzig, which were in neutral League of Nations enclaves and populated entirely by ethnic Germans.

In 1939, Poland's leaders Rydz Smigly and Ignacy Moscicki claimed: "Poland wants war with Germany and Germany will not be able to avoid it even if she wants to." And they threatened to overrun Germany in three days.

Poland was no different from the Nazi Germany in its actions prior 1939. The 1939 Danzig Massacres, for historical accuracy it should be noted, that the Poles committed an unprovoked hostile act (with British complicity), serious enough to trigger war. This act was the ambushing of a military transport by the Polish secret service, going through Poland to the German city of Danzig (Gdansk) delivering the Enigma machine. (Cypher machine).

This happened in 1939 May or June - before the war, All the German military personnel were killed, the trucks were set on fire, the Enigma machine was stolen, and a British built look-alike was put in place before the truck was set on fire. Source: "A man called Intrepid" (not a novel) by William Stevenson (1976). Therefore, it can be seen that Poland’s considerable machinations were responsible for the start of the Great Patriotic War.

During wars in Ukraine, the Poles massacred somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million Russian POWs that they had taken. Poland ran concentration camps for Orthodox Christians, while it burned them out of Ukrainian and Belarus provinces, solely for the reason that they refused to convert to Catholicism.

In Poland, 3 million Jews were killed, and only 40-50,000 Jews survived in Poland, the majority (about 240,000) survived in exile in Russia or in German concentration camps. This number of Jews could not have been killed in a short span of 18 months without the active help of the Polish population. The dehumanization of the Jews made them easy prey. There was a saying among the Poles under the occupation: “The Germans will throw stones at Hitler dead, because he brought about the downfall of the German people, but the Poles will bring flowers to his grave as a token of gratitude of his freeing Poland from the Jews.”

Add to this the fact that Polish nationalists ran the concentration camps in which tens of thousands of German civilians died in 1946. Poles never seem to feel guilty about their behavior prior to the war. They like to portray themselves always as victims. Poland has continuously failed to enact legislation that requires restitution or compensation for those individuals who had private property seized and confiscated.

So there you have it in the case of Poland. In the words of the OSCE Resolution: genocide, human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Lisa Karpova

Pravda.Ru