Vladimir Putin has been accused of rewriting history to turn killers who carried out bloody massacres into victims in an ongoing and bitter dispute which erupted after he claimed that Poland was complicit with Hitler’s Germany in the lead-up to the Second World War.

The Kremlin, claims Arkady Rzegocki, Poland’s ambassador to the UK, is seeking to deflect guilt and cover-up the legacy of the Nazi-Soviet pact – the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty – which sought to secretly carve-up countries in eastern Europe between the two totalitarian powers.

Writing in The Independent, Mr Rzegocki says: “President Vladimir Putin is harking back to the USSR’s false wartime narrative and unfairly turning perpetrators into victims.’’

“The denial of responsibility for the Nazi-Soviet pact being propagated by the Russian authorities must be continuously met with a firm response from the custodians of the truth. It must be opposed so that the 150,000 Poles who died at the hands of the Soviets did not die in vain.”

“All these were part of Russia’s continuous efforts to divert attention from its dark wartime past and reinforce Mr Putin’s narrative of a strong, faultless country which is a natural successor to war-winning USSR.’’

The Ambassador’s charge comes during an extraordinary confrontation in the lead-up to the International Holocaust Memorial Day and the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

Mr Putin has lashed out on a number of occasions after the European Parliament passed a resolution last September urging Moscow to acknowledge the brutalities of its Stalinist past, maintaining that the country had escaped the scrutiny of Germany’s Nazi era.

But the Kremlin has accused the current Warsaw government of leading an anti-Russian campaign in the European Union, and retrospectively undermining the liberation of Poland from the Germans by Soviet forces.

President Putin and other Russian leaders have also charged Poland with working with the Nazis and virulent anti-semitism during the war.

In one speech, made to military officers in the Defence Ministry in Moscow, Mr Putin alleged that “essentially they colluded with Hitler. This is clear from documents, from archival documents...’’

Giving examples from the diaries of Józef Lipski, who served as Polish ambassador in Berlin from 1934 to 1939, Mr Putin pointed to promises made to put up a statue to Hitler in thanks for a German plan to deport Jews to Africa.

“A bastard, an anti-Semitic pig, you cannot put it any other way... it is people like that who today are tearing down monuments to the liberating warriors, the Red Army soldiers who freed Europe and the European people from the Nazis’’, he said.

The Polish government has protested strongly, reiterating that nearly six million Polish citizens, half of whom were Jewish, died in the Second World War.

But the allegation of white washing Holocaust history is one of which the Polish government has itself been accused, after making it an offence to use the term “Polish death camps” or discuss the Polish state’s involvement in Nazi war crimes – a move on which it was forced to backtrack after an international outcry.

Now the row has escalated, with other countries being drawn in.

Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor describes moment she was taken by Nazis

More than a thousand Auschwitz survivors will travel to the site of the concentration camp in Poland on 27 January for the anniversary of its liberation. The event will be boycotted by Mr Putin.

This week, another commemoration will be held at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial site in Jerusalem. More than 45 heads of state and international public figures are due to attend. Prince Charles will represent the UK in what will be his first visit to Israel.

But Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has pulled out after learning that he would not be allowed to speak at the event while Mr Putin would be addressing those present, along with others including France’s Emmanuel Macron, and US Vice-President Mike Pence.

The issue has caused controversy among Israelis.