US ambassador defends Poland from false Russian WWII claims

WARSAW, Poland — The US ambassador in Warsaw comes to Poland’s defense following repeated claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Poland bears blame for the outbreak of World War II.

“Dear President Putin, Hitler and Stalin colluded to start WWII. That is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict,” Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher says on Twitter in English and Polish — though not in Russian.

World War II began September 1, 1939, when German troops invaded Poland. Two weeks later, the Soviet Red Army invaded from the east, in what Poles still call a “stab in the back.” The dual occupation came days after the Nazi and Soviet regimes had signed a pact with a secret protocol to carve up Poland and the Baltic states. Some six million Polish citizens were killed in the war, about half of them Jews murdered in the Nazi Holocaust.

Recently Putin has been arguing that the collusion of Western powers with Adolf Hitler paved the way for World War II. He has singled out Poland in particular, casting it as an anti-Semitic country that welcomed Hitler’s plans to destroy Europe’s Jews. He noted Poland’s ambassador to Berlin in the lead-up to the war, who was an avid anti-Semite.

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki protested Putin’s words on Sunday, saying they are deliberate “lies” and arguing that Putin is trying to deflect attention from recent political failures by Russia.

— AP and Times of Israel staff