Tribune | By Mateusz Morawiecki, Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939: the Third German Reich, not provoked and without having announced it, attacked Poland. One of the first acts of the invasion was the bombing of the ammunition deposit in the Westerplatte peninsula.
It was the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, wetting for a few days in the port of Gdansk under a false pretext for a peaceful visit, which opened fire on the Polish garrison.
I recall these elementary facts 83 years after the outbreak of war, because this distance in time makes European societies less and less aware of the genesis of events that have decided on the form that contemporary Europe takes.
The less there are direct witnesses, the more the memory of this period is weakening and the greater responsibility of watching for the truth is based on our shoulders. And the stake of this responsibility becomes more fundamental today than to no time in the history of the post-war period.
The pre-war Europe fell into the trap of the Second World War because it was incapable, for years, to seize and assess properly the threats posed by two totalitarian ideologies.
As phenomena, both Soviet communism and German Nazism exceeded the understanding of the political elites of the time. In particular, Nazism and the fascination of German masses for Hitler were inconceivable for Europeans. After all, Germany, for years, had remained a highly developed culture model, immune to mass madness.
As soon as he came to power, Hitler did not hide his imperial ambitions. And step by step, he began to put them into practice, first by the Anschluss of Austria, then by the annexation of Czechoslovakia. Both only encountered the passivity of a Europe that would be ignored by thinking that war could be avoided, if the German appetite was satisfied. The peace prize was to be the submission of nations and states that Germany considered its area of influence, its Lebensraum.
In this regard, Poland was a separate case. More than once, Hitler had agitated cooperation offers, in exchange for a subordinate state status, but Poland had all rejected them. Consequently, Germany’s decision could only be invaded Poland.
At the same time, Hitler had two concerns: the first, concerning the reaction of the West to the assault of his Polish ally; the other – the reaction of the Soviet Union officially hostile to the Reich.
Using the many differences, the two totalitarianisms united in their desire to destroy the Polish state. On August 23, 1939, the Third Reich and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact, supplemented by an additional secret protocol, in which the two states shared the territories of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania.
The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact sealed the fate of central and eastern Europe. On September 1, Germany attacked Poland; On September 17, the Red Army did the same. Poland thus became the first victim bruised of the war, Hitler and Stalin having the feeling of a double victory: not only could they have been able to triumph quickly by taking advantage of their crushing military advantage, but above all they did not meet any concrete reaction from the Western states.
Current Europe has built both the memory of victory over Nazism and the shameful denial of the truth about passivity in the first phase of the conflict. When Poland, the first to be brutalized by the criminal regime, bleed, in Paris or even in London there were always many of those who believed that Hitler was going to be satisfied by taming Warsaw. They soon had to see how wrong they were.
The fate reserved for Poland during the German occupation is a story of absolute degeneration. It was on its territory that the Germans committed their most cruel crimes. It was on its territory that they have installed most of their infrastructure which served to perpetrate one of the most horrible crimes that humanity has ever known – the Shoah.
In many Western countries, the occupation was a painful experience but which offered chances of survival. Meanwhile, in Poland, millions of Poles and Jews, treated in sub-men, were fighting to survive one more day. From the start, the Jewish nation had been sentenced by the nation of “masters” to extermination; and the Polish nation – described as a people of slaves, a large part of which was also murdered.
The West has become very slowly aware of hell on earth that Germany has made the citizens of Poland live. The adventures of Jan Karski, one of the first to deliver to the Americans a testimony on German crimes – on the genocide of the Jews – are now a symbol. And even then, despite the fact that war had been engaged for many months, the West was not ready to accept full truth.
The ability to deal with the truth about the Second World War is not only our duty towards the past, but also our duty towards the future. The rapid reintegration after 1945 from Germany to the international community without it to carefully result in the accounts of the war criminals, opened the way to the relativization of evil.
There is rarely room in politics to make morals, but when it comes to judging totalitarianisms, we must not have any doubt – it was absolute evil and their authors have ever been excluded from the community of humans. And yet, we hear and read more and more often that the victims of the crimes were accomplices.
From there, there is only one step in a complete reversal of history. Regarding Poland, it was done by none other than Vladimir Putin. Indeed, for years, Russian propaganda has been trying by all means to convince the international community that Poland is responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War. Lying like this, cheeky to the absurd, is one of the fundamental characteristics of totalitarian propaganda.
Historical comparisons can be misleading, but it is difficult to escape it today. If we rewritten the genesis of the Second World War in the light of what is happening today, the culmination would be the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. That it could have taken place obviously means that there are many countries which have still not learned the lessons of the 20th century, or that it forgot them.
We are faced with the rebirth of an empire with totalitarian trends. 83 years ago, Poland was the first to refuse to submit. She chose loyalty to freedom, fidelity to the values that found Western civilization. And she was betrayed by her allies. If we come back to this story, it is not to remember only, but above all not to redo the same mistakes.
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Text co-published with the Polish monthly “Wszystko co najważniejsze” as part of a project carried out with the Institute of National memory (IPN) and the Polish National Foundation.
