September 27, 2015 — New York, New York
AJC Executive Director David Harris issued the following statement:
“In a startling assertion, the Russian Ambassador to Poland, Sergey Andreev, claimed on Friday that Poland was ‘partly responsible’ for the outbreak of the Second World War. This is absurd, and, in reality, no one should know it better than Moscow.
Let’s recall that Poland was the first target nation of Nazi forces, which invaded the country on September 1, 1939, triggering the start of World War II. Britain and France, in turn, declared war on Germany two days later, honoring their security commitments to Poland. Despite fighting valiantly against the invaders, Polish troops were outnumbered, outgunned, and outmaneuvered.
At the time, the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany. The infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been signed on August 23, 1939, giving Berlin confidence that it would not face war with the USSR anytime soon.
To make matters worse, and again totally ignored by Ambassador Andreev, the Soviet Union followed Germany’s aggression against Poland by 16 days, invading and occupying eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. Countless Poles were seized by the occupying forces and imprisoned in the Soviet Union. And Stalin’s unprovoked action resulted in a permanent change to Poland’s eastern border.
Moreover, in the spring of 1940, thousands of Polish military officers were murdered by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, in Katyn Forest, although it took Moscow more than five decades to acknowledge this obvious and painful truth.
By June 1941, after Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, Moscow became a Western ally and fierce foe of the Third Reich. Soviet forces were absolutely essential to vanquishing Hitler’s dream of a 1000-year reign, and no country endured heavier military and civilian losses than the USSR.
But for the Russian Ambassador to ignore the deeply painful and well-documented history of 1939-1941, and instead suggest that Poland brought calamity upon itself, and others, turns well-documented historical facts on their head. It is also a transparent effort to shift the focus from the perpetrators to the victims.
We can only hope that his superiors in Moscow will quickly distance themselves from the Ambassador’s comments, lest the impression be left that his view is indeed official Russian policy today.”
