the 70th anniversary of World War II

[incarcerated]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/invasion_poland_01.shtml

....At 4.45 am on 1 September 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison of the Westerplatte Fort, Danzig (modern-day Gdansk), in what was to become the first military engagement of World War Two. Simultaneously, 62 German divisions supported by 1,300 aircraft commenced the invasion of Poland.....



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6111610/Second-World-War-70th-anniversary-The-Scoop.html

The Scoop

Seventy years ago, a sleek limousine crossed the border of Poland and Germany and sped along the autobahn between Beuthen and Gleiwitz. Inside was a 26-year-old reporter on her first assignment for The Daily Telegraph, who was about to break the scoop of the century.

Once past Gleiwitz, the road began to climb a hill. Clare Hollingworth, now nearly 98 years old, suddenly caught sight of 65 German motorcycle dispatch riders, who overtook her car and sped away with a roar. As she looked to the side, a gust of wind lifted up the hessian sheets that had been strung alongside the road.

That was when she spied hundreds of tanks, armoured cars and field artillery – von Rundstedt's 10th Army and its Panzer Corps – massed in the valley below, waiting to roll into Poland and begin the Second World War.

Hollingworth filed the story that appeared on Tuesday, August 29, on The Daily Telegraph's front page, underneath the headline: "1,000 tanks massed on Polish border. Ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke." She went on to write: "The German military machine is now ready for instant action."

"I wasn't frightened," she says from the modest apartment in Hong Kong where she now lives, just around the corner from the Foreign Correspondents' Club. Today, Hollingworth's health is frail, her eyesight and hearing nearly gone, but she is a unique witness to the events of 1939.

....Together with her driver and a companion who also worked with the refugees, Hollingworth set off towards her scoop, leaving border guards at Beuthen (now Bytom) staring open-mouthed as she drove past.

"People tend to confuse it, but she actually had two scoops," says Garrett. "The first was to spot the tanks. The second was to see the war itself break out when the Germans invaded and she was in Katowice."

It was as the first light of dawn broke on September 1 that she was woken by explosions and distant gunfire. "Someone rushed into the room and said: 'The Germans are coming!'," she recalls. "And they were quite right!" With the roar of the planes behind her, Hollingworth called the British Embassy in Warsaw and asked to speak to Robin Hankey, her friend and the second secretary. "Robin, the war's begun," she shouted. "Are you sure, old girl?" he asked. In response, she held the telephone out of the bedroom window where the roar of tanks encircling Katowice was clearly audible.

She helped the staff at the consulate to burn documents and then drove to the border at around 10am when the gunfire subsided. She witnessed the mass evacuation and then returned to Katowice where the mood was grim. In fear of a night attack, she spent the night in Crakow, 50 miles away. Returning on September 2, she found Katowice being evacuated. She quickly stuffed her typewriter and some clothes into a pillowcase. However, she was unable to refuse a case of champagne from the French consul, who was overladen. For the next two weeks, she criss-crossed Poland, keeping just ahead of the advancing Germans.

Many of her words never made it back to London. And the copy that did arrive never carried her byline. "She told me: 'We didn't do bylines back then,'" says Garrett. "But she said it was a good thing, since it would only have worried her parents."

It was only the start of a distinguished career, that took her to wars in Algeria and Vietnam before she was appointed the Telegraph's Beijing correspondent in 1973 at the age of 62. For the last 25 years or so, she has been based in Hong Kong, dropping in each day to the Foreign Correspondents' Club....

[Ret10Echo]

And everyone thought if they just ignored that "one thing" or gave one more concession that the whole issue would go away......

Have I heard that somewhere before? :confused:


Poland remembers its catastrophe
By Jonny Dymond
BBC News, Gdansk

Searchlights lit up the sky as the hour of the anniversary approached - three streams of light pricking the early morning darkness.

Around the monument to the heroes of the Battle of Westerplatte, military units shuffled into formation.

A long line of dignitaries - military, governmental and religious - faced the obelisk, itself a throwback to Soviet-era sculpture.

Westerplatte is one of Poland's great moments of resistance: bombarded by the German warship Schleswig-Holstein, vastly outnumbered by German troops, and dive-bombed by Stuka planes, 180 lightly armed Polish troops guarding a military depot held out for seven days before surrendering.

At the appointed hour - 0445 (0245 GMT), marking the passage of 70 years to the minute - trumpets rang out across the Westerplatte.

Catastrophe

There was, of course, talk of heroism in the speeches of the mayor of Gdansk, the President Lech Kaczynski and the Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

But for Poland, perhaps more than any other nation on earth, World War II was nothing but a catastrophe. By the war's end, five to six million Poles had been killed, many of them Jews - a greater proportion of Poland's population than that of any other country.


Both Nazi and Soviet occupiers sought to wipe Poland and its civilisation from the map.

The country's intellectual, religious, commercial and military elite were slaughtered. Properties were confiscated, museums looted, universities and schools closed. The capital Warsaw was destroyed on the orders of Hitler.

And the country became a base for the mechanised slaughter of the Holocaust. Auschwitz, Sobibor and Majdanek were some of the camps placed here by the Nazi occupiers.

"We remember," said Mr Tusk, "because we know well that he who forgets or he who falsifies history, and has power, or will assume power, will bring unhappiness again, like 70 years ago."

'Knife in the back'

Mr Kaczynski, the country's more nationalist president, threw a little more fat on the fire of an argument raging between Poland and Russia over responsibility for the war.

Poles have long seen the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, signed a week before war started, as the starting gun for the German invasion.

Just two weeks later, in mid September 1939, the Soviet armies occupied eastern Poland, and the country was effectively no more.

"On 17 September," said President Kaczynski, "when we were we still defending Warsaw… that day Poland received a knife in the back."

The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will speak later in the day.

But as the dawn broke over the Westerplatte, and the trumpets sounded again to mark the end of the ceremony, it was the soldiers of Poland - who fought and fell for their country - who were, once more, remembered.

Story from BBC NEWS:

[Sigaba]

Source is here (http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USL1655337).Russia's Putin rejects WW2 criticism in Poland
Tue Sep 1, 2009 12:42pm EDT

* Russians, Europeans at odds over Stalin's role
* Russia, Poland to look into darker parts of shared past
* "Huge number of mistakes by all sides" - Putin

By Gabriela Baczynska and Denis Dyomkin

SOPOT, Poland, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rejected criticism of Moscow's role just before World War Two during ceremonies on Tuesday marking the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland.

But Putin and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk agreed their countries' historians should work more closely to uncover darker parts of their shared past which still cloud relations 20 years after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.

Russia and former satellites such as Poland are at loggerheads over the actions of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1939, when he clinched a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for the invasion of Poland and world war.

"If we are going to speak objectively about history we must understand it does not have just one colour. It was diverse and a huge number of mistakes were made by all sides," Putin told a news conference after talks with Tusk in the resort of Sopot.

"And all these actions created the conditions for the large scale aggression by Nazi Germany."

Russians are deeply proud of their country's victory over Hitler in 1945, but Poles, Balts and others say Stalin also bears direct responsibility for the outbreak of war, for carving up Poland with Hitler and also annexing the Baltic states.

Putin cited efforts by Britain and France to appease Hitler in 1938, resulting in their acceptance of the destruction of Czechoslovakia, as well as Poland's own seizure of a strip of Czech territory shortly before it too faced German invasion.

Addressing war veterans and other European leaders later, Putin said the non-aggression pact clinched by Stalin's Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Germany's Joachim von Ribbentrop in August 1939 was a mistake, but added: "We now have the right to expect other countries which accepted a deal with the Nazis to follow suit (in acknowledging their mistakes)."

BATTLE FOR PAST

His comments will not satisfy the Poles and Balts, who regard Stalin's actions as a stab in the back and also recall the mass deportations and executions of their countrymen that followed the Soviets' arrival.

In a speech at the Westerplatte monument near Gdansk, where German forces fired the first shots of World War Two on Sept. 1, 1939, Tusk said historical truth must prevail.

"Different interpretations are allowed but the facts are the same. We want to remember these facts not to use history against anybody but for them to serve as a basis for peace," he said.

Putin and Tusk agreed to offer historians reciprocal access to their nations' archives and to set up joint groups of experts to study the murder of Polish officers in a forest at Katyn in the western Soviet Union in 1940 -- an event which for Poles symbolises Stalin's treachery and cruelty.

"We Poles have the right to the truth about the tragedy that befell our people and we cannot give up this right," Polish President Lech Kaczynski told the gathering at Westerplatte.

Poland wants Russia to apologise for Stalin's decision to have 20,000 Polish officers shot at Katyn. For decades, Moscow blamed the deaths on the Nazis, but after the fall of the Soviet Union it acknowledged they had been shot on Stalin's orders.

Kaczynski compared Katyn to the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

"There's one thing linking those crimes, though their scale was different. Jews perished because they were Jews. Polish officers perished because they were Polish officers," he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the prime ministers of Italy and France and Britain's foreign secretary were among other guests attending Tuesday's commemorative events in Poland. U.S. President Barack Obama sent a high-level delegation with a message praising Poland's wartime struggle for freedom.

Poland lost about a fifth of its population, including the vast majority of its three million Jewish citizens, as well as a fifth of its territory during World War Two. After the war, it remained under Soviet domination until 1989.

Some 27 million Soviet citizens perished in the war after Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

"I commemorate the 60 million people who lost their lives because of this war unleashed by Germany," Merkel said.

"We know we cannot change the atrocities of World War Two. The scars will remain visible. But it is our task to shape the future in the consciousness of our perpetual responsibility."
(Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Louise Ireland and Charles Dick)