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From the article\u00a0 Sunday (today) marks exactly 80 years since Nazi Germany invaded Poland, on Sept. 1, 1939, the attack that triggered a nearly six-year world conflict that left more than 70 million people dead before Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.militarytimes.com\/news\/your-military\/2019\/09\/01\/80th-anniversary-of-poland-invasion-why-the-memory-is-still-a-battleground\/<\/a><\/p>\n … from the Baltics and Poland to Hungary and Russia, where fighting, deportations and mass executions happened, there are many shades of gray: heroic resistance and martyrdom but also collaboration \u2014 and a liberation by Soviet forces that spelled the start of decades of occupation and oppression for those behind the Iron Curtain.<\/p>\n That leaves a lot of room for differing ways to remember the war.<\/p>\n In the past week the Russian government put out a video that seeks to rehabilitate the pact, arguing that the USSR was forced into it by the failure of the West to stand up to Hitler\u2019s aggression and even blaming Poland for the war.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n “Today there are, unfortunately, many trying to falsify history,” Duda said recently. “They suggest that, in fact, World War II began in 1941. No \u2014 the war began with the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 based on the arrangements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.” – article<\/p>\n In case you’re wondering about that pact, the 1939 article from The Guardian is here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n