Vladimir Putin makes absurd accusations against Poland regarding the Second World War. Historian Stefan Creuzberger explains what really happened back then and what the Kremlin chief’s goal is with his distortion of history.
Vladimir Putin believes he is on a kind of crusade. In it, he is using history as a weapon. It is being used against Ukraine, but the Russian regime is also weaving a web of historical untruths against Poland. Poland, which was invaded by Germany on September 1, 1939, is largely to blame for the outbreak of the Second World War, says Putin.
An absurd accusation. All the more absurd as Josef Stalin – Putin’s predecessor in the Kremlin – also had his Red Army invade Poland on September 17, 1939, only to later divide the country with Adolf Hitler. But why did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939? What consequences did this have for Poland? And how does Putin construct his pseudo-historical claims? Stefan Creuzberger, historian and expert on Russian history, answers these questions in an interview.
t-online: Professor Creuzberger, Vladimir Putin is flanking Russia’s war against Ukraine with pseudo-historical lies. He is weaving another historical web of untruths against Poland. How is Putin going about it?
Stefan Creuzberger: Vladimir Putin blames Poland for a significant part of the outbreak of World War II – and not just since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Putin has been making such claims for some time. For example, he did so in 2020 in a speech on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, and the Kremlin chief also made similar arguments in an interview with him this year by the ultra-conservative US presenter Tucker Carlson, who is prone to right-wing conspiracy theories.
Wait a minute! Germany actually invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and on September 17, 1939, Soviet dictator Stalin, as an accomplice of Adolf Hitler, ordered the Red Army to invade the east of the attacked country.
Correct. But Putin makes a serious accusation against Poland – namely, that the country was not prepared to make sufficient concessions in the difficult diplomatic situation of 1939. At the same time, Poland behaved aggressively. This is a blatant distortion of history; even in Soviet historiography, such statements would not necessarily have been accepted by the majority. But Putin no longer allows any critical view, neither of the Hitler-Stalin pact nor of the outbreak of the so-called Great Patriotic War on June 22, 1941.
Stefan Creuzbergerborn in 1961, teaches contemporary history at the University of Rostock and also heads the research and documentation center of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on the history of dictatorships in Germany. The historian is an expert on the history of Russia and co-editor of the “Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany“. In 2022, Creuzberger’s book “The German-Russian century. History of a special relationship“, which was nominated for the German Non-Fiction Prize.
The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939 surprised the world, as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were considered ideological sworn enemies. How was this non-aggression pact even possible?
When people in Germany and the Soviet Union woke up on the morning of August 24, 1939, they learned that their governments had made a 180-degree turn in foreign policy. This was quite a shock; no one had thought it possible: for years, the two regimes had viewed each other as political and ideological enemies. From one day to the next, this was no longer the case. Because Hitler and Stalin had agreed that they could benefit from each other.
How did leading National Socialists and Communists react to this radical shift?
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, for example, who said of himself that he would make a “pact with the devil” if necessary, provided it served Germany’s cause, carried out this radical change of course without any problems. For Goebbels, as a close confidant of Hitler, this was only a temporary alliance. Other long-serving National Socialists, such as the Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, a die-hard anti-Bolshevik, found the new situation difficult to come to terms with. But out of loyalty to Hitler they went along with it, albeit with gritted teeth. The Soviet party leadership was also very disorientated, especially among many subordinate officials who were urgently waiting for instructions on how to act and official language.
No wonder, after all, anti-fascism had been dictated to these officials from above for years?
Indeed, they had long believed that the USSR was an anti-fascist bulwark. Soviet foreign policy had worked with powers such as France and Great Britain in the spirit of collective security to contain the fascist regimes in Europe. Likewise, through the Communist International, they had cooperated across party lines and with relatively little ideology with rival political currents such as social democrats, bourgeois and conservatives against the threats from the right. All of this had now been called into question, literally overnight.
