Europe marks anniversary of WWII beginning

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-02 02:54

GDANSK: On a wind-swept peninsula where shells lobbed from a German battleship ignited World War II 70 years ago, European leaders vowed Tuesday never to forget the lessons of the 20th century's bloodiest conflict.

Evidence of continued animosity was not far from the surface, however, as Poland pushed for greater acknowledgment from Russia of its role in starting the war, while Russia sought to minimize the impact of Moscow's 1939 pact with Berlin.

At dawn on Gdansk's Westerplatte peninsula, Poland's leaders marked the hour the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled a tiny Polish military outpost housing the navy's arsenal. It was the war's opening salvo.

Red and white Polish flags fluttered in a breeze as the officials opened the ceremony at 4:45 am. Later, Poland's president, prime minister and others placed wreaths at the foot of the towering granite monument to the defenders of Westerplatte as an honor guard looked on.

The blitzkrieg on Poland launched nearly six years of war that engulfed the world and left more than 50 million people dead as the German war machine rolled over Europe.

Poland alone lost 6 million citizens, half of them Jews. During the German occupation, the country was used as a base for the Nazis' genocide machinery: It was home to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor and other death camps built by the Nazis to annihilate Europe's Jews.

"Remembering the cruelty, remembering the extermination of peoples and nations, is perhaps the most important and most effective shield against the danger of another war," Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a solemn afternoon ceremony with European and American officials along the waterfront on Westerplatte.

"Nobody in the world who will remember the events here in Gdansk in 1939 and the horrible events around the world in the years that followed ... will ever do anything to allow that nightmare to return."

A Polish sailor bugled Taps as a wreath decorated with the red and white of Poland's flag was placed in memory of the war's victims.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel apologized for her nation, saying that remembering the war and its victims was its "everlasting historical responsibility."

"There are no words that can even approximately describe the suffering of this war and the Holocaust," Merkel told dignitaries, including Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, French Premier Francois Fillon, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, and US National Security Adviser James Jones, as well as Tusk and Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski.

"I bow before the victims."

Many historians see the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact a week before the hostilities began as a critical development in Berlin's march to war.

The pact, formally a treaty of nonaggression, was signed Aug 23, 1939, in Moscow by Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign ministers of the two countries.

In addition, the treaty included secret protocols that divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east sixteen days after the Nazis invaded from the west.

Putin sought to downplay the treaty's importance, saying it was only one factor to be considered in the context of the western powers' appeasement of Hitler, along with agreements signed by other countries with the Nazis, including a Polish-German nonaggression pact.

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