Putin: USSR saved the Jews of Eastern Poland in 1939
06/19/2020
Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out that the introduction of Soviet troops into Poland in 1939 saved the Jews who lived in these territories from extermination and strengthened the position of the USSR in the upcoming war with Nazi Germany. The Russian leader wrote about this in the article “75 Years of the Great Victory: Shared Responsibility to History and the Future,” published on June 19. The President emphasized that if the USSR had not occupied Eastern Poland in 1939, “millions of people of different nationalities, including Jews living near Brest and Grodno, Przemysl, Lvov and Vilna, would have been thrown to the Nazis and their local henchmen, anti-Semites, for destruction and radical nationalists.
In the article, Putin recalled that the USSR was “actually the last of the European countries” to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany, but other states “prefer not to remember agreements signed by Nazis and Western politicians.” Moreover, some European politicians "directly encouraged" the plans of the Nazis. The President again quoted the notes of the Polish ambassador to Germany, which he had repeatedly mentioned , in which it was proposed to erect a monument to Hitler in Warsaw for the project of deporting European Jews to African colonies.
Putin also pointed out that local accomplices of the Nazis, under the guise of fighting for national independence or freedom from communism, “often surpassed their masters in inhumanity” and “trying to curry favor, willingly carried out the most cannibalistic orders.” “The work of their bloody hands is the executions of Babi Yar, the Volyn massacre, the burning of Khatyn, the extermination of Jews in Lithuania and Latvia,” the article says.
The President again recalled that it was the Red Army, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives of Soviet soldiers, that “saved entire peoples from annihilation and enslavement, from the horror of the Holocaust,” and condemned the “historical revisionism” of the West.