SECOND WORLD WAR ANNIVERSARY:WITH A mournful, wailing siren and a spat with Moscow, Poland yesterday recalled the dawn attack by Nazi Germany 70 years ago that triggered the second World War.
The last elderly veterans returned to the Westerplatte peninsula outside Gdansk where, joined by Polish leaders and foreign dignitaries, they remembered the first salvos in the six-year war.
At 4.43am on September 1st, 1939, the Schleswig Holstein battleship, ostensibly in Gdansk on a friendly visit, began shelling a Polish munitions depot.
The 180 lightly armed Polish troops stationed at the depot held out for seven days before they were ordered to surrender as German troops marched on Warsaw.
Yesterday Polish prime minister Donald Tusk struck a measured and conciliatory tone, praising the heroism of Polish soldiers while stressing the need for clear-eyed remembrance "without humiliating anyone".
"We remember 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," said Mr Tusk.
It was a careful nod to traditionally tense relations with Moscow that have been strained to breaking point ahead of this anniversary.
For years Poles have called for Russia to acknowledge Stalin's aggression against their country, in particular the 1940 massacre of 20,000 Polish officers. For decades Moscow blamed the Nazis until evidence linked the atrocity to the Red Army.
Channelling this resentment, Poland's conservative president, Lech Kaczynski, remembered how, on September 17th, the Red Army invaded and annexed eastern Poland in line with the secret terms of a pact signed with the Nazis a week before the war began to carve up Polish territory.
After the war, Poland spent half a century as a Soviet satellite.
"Poland was stabbed in the back," said Mr Kaczynski. "And this blow came from Bolshevik Russia."
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin responded to the attacks, saying in a speech it was "time to move on" and that history was "complex and not painted in just one colour". "A lot of wrong steps were made in Europe, which eventually caused the tragedy [ of war]," he said.
In a Polish newspaper article, Mr Putin condemned the Hitler-Stalin pact but suggested it was "analogous" to the 1938 Munich agreement accepting Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland.
Historians in Russia have dismissed Polish demands for an apology in recent days; some went so far as to publish documents they claim prove Polish collaboration with the Nazi regime.
This caused huge upset in Poland, which lost one-fifth of its population in the war, a greater proportion of victims than any other country.
German chancellor Angela Merkel stayed well clear of the spat yesterday, acknowledging the "endless suffering" Germany unleashed on the world 70 years ago.
"For that reason September 1st is a sad day," she said.
"But it is also a day for thanks and of confidence that today we can work together as friends and partners."
