THE RUSSIAN FRONT

In the summer of 2009, I noted a piece by Pat Buchanan on the origins of World War II which essentially took the same position as the Russian military: it’s the fault of the Poles for not accepting Hitler’s ostensibly reasonable demands for the cession of Danzig.

In the wake of the most recent Katyn tragedy, Buchanan has made the same point, though a bit more delicately, presumably to be cognizant of Polish feelings. He writes of the irony that Polish defiance in insisting on landing in fog at Smolensk led to tragedy, just as in 1939:

it was Polish defiance of Adolf Hitler’s demand to negotiate the return of Danzig, a German town put under Polish control after World War I, that gave birth to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which led to Katyn.

To repeat my point in the earlier post, Hitler had just jumped up and down on his own Munich agreement by absorbing what was left of Czechoslovakia and utterly destroying any hope that he might solely be interested in ethnically German territory. Why should the Poles trust Hitler after that?

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