Leaders of Poland, Russia and Germany along with several other European leaders commemorated the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War 2 with a September 1 dawn ceremony on the Baltic peninsula.

The commemorations took place against a backdrop of lingering resentment in Poland at the connivance of both Germany and Russia in dismembering their country after the outbreak of war.

The ceremony began at 2.45am GMT to coincide with the launch of hostilities by Nazi Germany. This was the precise moment that the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled a Polish military outpost on Westerplatte, where the Polish navy’s arsenal was housed, in the war’s opening salvo.

At the Westerplatte peninsula, Polish political and religious leaders at the 2009 ceremony recalled the heroic struggle of their compatriots against the overwhelming might of Hitler’s war machine.

Polish president Lech Kaczynski described Westerplatte as "a symbol of the heroic fight of the weaker against the stronger".  He said that "it is proof of patriotism and an unbreakable spirit".

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk warned of the dangers of forgetting the war’s lessons. "We meet here to remember who started the war, who the culprit was, who the executioner in the war was, and who was the victim of this aggression. 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," he said.

Significantly, Tusk blamed both Russia and Germany for his country’s plight. "Poland wants September 1 1939 to remain etched in the world’s memory as the beginning of the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, tied to Germany’s, and then Soviet Russia’s, aggression," he said.

Merkel: ‘I bow before the victims’
Less than a month after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, Poland was overwhelmed by the Nazi blitzkrieg from the west, and an attack from the east by forces from the Soviet Union, which had signed a pact with Hitler’s Germany.

Poland alone lost a total of six million people — three million of them Jews — and more than half its national wealth in destroyed factories, torched museums, libraries and villages.
Predictably, German chancellor Angela Merkel was unequivocal in her condemnation of her country’s past.

"I pay tribute to the 60 million people who lost their lives in this war unleashed by Germany," Merkel said.  The scars remain today," she said. "There are no words that could even remotely describe the suffering caused by this war and the Holocaust. I bow before the victims," said Merkel.

Putin’s speech was a careful balancing act that sought to condemn all those who tried to negotiate with Nazi Germany. His words were scrutinised carefully because Poles have long seen the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty of 1939, signed a week before war started, as the starting gun for the German invasion.

But Putin, perhaps mindful of rising nationalist sentiment at home, refused to accept unilateral condemnation of Russia for its agreement with Hitler.
"All attempts to appease the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 through various agreements and pacts were morally unacceptable and politically senseless, harmful and dangerous," Putin said.

"We must admit these mistakes. Our country has done this. The Russian parliament has condemned the (1939) Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. We have a right to expect this from other countries that also agreed deals with the Nazis," he said in an apparent reference to the now infamous Munich Agreement concluded between the UK and France with Germany in 1938, which virtually sealed the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and the pact between Poland and Germany in 1934.

Putin concluded that in the light of these agreements, any hope of an anti-Nazi alliance combining Russia and the western allies was sunk. He reminded his audience that Russia had born the brunt of losses in its war against the Nazis, losing 20 million people. His implication was that the allies owe a debt to Russia and should not merely indulge in point-scoring.