That Baltic country was the victim of a pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR
World War II began on September 1, 1939 with the invasion of Poland by Germany, but it was planned earlier with the USSR.
The mistake of treating all the victors of World War II as equals
United by hatred of democracy: a revealing telegram about the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939
Yesterday, through its official Twitter account, the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalled a historical fact that many people still ignore, almost 81 years after the end of that bloody war:
“Soviet Union is as guilty for triggering WWII as Nazi Germany. Two countries concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which secretly divided the region into zones of influence, and both conspired to invade Poland. Nazis’ surrender did not bring freedom to the Baltic States.“
In four images published alongside that message, the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalls the following:
“The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both responsible for triggering the Second World War. On 23 August 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed.
The USSR joined the fight against Nazism only after Nazi Germany betrayed and attacked the former. Until then, both regimes cooperated politically, militarily, and economically through large-scale trade in oil, grain, and raw materials.
Nazi Germany’s surrender on 8 May 1945 did not bring freedom to Lithuania and other Baltic States. For the Baltics, the so-called “liberators” became the new occupiers.
During the summer of 1944, the USSR reoccupied Lithuania. The attempts to restore statehood were violently crushed by using armed force. The goal was to destroy national identity and eliminate any opposition.”
What Lithuania is commemorating here are historical facts. Let us recall that in August 1939, Hitler and Stalin sealed their alliance driven by their shared hatred of democracy, a fact documented by the communications exchanged between the two dictatorships, including Telegram 175 sent on August 14, 1939, by Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Foreign Minister, to the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg:
“The Reich Government and the Soviet Government must, judging from all experience, count it as certain that the capitalistic Western democracies are the unforgiving enemies of both National Socialist Germany and of the U.S.S.R.“
On September 22, 1939, Germans and Soviets celebrated their victory over Poland with a joint parade in the Polish town of Brześć Litewski (now Brest-Litovsk, in Belarus), during which Soviet General Semyon Krivoshein invited his German allies to visit Moscow and wished them a swift victory over capitalist England. This pact between the Third Reich and the USSR relied on the collaboration of communist parties under Moscow’s orders to justify the invasion of Poland, and also led to a trade agreement between the two dictatorships in February 1940, whereby the USSR supplied Nazi Germany with large quantities of raw materials, which served to fuel German aggression against Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom.
Significantly, pointing out the joint responsibility of Nazi Germany and the USSR in the outbreak of World War II has been a crime in Russia since 2021. Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship has decided to censor these historical facts in its eagerness to drag the Russian people back to the era of Soviet totalitarianism. At the same time, for years, Putin’s dictatorship has been repeating Stalinist slogans about the invasion of Poland, openly justifying it. Given the Kremlin’s efforts to conceal the truth and spread disinformation about its country’s past, it is more necessary than ever to remember these historical facts.
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Photo: A picture of German and Soviet soldiers together on the day of the joint Nazi-Soviet parade in Brest-Livosk, Poland, September 22, 1939, with which both invaders celebrated the defeat of the Poles.