Polish President Andrzej Duda took part in an early morning ceremony in Westerplatte, near Gdansk, on Tuesday to mark the 81st anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two.
Officially known as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, August 23rd was chosen as it coincides with the date of the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a 1939 non-aggression pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany which would see a German-Soviet carve-up of Poland.
The boulder was used to mark the location of the barracks of the soldiers of the 1st Company of the battalion known as the Führer-Begleit-Bataillon, with the abbreviation F.B.B., which was formed in 1939 to protect the Fuhrer at the front.
Among the remains researchers from the POMOST Historical and Archaeological Research Laboratory discovered weapons, tools, soldiers’ dog tags and medals identifying them as a paratrooper unit attached to Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
The letter, dated 15 March 1941, was written by two Polish men, whose names and dates of birth are in the text. Local officials are now trying to tack down their descendants.
The heads of the foreign affairs committees of the Polish lower house and parliaments of the Baltic States have voiced their concern over Russia's attempts to distort history by means of a new interpretation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
The reconstruction at the site of the Nazi leader’s Wolf’s Lair HQ, used archive documents, photographs, witness testimony and the knowledge of local guides to recreate the room as it was in July 1944.
The memorial plaque, the flag design of which is a reference to the Polish flag that Polish soldiers raised on the Victory Column in Berlin’s Tiergarten on 2 May 1945, will be mounted on the city’s Polytechnic where the First Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division finally broke the fierce resistance of the Germans defending the building.
The unique collection sent to WWII Polish diplomats known as the Ładoś Group who tried to save the Jews from being murdered, was acquired from a private owner in Israel thanks to the efforts of the Polish Embassy in Bern and Markus Blechner, a Polish honorary consul in Zurich.
TFN’s Stuart Dowell travels to the city of Bydgoszcz where he unravels the extraordinary story of one man’s literal fight for survival in a concentration camp nicknamed the ‘bone grinder’ by its SS guards.
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