Someone has cited some maps on my site:
#1: http://www.files.maproom.org/00/31/present.php?m=0010
#2: http://www.files.maproom.org/00/31/present.php?m=0011
Those URLs are temporary, and may stop working some time. The permanent URLs for these maps are
#1: http://www.maproom.org/00/31/present.php?m=0010
#2: http://www.maproom.org/00/31/present.php?m=0011
Nick
Thank you very much! Great site! I was thinking to by the book when I saw it on Ebay.com, but was to greedy to pay 150 USD for it. You site made my day!
The echo of 17th September 1939:
Russia and Poland in bitter row over nationality of Auschwitz’s victims
Ian Traynor, Europe editor
Tuesday April 10, 2007
The Guardian
The Nazi death camp of Auschwitz is at the centre of a bitter dispute between Russia and Poland, with Moscow accused of seeking to inflate the figures for Soviet wartime victims and Warsaw charged with trying to rewrite the history of the second world war.
The authorities - in charge of the camp where around 1.5 million people, overwhelmingly Jewish, were murdered on an industrial scale - are blocking the re-opening of the permanent Russian exhibition at the site because it classifies innumerable Polish, Jewish and other Auschwitz victims as “Soviet citizens”.
Article continues
The row between Russia and Poland over the second world war is also poisoning relations between Moscow and other parts of central Europe previously under Soviet control. Senior Russian politicians are calling for a boycott of Estonia because of plans to remove a memorial to the Red Army troops who routed the Germans in 1945, while a petition movement in Hungary is gaining ground also demanding the demolition of the Soviet war memorial in Budapest.
The dispute between Moscow and its former satellite states who are all now members of Nato and the European Union highlight how history is being hijacked to serve current political ends.
“The Russians still think they are a superpower. It’s an ego thing,” said Ferenc Hammer, a Hungarian political scientist. “But in Hungary there is no consensus either on whether 1945 was a liberation or the beginning of a Soviet occupation.”
Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper last week accused the Poles of using Auschwitz “to blackmail Russia” and to capitalise on the “tragedy of millions”.
Polish experts said the Russians had been given three years to resolve the dispute, but had failed to come up with a version of the history of Auschwitz which would satisfy an international panel of historians and former inmates of the camp near Krakow in what was Nazi-occupied Poland.
The row focuses on the start of the second world war when the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships carved up central Europe between them. In September 1939 under the terms of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Hitler invaded Poland while Stalin annexed large tracts of eastern Poland, western Ukraine, Romania and the Baltic region.
The Russians refuse to acknowledge this history in their exhibition at Auschwitz, describing around 1 million Jews from the annexed lands who died in the Holocaust as Soviet citizens. “It’s a very painful issue,” said Eugeniusz Smolar, a Polish analyst. “For the Poles to accept this is to accept the Nazi-Soviet pact.”
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, former Polish foreign minister and wartime resistance fighter who was incarcerated at Auschwitz, wrote: “They can desecrate their own graves if they want to. But we Poles will not allow ourselves to be misused … or allow the Jews and Poles who died there to be declared Soviet citizens.”
The row exposes the fundamentally opposed perceptions of the second world war across eastern Europe, with Russia insisting that the Poles, Balts, Hungarians and others be grateful for the Red Army’s defeat of the Germans across the region, while the central Europeans largely view the arrival of the Russians in 1945 as the start of four decades of communist dictatorship.
For the Estonians, the bronze figure of a Red Army soldier standing in central Tallinn embodies the Baltic state’s forced incorporation into the Soviet Union.
The parliament and the government have decided to take down the monument and to exhume the remains of 13 Red Army soldiers in the city centre, removing them to a cemetery on the city’s outskirts.
Over the past 18 months Russia has used oil and gas supplies, consumer boycotts, air and travel links, wine and meat sanctions to try to put pressure on Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and the Baltic states.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2053255,00.html