Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki, who recently boasted about how his country has set the global standard for Russophobia, just engaged in World War II revisionism regarding Hitler. He condemned French President Macron’s negotiations with his Russian counterpart as equivalent to negotiating with the former Nazi leader, rhetorically asking “Nobody negotiated with Hitler. Would you negotiate with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot?” This statement conveys the sense that nobody, not even the interwar Second Polish Republic whose successor state he represents, negotiated with the man who’s regarded by many as the evilest in history. That’s factually false though since Poland did indeed not only negotiate with him, but also participated in his dismemberment of their mutual Czechoslovak neighbor.

What Morawiecki deliberately didn’t mention is that Poland signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934 that lasted until the official outbreak of World War II in Europe. It also annexed a sliver of disputed territory in Czechoslovakia called Trans-Olza (“Zaolzie” in Polish)  in 1938 right after Munich. This made Warsaw a direct party to Hitler’s first erasure of an independent country from the map, not counting Austria of course but that state’s population largely agreed to what’s regarded as the so-called “Anschluss”. After this geopolitical jackal fed the Nazi beast and even dined with it at the same table over their mutual neighbor’s corpse, Hitler’s appetite became insatiable and he inevitably turned his sights onto Poland, which formally sparked the Second World War.

The late former Polish President Lech Kaczynski even apologized for this on 1 September 2009. According to the official website of the President of the Republic of Poland, he said that “Two generations have passed but the Second World War still requires reflection; Poland’s participation in the reduction of territory of Czechoslovakia was not only a mistake – it was a sin, and Poland can admit as much.” This was a brave act of historical justice by publicly acknowledging Poland’s cardinal sin that arguably set World War II into motion by making it inevitable in hindsight. One can only wonder what would have happened had Poland agreed to its Soviet neighbor’s request to allow the transit of troops through its territory to stop Czechoslovakia’s geopolitical dismemberment instead of participating in it.

Digging deeper, the historical context is a bit more complex than it might seem. The annexed sliver of that neighboring country was historically inhabited by ethnic Poles and was occupied by Czechoslovakia shortly after World War I during the Polish-Soviet War. Nevertheless, territorial irredentism on an ethno-historical basis was the very same motivation that formally drove Hitler’s international conquests ahead of World War II, which suggests that interwar Poland actually shared his vision in principle with respect to advancing their own geopolitical interests on that pretext. That of course doesn’t justify the Nazi war machine’s subsequent invasion of that country and ultimate killing of 6 million of its citizens (approximately half of whom were Jewish), it just makes it all the more tragically ironic.

It also raises questions about Poland’s official historical interpretation of what’s since come to be known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Warsaw never tires of claiming that Moscow conspired with Berlin to dismember its newly independent nation yet the Soviet Union was actually the last European country to enter into an agreement with Hitler and only did it as a last resort to buy time and build a buffer prior to the fascists’ inevitable invasion of the USSR. Furthermore, that communist country’s claims towards the eastern territories of the former Second Polish Republic were similar to Poland’s towards Trans-Olza: they were inhabited by the oppressed Belarusian and Ukrainian minorities of their neighboring eponymous Soviet Republics who were occupied by a geopolitically opportunistic Poland.

The run-up to World War II was extremely complicated and should therefore remain the realm of credentialed experts to calmly discuss in pursuit of the most objective interpretation of historical truth possible. It mustn’t be politicized by openly Russophobic leaders like Morawiecki for immediately self-serving purposes related to whatever the present security crisis might be such as the one connected to Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine that Poland’s American allies provoked. The Polish Prime Minister shamelessly engaged in historical revisionism about Hitler by implying that his own country never negotiated with that Nazi beast despite having agreed to a non-aggression pact with it in 1934 prior to jointly dismembering Czechoslovakia several years later right after Munich.