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Europe marks anniversary of WWII beginning

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-01 03:20

GDANSK: European and American officials plan to mark Tuesday's 70th anniversary of World War II with a ceremony bringing former friends and foes together on the Baltic peninsula where the conflict began.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk - along with around 20 foreign dignitaries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and US National Security Adviser James Jones - will attend the ceremony paying tribute to the tens of millions who lost their lives in the war.

At dawn on Sep 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled a tiny Polish military outpost on the Westerplatte peninsula, where the Polish navy's arsenal was kept, in the war's opening salvo.

Within less than a month 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.

It was the beginning of more than five years of war that would engulf the world and see more than 50 million people slaughtered as the German war machine rolled over Europe.

Poland alone lost some 6 million citizens - 3 million of them Jews - and more than half its national wealth in destroyed factories, torched museums, libraries and villages. During the Nazi occupation, the country was also to be used as base for the occupying Nazis' genocide machinery, home to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor and other death camps built for the annihilation of Europe's Jews.

Related readings:  Putin blames WWII on West's deal with Hitler  Town wants world to know where WW II started  WW II grave brings Poles, Germans together

At the height of the war, the European theater stretched from North Africa to the outskirts of Moscow, and pitted Germany and its allies, including Italy, against Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States, along with a host of other countries, including Polish forces in exile.

The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, with Germany's unconditional surrender.

Tuesday's ceremonies begin with a state service at the foot of the monument on Westerplatte at 4:40 am (0240GMT), the exact hour of the Nazi assault in 1939 on Polish forces stationed there.

Later in the day, around 20 European leaders and officials including Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, French Premier Francois Fillon and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, will take part in a larger service on Westerplatte.

But the presence of Merkel and Putin - the leaders of the countries that invaded Poland in the fall of 1939 - has sparked the most interest in Poland.

Warsaw enjoys generally warm ties with Germany, and Merkel welcomed her invitation to the events, pointing to it a "signal of reconciliation" between the two countries. Both are members of the European Union.

She called Sep 1 is "a day of mourning for the suffering" that Nazi Germany brought on Europe and of "remembrance of the guilt Germany brought upon itself" by starting the war.

Poland's relations with Russia, meanwhile, remain tense.

But in a letter to Poles published in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on the eve of the anniversary, Putin called for "joint grief and forgiveness" in the hope that "Russian-Polish relations will sooner or later reach such a high level of true partnership," as Russian-German ties.