- The Guardian Sat urday 31 Aug ust 2019
(^38) World
Shaun Walker
Westerplatte, Poland
S
hortly before 5am on
1 September 1939, the
German battleship
Schleswig-Holstein fi red
at a garrison of Polish
soldiers stationed on
the Westerplatte peninsula, part of
what was then the internationally
administered city of Danzig, now
Polish Gdańsk.
The attack marked the start of
a war that would eventually kill
millions of people and go down as
the most appalling confl ict in the
history of humanity.
As European leaders head to
Poland for commemorations to
mark the 80th anniversary of the
outbreak of the second world war
tomorrow, its bloody events are
being politicised and exploited more
than ever across the continent.
Poland’s nationalist Law and
Justice (PiS) party had invited
Donald Trump to Warsaw to give the
keynote speech– a move that many
feared would hardly contribute to
a tone of solemn commemoration.
On Trump’s last visit to the Polish
capital , he invoked the war tospeak of the west’s need to stand
up to enemies, using dark clash-of-
civilisations rhetoric.
Trump’s last-minute decision to
cancel his trip and send the vice -
president, Mike Pence, in his stead,
along with German chancellor
Angela Merkel’s last-minute
decision to attend, means there is
less potential for grandstanding
speeches. But in Poland and across
Europe, a bitter debate continues to
rage on what lessons to draw from
the confl ict.
Ten years ago, on the 70th
anniversary, the Russian president,
Vladimir Putin, and Merkel met
at Westerplatte, and there were
signs that European nations may be
edging closer to reconciliation over
the terrible events of the war. As the
80th anniversary comes around, the
atmosphere is very diff erent.
In many central European
countries, governments are focu sing
on Nazi atrocities during the war
and playing down stories of local
Holocaust collaboration, while
nativist politicians across the
region indulge in airbrushed, heroic
histories from the war.
In Britain, the war eff ort and
casualties are regularly invoked in
discussions about Brexit.launched an online campaign
with slick animations and a
#TruthaboutWWII Twitter hashtag.
The culture minister, Vladimir
Medinsky, wrote a column calling
the pact “a triumph of Soviet
diplomacy”.
While Merkel and the German
president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier,
will attend tomorrow’s anniversary,
Putin has not been invited.
Inside Poland too, the battles
over war memory have grown
more fi erce. Until recently, the
Westerplatte site, dominated by a
communist-era granite monument,
was controlled by the Gdańsk city
administration, run by the liberal
opposition to PiS.
Recently, however, the central
government has wrested control of
the site through a court ruling, and
wants to construct a new museum
to commemorate the heroism of the
defenders, due to be built by 2023.
Gdańsk’s liberal mayor,
Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, who took
up the post after the former mayor,
Paweł Adamowicz, was stabbed
earlier this year , said government
messaging over the war was wrong-
headed and infl ammatory.
City authorities plan their own,
separate commemoration event
tomorrow, where guests will include
the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.
“Of course Polish soldiers were
heroes, but on the 80th anniversary
this should not be the most
important message. The other way
to show this history is to think how
tragic it was, and use it to create a
new peaceful way of success for
Poland,” said Dulkiewicz.Second world war Nationalists
exploit 1939 anniversary events
In Russia, Putin has gradually
transformed the war victory and the
enormous Soviet sacrifi ce in the war
into a bombastic celebration and a
chance for militaristic posturing.
In eastern Ukraine, Russian-
backed forces have gone into battle
carrying fl ags inspired by the second
world war victory.
In the run-up to the anniversary,
the Russian government launched
a campaign to rehabilitate the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, signed
between Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union a week before the
attack on Westerplatte, which
included secret protocols by which
Berlin and Moscow would divide
eastern Europe. Within a few
weeks, Poland had been split and
dismembered by the two powers.
Russia’s foreign ministry hasDetective in
famous Lee
Harvey Oswald
photograph
dies aged 99
Associated Press
DallasJim Leavelle, the Dallas detective who
was captured in one of history’s most
famous photographs as he escorted
President John F Kennedy’s assassin
moments before he was fatally shot,
has died aged 99.
Leavelle, distinctive in his light-
coloured suit and white stetson, is
seen in the Pulitzer prize-winning
photograph with his hand on Lee Har-
vey Oswald. His body stiff en ed as the
nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot the
handcuff ed assassin at close range
on live TV in 1963. Leavelle appears
shocked as Oswald grimaces in pain.
Leavelle’s daughter, Tanya Evers,
said yesterday that her father died
on Thursday while visiting her sister
in Colorado. He fell earlier this week
and broke his hip, requiring surgery
at a Denver hospital, Evers said. He
responded well to the surgery , but
later suff ered a heart attack.
In the decades after the assassi-
nation Leavelle regularly spoke at
schools and before various groups
because he believed “he had a respon-
sibility to share his story”, said Evers,
who lives in San Antonio.
Her father received letters nearly
every day from people asking ques-
tions about the assassination or
invoking any one of several conspir-
acy theories, she said.
“He really felt a need to address the
theories, ” Evers said. “He wanted to
make sure that people knew there was
no conspiracy and that one misguided
person could take a shot at a president
and succeed. ”
Leavelle joined the Dallas police
force in 1950 and retired in 1975. He
was among the lead detectives who
investigated Kennedy’s assassination
on 22 November 1963.
In 2013, Dallas police commanders
honoured Leavelle with the police
commendation award and announced
that the department’s detective of
the year award would be named after
him. In accepting the honour, Leavelle
said he was thinking of other deserv-
ing offi cers, including J D Tippit, who
was shot dead by Oswald when he tried
to question him 45 minutes after Ken-
nedy’s assassination.
Leavelle also said that when he
saw Ruby approach in the basement
of Dallas police headquarters, he tried
unsuccessfully to jerk Oswald behind
him to shield him from harm.▲ Jim Leavelle recoils as assassin Lee
Harvey Oswald is shot by Jack Ruby▼ Adolf Hitler greets the crew of the
Schleswig-Holstein, the warship
that fi red the fi rst shots of the war
PHOTOGRAPH: ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGESAleksandra Dulkiewicz
Mayor of Gdańsk‘Of course Polish
soldiers were heroes,
but the way to show
history is to think
how tragic it was’RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws