European leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, will mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the second world war in Warsaw on Sunday. But Donald Trump – who cancelled on his Polish hosts at the last-minute last week, citing concerns over a hurricane barrelling towards Florida – was due to spend the day at his golf club in Virginia.
The conflict began in the early hours of 1 September 1939, when a Nazi battleship attacked a garrison of Polish soldiers at Westerplatte. Poland’s government had moved this year’s commemorations from Westerplatte, near the Baltic port city of Gdańsk, to Warsaw, in anticipation of a visit from the US president, who was to give the keynote speech. But Trump cancelled, citing Hurricane Dorian , and sent vice-president Mike Pence in his stead.
Shortly after Trump cancelled, Merkel made a last-minute announcement that she would attend. Yesterday it emerged that Trump, who had given the impression he would spend the day at Camp David with experts to monitor Dorian’s progress, had in fact flown by helicopter from Camp David to his Virginia golf club. He is expected to return to Washington on Sunday to attend a briefing at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).,,,
Two days after the attack on Westerplatte and following a Nazi assault on other parts of Poland, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain made his famous radio declaration that “this country is now at war with Germany”. Despite this, little practical assistance was given to Poland, which was crushed within weeks by the Nazis and invaded by the Soviet Union from the east, according to a pact signed by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in August 1939 that contained a secret protocol by which the two powers would divide Europe.
Germany made an emotional appeal for forgiveness to neighboring Poland 80 years after the start of World War II that was met by a renewed demand for reparations by the fellow European Union member’s prime minister.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, filling in after a cancellation by President Donald Trump, praised Poland‘s wartime heroism at the commemoration and said the evils of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism amounted to a period in history when men had “forgotten God.”
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, visiting the town of Wielun, Poland, where Nazi bombers caused the first large-scale civilian casualties of the conflict in an air raid on Sept. 1, 1939, said his country won’t forget the past and takes responsibility for the war’s terror and atrocities.
“I bow my head before the victims of the attack on Wielun, I bow my head in front of the Polish victims of German tyranny and ask for forgiveness,” Steinmeier said, first in German and then in Polish, at an event hosted by his counterpart Andrzej Duda.
