World leaders remember WW II outbreak

GDANSK, Poland, Sept. 1 (UPI) -- World leaders Tuesday remembered the 70th anniversary of the start of the most devastating war in human history.

It was still dark when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, sent by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, opened fire on the Westerplatte military base in Gdansk harbor in the early hours of Sept. 1, 1939. The attack on Poland was the first step to World War II, a conflict that lasted until May 5, 1945 and eventually killed 50 million people, including 6 million Poles.

"Germany attacked Poland. Germany started World War II. We caused unending suffering in the world," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday on German television.

Merkel was one of many world leaders to attend a wreath-laying ceremony in Gdansk at a cemetery where the 180 defenders of the Westerplatte, who held the naval station for days against 3,500 Germans, are buried.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was also present; Russia in 1939 had signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany that led to the partition of the country. Hitler's Germany occupied western Poland; Russia, led by Josef Stalin, took the east.

Putin in the run-up to the ceremony condemned the pact but said it had been Russia's only option. President Lech Kaczynski, playing to a widespread conviction of his fellow Poles, said Tuesday that Russia with the pact had "stuck a knife in the back of Poland."

Poland and Russia remain at loggerheads over the Red Army's role in the attack on Poland. The mass execution of the Polish officer corps was blamed on the Nazis, but it surfaced after the breakup of the Soviet Union that they were shot by Red Army soldiers on Stalin's orders. After the war, Poland remained under Soviet domination until 1989.

Despite the diplomatic tensions between Poland and Russia, World War II remains Germany's main responsibility.

Two days after the Nazi attack on Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Hitler's massive armed forces nevertheless swept nearly the entire western half of the continent in 1940 before turning on Russia as well. The conflict went global when the United States after a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, entered the war. It ended with Germany's and Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945.