Report from the three-day International Conference World Battlefield Museums Forum, that took place at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk (4-6 September, 2018). Thank you for being with us!

White-and-red flags, banners with slogans “Leve de Bevrijders!” (Long live the liberators!), “Long live Poland”, flowers – in this way the Flemish community welcomed the Polish 1st Armoured Division commanded by gen. Maczek. This grateful remembrance is still alive after so many years.

World Battlefield Museums Forum - Watch Live!

Poland was the first country to fiirmly resist the brutal expansion of the totalitarian powers that were utterly indifferent to the rights of weaker countries. Poland's armed resistance to German aggression on September 1, 1939, was a turning point in world politics towards tthe Third Reich. Contrary to the hopes of Adolf Hitler, on the third day after the commencement of military operations the German attack on Poland transformed into a world war. 

On 23 August 1939, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a nonaggression treaty in Moscow commonly known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov or Hitler-Stalin Pact. Its most important element was an additional secret protocol agreeing on a division of East Central Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.

The Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk organizes a unique conference dedicated to the most famous historical battlefields in the World. Its speakers will be guests from Pearl Harbor and Gettysburg (USA), Marathon (Greece), Waterloo (Belgium), Gallipoli (Turkey), Verdun (France) and many others.