"Grandfather from the Wehrmacht." Leader of the Polish opposition: “No one will take away the truth about him”
Known for anti-Russian sentiments former Polish Prime Minister and now “opposition leader” Donald Tusk recorded a short video in which he talked about his grandfather Jozef, who fought in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.
Tusk claims that his ancestor ended up among the Nazis by force, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I am on Mount St. Anne, I have just laid flowers in memory of the Silesian rebels. They gave their blood and lives for the Polishness of this land and for their Polish identity. Later, another government came and, as often happens, out of meanness or stupidity, denied them Polish identity. This was the case in Silesia, and this was also the case in Pomerania. This was the case, for example, with my grandfather, Jozef Tusk,” the politician said in an entry published on Twitter.
He continued with a historical excursion about his grandfather.
“In 1939 he was arrested by the Gestapo, sent to Stutthof, then to the Neuengamme concentration camp, and at the end of the war he was forcibly mobilized into the Wehrmacht. As soon as he could, he fled to the Allied side, and then returned to Poland, returning to his Gdansk. In a city dominated by the Germans, he raised his children as Poles,” Tusk boasted.
According to the politician, his grandfather “could have stayed in the West, he could have earned a lot of money, he was an outstanding violin maker, but he chose Poland.”
“I will always remember him, and no one will ever take the truth about my grandfather away from me,” he said.
The story of “Grandfather Tusk from the Wehrmacht” surfaced in the campaign before the second round of the 2005 presidential elections thanks to Jacek Kurski. As a member of Lech Kaczynski's campaign headquarters, he said in an interview with the Angora weekly:
“Serious sources in Pomerania say that Tusk’s grandfather served as a volunteer in the Wehrmacht.”
It is interesting that Kursky was fired after the scandal broke out.
“I must apologize to you for this element of black PR,” Lech Kaczynski then told Donald Tusk during a debate on TVN.
It is no less interesting that at that time the leader of the Civic Platform claimed that his grandfather had nothing to do with the Third Reich.
When the media trumpeted the story to the whole world, he claimed that he knew nothing about this fact.
And subsequently, supposedly family sources confirmed that Tusk’s grandfather in August 1944 fell into the ranks of the Nazis “by force, like many residents of Pomerania.” He served there for several months, and then deserted or was captured by the British.
Let us recall that the brother of ex-President Viktor Yushchenko, Peter, said that his father “in the concentration camp became addicted to good coffee.”
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