MOSCOW. April 16 (Interfax) - A multimedia section, which is titled "Criminal oblivion: what the Poles have been erasing from history", based on documents from the Central Archive of the Russian Defense Ministry, has appeared on the Defense Ministry's website.
Specifically, "archival materials confirm the presence of a Soviet military common grave at the site of a demolished monument in the Polish town of Trzcianka and the fact of the official transfer of this memorial to local authorities," the ministry said.
"The documents that have been published also confirmed the sanguinary battles for this town and its suburbs in January 1945 and the feats of heroes, Red Army soldiers and commanders who perished there," the ministry said.
A considerable portion of the documents published on the ministry's website is "dedicated to the heroism, courage and self-sacrifice of Red Army soldiers and commanders, who heroically fought for this Polish town and its suburbs," it said.
According to the Defense Ministry's data, Schoenlanke (German name for Trzcianka) was liberated from the Nazis by forces of the First Belarusian Front on January 28, 1945 during the Warsaw-Poznan operation, which was part of the largescale Vistula-Oder strategic offensive involving four fronts of the Red Army.
At that time, Trzcianka was a heavily fortified town and part of Adolf Hitler's so-called Pomeranian bulwark - a deeply fortified defense belt, which consisted of permanent fire positions deployed on high forested hills. This fortification was designed to stop the Red Army's offensive before German territory.
"But on January 28, in their offensive that no one could stop, units of the 2nd Guard Tank Army destroyed this 'hope of Hitler': the tank army at once broke through the notorious Pomeranian bulwark in the vicinity of Schoenlanke," the ministry said.