Did Polish authorities demolish a Soviet era WWII monument at the gravesite of Red Army soldiers? No, that's not true: The site contained no graves at the time the monument was dismantled in accordance with a 2016 Polish law aimed at removing monuments that glorify the Red Army.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) where it was published by sotnik_tiktok on May 5, 2023 with a caption that reads:
In Poland a monument of gratitude to the Red Army was demolished. It is a gravesite to more than 500 Soviet soldiers that liberated Poland from Nazism.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon May 29 05:43:38 2023 UTC)
The demolition occurred on May 5th in Glubczyce, southern Poland and was part of a wider effort to remove Soviet war memorials across Poland in accordance with a 2016 Polish law calling for the prohibition of propagation of communism or any other totalitarian system through the names of all public buildings, structures and facilities.
The state run Institute of National Remembrance of Poland cited Polish Red Cross documentation showing that the remains of 676 Red Army soldiers were exhumed from the site in 1952 and said it was no longer a burial site. A spokesman for the Institute said 28 such Soviet era monuments have so far been removed out of 60 so far identified across the nation.
Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union at the start of WWII and was ruled by a Moscow backed communist government tunnel 1989.
