General Overview of the Polish Resistance Movement

[Odin of Ossetia]

General Overview of the Polish Resistance Movement




"(...).

The first manifestation of the inflexibility of the conquered, a manifestation of the invincible belief in final victory, was bringing into being in capitulating Warsaw an underground combat organization, which was given a name the Service for the Victory of Poland. Its first commander, for a while though, had become General Micha³ Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz. In December it transformed into the Association of Armed Struggle (Zwi¹zek Walki Zbrojnej - ZWZ), controlled from Paris by Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski, appointed by Gen. W³adys³aw Sikorski, then Supreme Commander. After the fall of France the command of ZWZ was held by Gen. Sosnkowski from London, until his political breakthrough with the Supreme Commander and the Polish prime-minister; Gen. Sosnkowski had to resign because he opposed the Soviet-Polish alliance, concluded on 30 July 1941 by Gen. Sikorski and the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky. In February 1942 ZWZ was transformed into the Home Army (Armia Krajowa - AK), the first commander of which became Gen. Stefan Rowecki (Grot), one of outstanding Polish junior commanders; he belonged to those officers of the pre-war Polish army, who from the beginning were impressed by issues of armoured units. When Rowecki was arrested by Gestapo, what happened in summer 1943 due to a betrayal, the commander of the Home Army became Tadeusz Komorowski (Bor).

Simultaneously with the Home Army were arising in whole Poland many resistance groups, which were created by various political groups, or just by more venturesome people. The merging of the large number of organizations, usually acting in a complete isolation, cost a lot of work and lives. Many commanders, despite of the cause, refused to subordinate to a central headquarter. They attempted, surely noble but na¿vely, to fight and to win with their own, mostly very tiny, forces.

Basically the Home Army was disposed towards the general uprising only during the final stage of the war, when an occupation regime would collapse; it had to intercept the country's territory and to hand it over into hands of the government coming from exile. Besides the Home Army was carrying out intelligence; among others it signalled German preparations to the war against the Soviet Union and had gained and handed over to the British plans of German missile weapon V-2, which was designated to overpower Great Britain towards the close of the war. A strong detachment under the cryptonym Wachlarz (Fan), brought into being to support a future uprising by destruction of enemy's communications out of Poland, since April till December 1942 was demolishing railways, transports and storages in eastern territories, then its soldiers reinforced other specialized units of AK. There were also committed many outrages on senior German commanders and officials, among others the chief of the police and SS in Warsaw, Kutschera, was shot. About 1600 railway transports were destroyed and about 2000 Gestapo agents were liquidated. [Rawski-Stapor]

The partisan warfare as the main form of the fight was adopted from the beginning by the People's Guard (Gwardia Ludowa - GL), created in January 1942 as a combat organization of the Polish Workers' Party. The first partisan detachment of GL, led by Franciszek Zubrzycki (Ma³y Franek), went from Warsaw to the region of Piotrkow Trybunalski on 15 May 1942. The detachment was lost in battle but by December 1942 there were 29 fighting GL's groups and detachments, and by autumn 1943 - as many as 60. [Rawski-Stapor] Then started the formation of battalions. Later the People's Guard became the core of the People's Army created by the decree of just being created the National Council of Homeland. To it's commander was appointed General Micha³ ¯ymierski (Rola), a veteran of the First World War and a graduate of the French École Supérieure de Guerre. Within the year 1944 the People's Army formed 10 partisan brigades and about 20 smaller units, [Rawski-Stapor] which were disorganizing German communication routes between the Reich and eastern front as well as struggling with German occupation system. In April 1944 in the Soviet Union was created the Polish Partisan Headquarter, in van of which was Gen. Aleksander Zawadzki. It resided in Shpanov near Rovno and organized the training and transfer to Poland of sabotage and diversion groups.

Since 1943 the Home Army as well formed partisan detachments too. Their cadres were constituted mostly by the officers sent from Great Britain where they got a versatile training in diversion and then they were dropped with parachutes to Poland. That is why they were called cichociemni (silent and dark) - because they usually landed in Poland by silent and dark nights. Partisan detachments of the Home Army played a serious role in many fights, carried out either by own forces or with the detachments of the People's Guard and the Peasant Battalions, a combat organization of the Peasant Party, among others in Vilnius, province of Zamosc, on Tanew river and in Sola Forest. In the summer 1944 the command of AK undertook an operation Burza (Tempest), the goal of which was to destroy the German defence in face of the Soviet army's offensive and to intercept the power in Poland in name of the government in exile residing in London and led, after the death of Gen. Sikorski, by Stanis³aw Miko³ajczyk. The culminant and the most tragic episode in the history of the Home Army was the Warsaw Uprising. It was the greatest and the longest uprising operation of a kind in the field of human conflicts. However ill-prepared, launched prematurely and without a co-operation with regular allied forces it finished with the most horrible defeat in Poland's history.

A particular tragedy of the war had become the fate of the beforehand sentenced by Adolf Hitler to extermination Jewish population of occupied countries. The biggest part of it, about 3,500,000, lived in Poland. [Verstandig] As early as in autumn 1939, promptly after the Polish campaign, hitlerite administration began to drive the Jews away to isolated urban districts and provincial centres. Similar ghettoes were subsequently created in other conquered countries. The biggest however were those in Warsaw and Lodz, of about 500,000 and 300,000 people respectively. [Verstandig] With time invaders began to transport to Poland the Jews from other European countries. They were in for death in one of the extermination camps, mainly in gas chambers of a large, called later a "death factory", death camp near Oswiecim (Auschwitz). An inborn to contemporary Jewish communities passivity and subjection to state authorities were maintained by the Germans with the assistance of traitors and ambiguous promises to spare their life in exchange for a hard work for the Reich and release the remnants of the possessions. In an inexpressible crowd of ghettoes and poverty of the most inmates thousands were dying of starvation.

The whole Europe was tormented by the barbaric occupation; every day of the long war cost the nations of Europe twenty thousand killed or murdered. Everywhere the help to the Jews was imperilled by punishments, even up to a death penalty. Nevertheless the help to the Jews had grown to a wide scale. In Poland there was brought into being the Council for Aid to the Jews (under the cryptonym ¯egota); in exile the governments of the occupied countries appealed to the powers to undertake warning and repressive measures, which could stop the process of annihilation of the Jewish nation. Unfortunately, in vain - simply nobody believed the reports from occupied countries; they were deemed exaggerated, and the most reluctant were the influential Jewish circles in the United States.

But even in passive crowds harassed in ghettoes had to and did arise various forms of resistance. In Warsaw ghetto in October 1942 was created the Jewish Combat Organization (¯ydowska Organizacja Bojowa - ¯OB), which with an aid of AK and GL started a military training of volunteers, gathering the weapons and persecution of traitors. When a next stage of deportations to extermination camps began and when the news came about just resolved, complete liquidation of the rest of the Jews, on 10 April 1943 the 600-men strong ¯OB struck against hitlerite troops marching in ghetto. [Verstandig] The uprising of course had no chance to win, but it proved to the Germans that even the most hunted down will not submit to hitlerite verdicts. Against the insurgents was used the artillery, demolishing house after house, and eventually the poison gas, when they fiercely fought in a system of underground bunkers. The uprising extinct on 8 May, when its commander Mordechaj Anielewicz died. Polish resistance saved some survivors, others were put to death at the camp of Treblinka. On 16 May, in the report to his superiors, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop (after the war sentenced to death for war crimes) reported that the former Jewish quarter in Warsaw is no more.1 The military onrushes though to a less scale took place in other Polish towns - Czestochowa, Bedzin and Hrubieszow as well as in the USSR in Vilnius, Belostok, Kremenets, Kletsk and Glubokoye.

(...)."




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