Antoni Szacki
Antoni Szacki, was a Polish military officer and activist. He was a National Radical Camp activist, captain of the Polish Army of the Second Republic, colonel of the National Armed Forces, commander of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade of the NSZ-ZJ, and collaborator with the Germans during World War II.
Early life and education
Antoni Szacki was born on 1 March 1902. As a result of his father's participation in the Russian Revolution of 1905, the whole family was exiled to Tomsk in Siberia. There they stayed until 1910, when Szacki's father died. They then moved to Kharkiv, where Szacki attended secondary school. There he lived through the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. In 1919, he returned to Warsaw and volunteered for the army. He was assigned to the 1st Krechowiec Uhlan Regiment. During the 1920 campaign, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks, from which he was only released after the signing of the Riga peace treaty.In 1923, he passed the exam and went to study at the Warsaw Polytechnic. He abandoned his studies, however, and in 1924 went to the Officer Infantry School in Warsaw. As a student there, he took part in the fighting during the May 1926 coup against Piłsudski's rebel troops. He was wounded during the coup. In 1927, he received the rank of second lieutenant and was sent to the 76th Infantry Regiment in Grodno, where he served until September 1939. In 1934, he became a member of the National Radical Camp
Activities in World War 2
At the beginning of the September campaign in 1939, Szacki was placed on the staff of what was then, the Prussian Army. After it was broken up by the German army, he found himself in Lviv and was taken prisoner by the Germans, from which he escaped and made his way to Kraków. He eventually arrived in Zagnańsk.In 1940, he joined the Jaszczurcze Union, and then the National Armed Forces where he served as chief of staff of District V of the Kielce for the NSZ. After the split that occurred in the NSZ in March/April of 1944, he sided with the faction originating from the "Szaniec group", which did not agree to the subordination to the Home Army (NSZ-ZJ).
From August 1944, he was commander of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade of the NSZ-ZJ. Under his command, the unit had been in constant contact with the head of the Gestapo cell responsible for fighting the Polish underground in the Radom district, SS-Hauptsturmführer Paul Fuchs, through a German agent named Hubert Jura. "Tom", who held the position of special tasks officer in the brigade and, even before the brigade was established, had set up an intelligence organisation named after his nickname Tom, which collaborated with the Gestapo and SS in fighting the communist underground and political opponents of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade from non-communist resistance organisations, with a plan for the ONR-derived political base of the brigade to seize full power in Poland by means of a coup d'état and introduce a fascist dictatorship there.
In January 1945, in the face of the Red Army offensive approaching Poland, the brigade withdrew together with the Germans from the Kielce region through Silesia to the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where in the last days of the war it went over to the side of the American troops. On 5 May 1945, it liberated the Nazi women's concentration camp in Holýšov near Plzeň and then made contact with the American 3rd Army of General George S. Patton. Due to its past, however, it was a politically inconvenient ally for the Americans and was therefore disbanded by the American command in August 1945. The formation had German officers supply and ammunition supplies and dislocated according to the orders of the German command. The overt collaboration of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade commanders, including Szacki, with the Germans was reported in Home Army reports to the Polish Government in Exile, London. After the end of World War II, the head of the intelligence desk of the Kielce Inspectorate of the Home Army, Capt Leon Torliński alias "Kret", arrived in England.
In September 1945, he became commander of the Polish Guard Companies in the American occupation zone in Germany, into which some of the former soldiers of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade were incorporated. He was removed in March 1946. It is likely that the Americans sensed at the time that the Communist Polish authorities might accuse him of collaboration or war crimes and demand his extradition. Any confirmation of the charges against him would have put them in an awkward position. According to the law of the time, the Polish authorities first had to apply to the United Nations War Crimes Commission to declare Szacki a war criminal. On the basis of the UNWCC's's decision, the accused was then included in the Central Registry of War Criminals and Suciurity Suspects lists, which were treated as letters of indictment. The final decision on extradition rested with the occupation authorities. In view of the fact that the UNWCC did not deal with Allied nationals who had committed collaboration with the Germans, it initially decided to approach the US military authorities directly, bypassing the UNWCC. After the anticipated refusal, the intention was to appeal to the Allied German Control Council, wishing to take the whole matter to an international forum. The head of the Polish Military Mission for the Investigation of German War Crimes, Lieutenant Colonel Marion Mushkat, disagreed with this position, arguing that preparations for an application to the UNWCC should be continued, accusing Szacki not of collaboration, but above all of "murdering AL partisans, looting peasants, collaborating with the SS in the persecution of civilians and prisoners of war".
In January 1947, Mushkat applied to register Szacki on the UNWCC list. In March, the UNWCC included the former commander of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade on the list of war criminals under number 4187. However, due to the fact that he was a Polish citizen, it was not possible to obtain his inclusion on the CRWCSS list. Despite the unfavourable attitude of the Americans, in September 1947 the Polish authorities managed to obtain an extradition warrant for Szacki, but it never happened, probably because of the close cooperation between the Brigade's milieu and the American Army's counterintelligence.
Life post-World War 2
In February 1949, Antoni Szacki left the American occupation zone of Germany and settled in France, where he took up farming. Following confirmation of this information, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a note to the French embassy in Warsaw in April 1949 demanding that Szacki be arrested and handed over to Poland. The Polish authorities counted on the support of the French Communist Party and the influential left-wing press in France in this matter. However, the tardy actions of the Polish embassy in Paris and the tense Polish-French relations, which had deteriorated considerably following the arrest and prosecution of several French citizens for espionage activities and their subsequent sentencing to long prison sentences by the Communist courts, meant that these actions failed. In August 1950, Antoni Szacki was detained in Toulouse, but after a few days the court there ordered his release and rejected the extradition request. In its reasoning, the court stressed that the charges formulated against Szacki by the communist Polish government were clearly political in nature and violated his rights.In 1956, he moved to the United States.
He died on 2 July 1992 in Costa Mesa, California, and sometime after 1992, he was awarded the, although he had previously held the Silver Cross with Swords of the original decoration of the same name since 1944.
Writings
Antoni Szacki wrote and published a book entitled Byłem dowódcą Brygady Świętokrzyskiej, in which, in addition to the fate of the unit he commanded, he criticised the organisers of the Warsaw Uprising, as well as its final balance sheet, citing 200,000 dead, the capital completely destroyed within 63 days, along with all the priceless centuries-old heritage of the Polish nation.His memoirs contain a number of misrepresentations, serving to present himself and his unit in the best possible light. Among other things, he writes about the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade taking the staff of the 13th German Army, including 2 generals, captive in cooperation with the 2nd Armoured Division of the US Army. In reality, the 2nd Armoured Division was stationed hundreds of kilometres away from the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade, and there was no army numbered 13 in the Third Reich armed forces. Nevertheless, these memoirs are often treated completely uncritically.