Polish resistance movement in World War II


In Poland, the resistance movement during World War II was led by the Home Army. The Polish resistance is notable among others for disrupting German supply lines to the Eastern Front, and providing intelligence reports to the British intelligence agencies. It was a part of the Polish Underground State.

Organizations

The largest of all Polish resistance organizations was the Armia Krajowa, loyal to the Polish government in exile in London. The AK was formed in 1942 from the Union of Armed Struggle and would eventually incorporate most other Polish armed resistance groups. It was the military arm of the Polish Underground State and loyal to the Polish government in Exile.
Most of the other Polish underground armed organizations were created by a political party or faction, and included:
  • The Bataliony Chłopskie. Created by the leftist People's Party around 1940–1941, it would partially merge with AK around 1942–1943.
  • The Gwardia Ludowa WRN of Polish Socialist Party
  • The Konfederacja Narodu. Created in 1940 by far-right Obóz Narodowo Radykalny-Falanga. It would partially merge with ZWZ around 1941 and finally join AK around fall 1943.
  • The Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa, established by the National Party in 1939, mostly integrated with AK around 1942.
  • Narodowe Siły Zbrojne ; created in 1943 from dissatisfied NOW units, which refused to be subordinated to the AK.
  • The Obóz Polski Walczącej, established by the Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego around 1942, subordinated to AK. in 1943.
The largest groups that refused to join the AK were the National Armed Forces and the pro-Soviet and communist People's Army, backed by the Soviet Union and established by the Polish Workers' Party.
Regarding the scale and scope of the Polish resistance, Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler noted on 31 December 1942:

Size

In February 1942, when AK was formed, it numbered about 100,000 members. In the beginning of 1943, it had reached a strength of about 200,000. In the summer of 1944 when Operation Tempest began, AK reached its highest membership numbers, though the estimates vary from 300,000 to 500,000. The strength of the second largest resistance organization, Bataliony Chłopskie, can be estimated for summer 1944 at about 160,000 men. The third largest group include NSZ with approximately 70,000 men around 1943–1944; only small parts of that force were merged with AK. At its height in 1944, the communist Armia Ludowa, which never merged with AK, numbered about 30,000 people. One estimate for the summer 1944 strength of AK and its allies, including NSZ, gives its strength at 650,000. Overall, the Polish resistance have often been described as the largest or one of the largest resistance organizations in World War II Europe.

Actions, operations, and intelligence, 1939–1945

1939

On 9 November 1939, two soldiers of the Polish armyWitold Pilecki and Major Jan Włodarkiewiczfounded the Secret Polish Army, one of the first underground organizations in Poland after defeat. Pilecki became its organizational commander as TAP expanded to cover not only Warsaw but Siedlce, Radom, Lublin and other major cities of central Poland. By 1940, TAP had approximately 8,000 men, some 20 machine guns and several anti-tank rifles. Later, the organization was incorporated into the Union for Armed Struggle, later renamed and better known as the Home Army.

1940

In March 1940, a partisan unit of the first guerrilla commanders in the Second World War in Europe under Major Henryk Dobrzański "Hubal" destroyed a battalion of German infantry in a skirmish near the village of Huciska. A few days later in an ambush near the village of Szałasy it inflicted heavy casualties upon another German unit. To counter this threat the German authorities formed a special 1,000 men strong counter-insurgency unit of combined SS–Wehrmacht forces, including a Panzer group. Although the unit of Major Dobrzański never exceeded 300 men, the Germans fielded at least 8,000 men in the area to secure it.
In 1940, Witold Pilecki, an intelligence officer for the Polish resistance, presented to his superiors a plan to enter Germany's Auschwitz concentration camp, gather intelligence on the camp from the inside, and organize inmate resistance. The Home Army approved this plan, provided him a false identity card, and on 19 September 1940, he deliberately went out during a street roundup in Warsaw and was caught by the Germans along with other civilians and sent to Auschwitz. In the camp he organized the underground organization – Związek Organizacji Wojskowej – ZOW. From October 1940, ZOW sent its first report about the camp and the genocide in November 1940 to Home Army Headquarters in Warsaw through the resistance network organized in Auschwitz.
During the night of 21–22 January 1940, in the Soviet-occupied Podolian town of Czortków, the Czortków Uprising started; it was the first Polish uprising during World War II. Anti-Soviet Poles, most of them teenagers from local high schools, stormed the local Red Army barracks and a prison, in order to release Polish soldiers kept there.
At the end of 1940 Aleksander Kamiński created a Polish youth resistance organization, known as "Wawer". It was part of the Szare Szeregi. This organisation carried out many minor sabotage operations in occupied Poland. Its first action was drawing graffiti in Warsaw around Christmas Eve of 1940 commemorating the Wawer massacre. Members of the AK Wawer "Small Sabotage" units painted "Pomścimy Wawer" on Warsaw walls. At first they painted the whole text, then to save time they shortened it to two letters, P and W. Later they invented Kotwica – "Anchor" – which became the symbol of all Polish resistance in occupied Poland.

1941

From April 1941 the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Union for Armed Struggle started Operation N headed by Tadeusz Żenczykowski. It involved sabotage, subversion and black-propaganda activities.
From March 1941, Witold Pilecki's reports were forwarded to the Polish government in exile and through it, to the British and other Allied governments. These reports informed the Allies about the Holocaust and were the principal source of intelligence on Auschwitz-Birkenau for the Western Allies.
On 7 March 1941, two Polish agents of the Home Army killed Nazi collaborator actor Igo Sym in his apartment in Warsaw. In reprisal, 21 Polish hostages were executed. Several Polish actors were also arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, among them such notable figures as directors Stefan Jaracz and Leon Schiller.
In July 1941 Mieczysław Słowikowski set up "Agency Africa", one of World War II's most successful intelligence organizations. His Polish allies in these endeavors included Lt. Col. Gwido Langer and Major Maksymilian Ciężki. The information gathered by the Agency was used by the Americans and British in planning the amphibious November 1942 Operation Torch landings in North Africa. These were the first large-scale Allied landings of the war, and their success in turn paved the way for the Allies' Italian campaign.

1942

On 20 June 1942, the most spectacular escape from Auschwitz concentration camp took place. Four Poles, Eugeniusz Bendera, Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster and Józef Lempart made a daring escape. The escapees were dressed as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, fully armed and in an SS staff car. They drove out the main gate in a stolen Steyr 220 automobile with a smuggled report from Witold Pilecki about the Holocaust. Three of the escapees remained free until the end of the war; Jaster, who joined the Polish Underground, was recaptured in 1943 and died shortly afterwards in German custody.
In September 1942 "The Żegota Council for the Aid of the Jews" was founded by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz and made up of Polish Democrats as well as other Catholic activists. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where there existed such a dedicated secret organization. Half of the Jews in Poland who survived the war were aided in some way by Żegota. The best-known activist of Żegota was Irena Sendler, head of the children's division, who saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false documents, and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the ghetto.
In 1942 Jan Karski reported to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the situation in Poland, especially the Holocaust of the Jews. He met with Polish politicians in exile including the prime minister, and members of political parties such as the Socialist Party, National Party, Labor Party, People's Party, Jewish Bund and Poalei Zion. He also spoke to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec.
The Zamość Uprising was an armed uprising of Armia Krajowa and Bataliony Chłopskie against the forced expulsion of Poles from the Zamość region under the Nazi Generalplan Ost. The Germans attempted to remove the local Poles from the Greater Zamość area to get it ready for German colonization. It lasted from 1942 until 1944 and despite heavy casualties suffered by the Underground, the Germans failed.
On the night from 7 to 8 October 1942 Operation Wieniec started. It targeted rail infrastructure near Warsaw. Similar operations aimed at disrupting and harrying German transport and communication in occupied Poland occurred in the coming months and years. It targeted railroads, bridges and supply depots, primarily near transport hubs such as Warsaw and Lublin.

1943

In early 1943 two Polish janitors of Peenemünde's Camp Trassenheide provided maps, sketches and reports to Armia Krajowa Intelligence, and in June 1943 British intelligence had received two such reports which identified the "rocket assembly hall', 'experimental pit', and 'launching tower'. When reconnaissance and intelligence information regarding the V-2 rocket became convincing, the War Cabinet Defence Committee directed the campaign's first planned raid and Operation Crossbow.
On 26 March 1943 in Warsaw Operation Arsenal was launched by the Szare Szeregi Polish Underground The successful operation led to the release of arrested troop leader Jan Bytnar "Rudy". In an attack on the prison, Bytnar and 24 other prisoners were freed.
In 1943 in London Jan Karski met the then much known journalist Arthur Koestler. He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His report was a major factor in informing the West. In July 1943, again personally reported to Roosevelt about the situation in Poland. He also met with many other government and civic leaders in the United States, including Felix Frankfurter, Cordell Hull, William Joseph Donovan, and Stephen Wise. Karski also presented his report to media, bishops of various denominations, members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but without success. Many of those he spoke to did not believe him, or supposed that his testimony was much exaggerated or was propaganda from the Polish government in exile.
In April 1943 the Germans began deporting the remaining Jews from the Warsaw ghetto provoking the Warsaw Ghetto Rising, 19 April to 16 May. Polish Underground State ordered Ghetto Action – a series of combat actions carried out by the Home Army during the uprising between 19 April 1943 and May 16, 1943.
Some units of the AK tried to assist the ghetto rising, but for the most part, the resistance was unprepared and unable to defeat the Germans. One Polish AK unit, the National Security Corps, under the command of Henryk Iwański, fought inside the ghetto along with ŻZW. Subsequently, both groups retreated together. Although Iwański's action is the most well-known rescue mission, it was only one of many actions undertaken by the Polish resistance to help the Jewish fighters. In one attack, three cell units of AK under the command of Kapitan Józef Pszenny tried to breach the ghetto walls with explosives, but the Germans defeated this action. AK and GL engaged the Germans between 19 and 23 April at six different locations outside the ghetto walls, shooting at German sentries and positions and in one case attempting to blow up a gate. Participation of the Polish underground in the uprising was many times confirmed by a report of the German commander – Jürgen Stroop.
File:V-2 Bug.jpg|thumb|left|AK members recovering V-2 from the Bug River.
In August 1943 the headquarters of the Armia Krajowa ordered Operation Belt which was one of the large-scale anti-Nazi operations of the AK during the war. By February 1944, 13 German outposts were destroyed with few losses on the Polish side.
Operation Heads began: the serial executions of German personnel who had been sentenced to death by Polish underground Special Courts for crimes against Polish citizens in German-occupied Poland.
On 7 September 1943, the Home Army killed Franz Bürkl during Operation Bürkl. Bürkl was a high-ranking Gestapo agent responsible for the murder and brutal interrogation of thousands of Polish Jews and resistance fighters and supporters. In reprisal, 20 inmates of Pawiak were murdered in a public execution by the Nazis.
In November 1943, Operation Most III started. The Armia Krajowa provided the Allies with crucial intelligence on the German V-2 rocket. In effect some 50 kg of the most important parts of the captured V-2, as well as the final report, analyses, sketches and photos, were transported to Brindisi by a Royal Air Force Douglas Dakota aircraft. In late July 1944, the V-2 parts were delivered to London.
In early 1943 the strength of the forest-based groups can be estimated at 40 groups numbering in total 1,200 to 4,000 fighters, but the numbers grew significantly next year.