Holocaust whistleblower Pilecki executed by communists 69 yrs ago
May 25 marks the 69th anniversary of the execution by the communist authorities of Rotamaster Witold Pilecki, a hero of Poland's World War II resistance and post-war anti-communist underground.
Called "the bravest of the brave", considered one of the top five war heroes of all time, he was executed by the communists in 1948 on feigned espionage charges.
Witold Pilecki was a Polish soldier and rotamaster in the pre-war Polish cavalry. In German-occupied Poland he founded the Secret Polish Army resistance group in November 1939, subsequently joining the 1942-formed underground Home Army (AK) (see: NOTE 1).
During World War Two Pilecki volunteered for a resistance operation to get imprisoned in the Nazi-German Auschwitz camp, where he planned to gather intelligence and escape. At Auschwitz Pilecki organized a resistance movement and as early as 1941 informed the Western Allies about Nazi atrocities in the camp.
Pilecki and his two friends Jan Redzej and Edward Ciesielski made their daring escape from Auschwitz on the night of April 26, 1943.
For their escape from Auschwitz Pilecki, Redzej and Ciesielski equipped themselves with false identity papers, civilian clothes, money, a special solution preventing dogs from picking up their scent - and cyanide capsules in case they were caught by the Nazis. They fled the camp through its bakery, which was located outside the camp premises. As the bakery staff, all prisoners, were locked in the bakery at night and taken back to the camp by SS guards in the morning, Pilecki and his two companions made sure they would be working there on the getaway night. At about 2 a.m., after some trouble with forcing the bakery door, and unpredictable behaviour of sluggish SS-guards, one scuffling to-and-fro, the other sleeping, who Pilecki and co. were ready to jump at and tie if necessary, they finally struggled out of the bakery to feel, as Pilecki put it in the Report, "a hit of a chilly breeze on heated heads, as the stars winked at us".
Pilecki wrote in his Report that once the guards had realised their disappearance, 9 shots were fired in the direction of "bakers", yet all missed as they "galloped harum-scarum into the dark like race horses".
After a week's trekking through woods and marshes, during which time Pilecki was wounded in a skirmish with German patrol troops, they reached Bochnia, where Pilecki got in touch with the Home Army in Krakow and presented a detailed report on atrocities taking place in Auschwitz. Unfortunately, his plan of freeing the Auschwitz prisoners was not accepted in face of the dominating strength of German forces, but mostly because the daring plan lacked support from the Allied forces.
Soon Pilecki moved to Warsaw, subsequently serving briefly in a partisan unit in central-south Poland and again returning to Warsaw to work for the underground.
In 1944 Pilecki fought in the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans (see: NOTE 2).
After the communist takeover of Poland he remained loyal to the London-based Polish exile government (for Poland's "Enduring Soldiers" post-war anticommunist underground (see: NOTE 3), and on May 8, 1947 was arrested on charges of working for "foreign imperialism", and sentenced to death after a show trial.
Before his trial Pilecki was brutally interrogated by the communists, who charged him with espionage work for the emigre Polish government in London. Although severely tortured, he did not reveal any information about his collaborators. He was also accused of illegally crossing the Polish border, using false documents, failure to register for military conscription, illegal possession of firearms, espionage for General Wladyslaw Anders (see: NOTE 4) and preparing the assassination of several high executives of communist Poland's Public Security Ministry.
Pilecki staunchly rejected the last charge, and insisted that what the communists held for espionage was in fact gathering information for the Polish 2nd Corps formed during the war from the so-called Anders Army (see: Note 5), for whose officer he still held himself. At his trial Pilecki pleaded guilty to the remaining charges. The accusing prosecutor at the trial was Major Czeslaw Lapinski, the main judge Lieutenant-Colonel Jan Hryckowian, during the war both officers of Poland's Home Army (AK) anti-Nazi resistance. The second judge was Captain Jozef Brodecki. The court lineup, with one judge and one lay judge, was against the then Polish law.
Pilecki was sentenced to death on March 15, 1948. Poland's President Boleslaw Bierut refused to pardon him and the sentence was carried out on May 25 of the same year in the basement of Warsaw's infamous Mokotow Prison on Rakowiecka Street. Pilecki was executed by a gunshot to the back of the head (so-called Katyn style - see NOTE 5), his body was most probably dumped into a nameless grave and has yet to be found. Information about his activities and fate was suppressed by the Polish communist regime until 1989.
As Pilecki's burial site remains unknown, he is among the communist regime victims whose remains are currently sought in countrywide exhumations by Poland's National Remembrance Institute (IPN).
Witold's Report, considered the world's first comprehensive intelligence on the Holocaust, was presented at the last International Book Fair in London, promoting Poland's "bravest of the brave" among compatriots (with the support of the Polish Institute and the Polish Social and Cultural Centre) as well as foreigners at the fair in Olympia.
Pilecki was posthumously awarded Poland's highest decoration the Order of the White Eagle by late President Lech Kaczynski, and later promoted to the rank of Colonel.
NOTE 1: Founded in 1942, the Home Army was the largest underground resistance force in German-occupied Europe, with up to half a million soldiers fighting in its ranks. In his book 'God's Playground. A History of Poland', historian Norman Davies said that "the Home Army could fairly claim to be the largest of European resistance [organisations]".
NOTE 2: The Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944 as the biggest resistance operation in Nazi-occupied Europe. Initially intended to last several days, it continued for over two months before being suppressed by the Germans. The uprising claimed the lives of 18,000 insurgents and around 180,000 civilians.
After the insurgents surrendered and the remaining 500,000 residents were expelled, the Germans methodically burned down and blew up Warsaw house by house. By January 1945, 85 percent of the buildings had been destroyed.
NOTE 3: Poland's Enduring Soldiers, also called "cursed" for having been treated by communist authorities as outlaws and at best sentenced to oblivion, battled the Soviet-imposed regime well into the 1950s. The last known "Enduring Soldier", Jozef Franczak, nom de guerre "Lalek", died in an ambush as late as 1963.
NOTE 4: The Anders Army, named after its commander General Wladyslaw Anders, was formed on the strength of the 1942 Sikorski-Mayski Agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland, which stated the formation of a Polish force to aid the Soviet army and other Allied states in their struggle against the Third Reich.
Conscripts to the Anders Army were mainly recruited from Polish people incarcerated in Soviet prisons and labour camps, who were amnestied to enable them to join the force. On March 24 1942 the Anders Army began its evacuation from the USSR, making its way through Iran to Palestine under a British-Soviet-Polish agreement. In Palestine the force passed under British command and formed the bulk of the Polish 2nd Corps which fought in the Italian campaign.
In Palestine the force's commanders became known for turning a blind eye to thousands of desertions by the army's Jewish-descended conscripts, who left the Anders Army to join Jewish military organisations fighting for the independence of Israel. Among the soldiers granted an official release from the formation was Menachem Begin (born Mieczyslaw Biegun) - the founder of Israel's Likud party and the 6th Israeli prime minister.
In line with the policy of the Polish government in-exile, when leaving the Soviet Union the Anders Army also helped civilians of Jewish descent, including soldier families, groups of (Polish-)Jewish children and war orphans, to escape Soviet repressions and travel safely to Palestine against a British ban. Polish authorities circumvented the interdict by loading fellow citizens of Jewish descent on ships and navigating them around the Arabian Peninsula. Jewish children, on the other hand, are said to have been clad in Catholic school uniforms and transported to Palestine through Iraqi deserts by trucks.
In 1944 the 2nd Corps proved crucial in defeating the Germans in what was called "the biggest inland battle in Europe" - the famous battle of Monte Cassino. This exceptionally hard-fought victory, which cost much Polish blood, allowed Allied forces to capture Rome and later the whole of southern Europe.
Another Italian-theatre decisive battle fought by the unit, actually its only independent operation, was the Battle of Ancona, in which Polish troops took over a strategic Adriatic port. The operation contributed to the breaking of the Gothic Line and subsequent surrender of the Axis forces in Italy.
NOTE 5: The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish POW's, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out by the Soviet security agency NKVD in April and May 1940. The killings took place at several locations but the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest in west Russia, where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.
The massacre was initiated by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, who proposed to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps. The victim count is estimated at about 22,000. The executions took place in Katyn Forest, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. About 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, the rest were Polish intellectuals, deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.
In 1943 the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in Katyn Forest. When the London-based Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Stalin promptly severed diplomatic relations with the London-based cabinet. The Soviets claimed that the killings had been carried out by the Nazis in 1941 and denied responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD.
Soviet responsibility for the Katyn killings was confirmed by an investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004), however Russia refused to classify them as a war crime or genocide.
In November 2010, the Russian State Duma passed a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordained the massacre. (PAP)
