Poland never collaborated with its wartime invaders - MoD
Poland never had a government that would collaborate with either Nazi Germany or the invading Soviet Union during World War II, Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz said on Monday.
He was speaking in the Polish capital on the 72nd anniversary of the end of the war.
Despite hopes, the end of the war "did not become a day of joy and victory" for Poland, Macierewicz reflected.
"Poland was the only nation, the only country that never collaborated with either the Soviet or the German invader", he said.
"It did not form a collaborative government; just the opposite, it created a great underground state", Macierewicz said in front the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in central Warsaw.
May 8 marked 72 years since the capitulation of the Third Reich: "a German state that together with Soviet Russia started this terrible war", Macierewicz said.
Back then, in May 1945, people in Poland hoped V-Day would "be a day of victory, joy, great national pride", he said, "but the reality proved to be different for Poland; the Polish reality meant murders committed by the (Soviet) NKVD, deportations to Soviet camps, people being handed prison terms, women being raped, sham trials being staged in Moscow".
During World War II, the Polish people, confronted "two foreign partitioning powers that in August 1939 joined forces against Poland, against Europe, and against world peace", Macierewicz said.
"Today we know that the real mastermind, the state that started the plot ... was Bolshevik Russia in equal measure to Nazi Germany", Macierewicz added.
The capitulation of the Third Reich ended war operations in Europe. According to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance between 5.6 and 5.8 million Polish citizens were killed during the war.
Polish intelligence (see: NOTE 4) and armed forces, including world's most robust anti-Hitler resistance movement (Home Army - see: NOTE 1), played a key role in defeating Germany in WWII. (PAP)
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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]".
(See: NOTE 2 on Warsaw Uprising).
Along with various combat activities, the AK was also widely involved in rescuing fellow citizens of Jewish descent, among others through the famous 1942-founded Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom) codenamed 'Zegota' - the only organisation in Europe and the world established to defend and provide help to fellow citizens of Jewish descent in ghettos and outside.
After the war many Home Army soldiers refused to lay down their arms and continued fighting against Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime, winning the name "Enduring Soldiers" (see: NOTE 3).
NOTE 2: Home Army-organised Warsaw Uprising, the biggest resistance operation in Nazi-occupied Europe, broke out on August 1, 1944. 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: The Enduring Soldiers (also called the 'Cursed Soldiers' for having been treated as outlaws by communist authorities and at best sentenced to oblivion) were underground organisations fighting against the communist regime, which seized power in 1944, after World War II. They fought for independence well into the 1950s. Jozef Franczak, known as the last Enduring Soldier, perished in an ambush as late as 1963.
NOTE 4: According to various experts, intelligence agents linked to Poland’s wartime Home Army (AK) played a key role in providing the Allies with information about Nazi actions in occupied Europe.
Polish intelligence operated in every European country and ran one of the largest intelligence networks in Nazi Germany. Many Polish also served in other Allied intelligence services, including the much-lauded Krystyna Skarbek ("Christine Granville") in the United Kingdom's Special Operations Executive.
More than 40 percent of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in 1939-1945 came from Polish sources.
Until 1942 most of Britain's intelligence from Germany came from Polish Home Army reports; until war’s end, the AK would remain Britain's main source of intelligence from Central and Eastern Europe.
Polish Home Army intelligence provided the Allies with information not only on the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket, but also on German concentration camps. As early as 1940, Polish agents (including Witold Pilecki) penetrated German concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and informed the world about Nazi atrocities.
Polish Home Army intelligence was vital to locating and destroying (18 August 1943) the German rocket facility at Peenemünde and to gathering information about Germany's V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket.
The Home Army delivered to the United Kingdom key V-2 parts after a rocket, fired on 30 May 1944, crashed near a German test facility at Sarnaki on the Bug River and was recovered by the Home Army.
On the night of 25-26 July 1944 the crucial parts were flown from occupied Poland to the United Kingdom in an RAF plane, along with detailed drawings of parts too large to fit in the plane. Analysis of the German rocket became vital to improving Allied anti-V-2 defenses.
During a period of over six and a half years, from late December 1932 to the outbreak of World War II, three mathematician-cryptologists (Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki) at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in Warsaw had developed a number of techniques and devices to facilitate decryption of messages produced on the German "Enigma" cipher machine.
Just five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on July 25, 1939, near Pyry in the Kabaty Woods south of Warsaw, Poland disclosed her achievements to France and the United Kingdom, which had, up to that time, failed in all their own efforts to crack the German military Enigma cipher.
Had Poland not shared its Enigma-decryption results at Pyry, the United Kingdom would have been unable to read Enigma ciphers. In the event, intelligence gained from this source, codenamed Ultra, was extremely valuable to the Allied prosecution of the war. While Ultra's precise influence on its course remains a subject of debate, Ultra undoubtedly altered the course of the war.
In July 1941, Mieczyslaw Slowikowski (using the codename "Rygor"—Polish for "Rigor") 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. (PAP)
