The Holocaust claimed the lives of some three million Polish Jews, herded into ghettoes and killed in extermination camps, of which Auschwitz (Oświęcim) was but one. Thousands of Jews died fighting, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. The Nazis also engaged in mass terror, deporting and executing non-Jewish Poles in an attempt to destroy the intelligentsia and extinguish Polish culture. Priests and politicians were killed; children of prominent citizens were kidnapped; and many Poles were forced into hard labour.
A group of Hungarian Jews arriving at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in German-occupied Poland.Yad Vashem Photo Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives
From 1939 a Polish underground, one of the largest in occupied Europe, resisted the Nazis through a veritable secret state and a Home Army (AK) loyal to the Polish government-in-exile. The latter was a legal successor of the government that on September 17, 1939, had crossed into Romania and was interned there. Set up in Paris and moved to London after the collapse of France, it was led by the premier and commander in chief, General Władysław Sikorski. Under his command Polish troops, organized in the west, fought in all theatres of war in Europe and North Africa. Polish pilots played a disproportionately large role in the Battle of Britain (1940–41), and the small Polish navy also distinguished itself. A major Polish contribution to the war effort lay in discovering and passing on to the Allies the secret of the German ciphering machine Enigma.
Władysław Sikorski, 1942.Courtesy of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London
The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 changed Poland’s position drastically, for one of its foes now became a member of the Grand Alliance. Under British pressure the Polish government-in-exile reestablished relations with the Soviet Union through the Sikorski-Maysky accord, accepting the annulment of the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty without an explicit Soviet renunciation of annexed Polish territory. The Soviets promised to release the deported Poles—more than 230,000 Poles had been prisoners of war since 1939—and agreed to the creation of a Polish army under the command of General Władysław Anders. Difficulties appeared almost from the start, however. The Soviets sought British and U.S. approval for their territorial gains. Friction developed regarding the Polish army in Russia, which in 1942 was evacuated to the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Soviets were promoting Polish communist activity both in the U.S.S.R. and in occupied Poland, where a Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) emerged in 1942 with its own small People’s Guard, though this force was much smaller than the AK.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not appreciating fully Stalin’s hegemonic designs, believed that timely territorial concessions to the U.S.S.R. would preserve the internal independence of postwar Poland. During three visits to Washington, D.C. (1941–42), Sikorski outlined his ideas about postwar security in east-central Europe, including a Czechoslovak-Polish confederation; however, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarded Polish issues as secondary. For him, as for Churchill, the importance of the Soviet Union as an ally was crucial, and neither leader was prepared to see relations with Stalin founder on the Polish rock.
This became apparent when they were undeterred by the German announcement on April 13, 1943, of the discovery in the Katyn Forest of mass graves of more than 4,000 Polish officers who had been captured by the Red Army. The Polish search for some 15,000 missing men had previously met with a Soviet profession of complete ignorance as to their fate. Stalin accused the Sikorski government—which had asked the International Red Cross to investigate—of complicity in Nazi propaganda and severed diplomatic relations with the government-in-exile. Only in 1992 did postcommunist Moscow publicly acknowledge its guilt and furnish to Warsaw supporting documents, which also indicated the locations of other mass executions.
Sikorski’s death in a mysterious plane crash in Gibraltar (July 1943) was a great blow to the Poles at a time when Soviet offensives after the victories of Stalingrad and Kursk had brought the Red Army closer to the prewar Polish borders. The new prime minister and Peasant Party leader, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, could not rival Sikorski’s standing and was at odds with the new commander in chief, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski. The Soviets demanded, as the price for reestablishing relations with the Polish government, territorial concessions and the dismissal of several of its members. The Soviets also provided support for Polish communist organizations such as the Union of Polish Patriots in Moscow and the National Committee of the Homeland, headed by Bolesław Bierut and set up in Poland in December 1943. At the Tehrān Conference late in 1943, Churchill’s proposal that the Soviet-Polish border coincide with the Curzon Line (roughly similar to the Ribbentrop-Molotov line) and that Poland be compensated at Germany’s cost was accepted by Roosevelt and Stalin. The Mikołajczyk government, which was opposed to such a territorial deal, was not informed.
Roosevelt suggested to Mikołajczyk, visiting Washington, D.C., in June 1944, that the AK show its goodwill by cooperating with the Red Army. Such cooperation, however, when attempted in areas that had been part of prewar eastern Poland, was followed by arrests and deportation or conscription into the Soviet-sponsored Polish Kościuszko Division commanded by General Zygmunt Berling. On August 1, 1944, just as Mikołajczyk, prompted by the British, went to Moscow, the AK, under the supreme command of General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, rose in Warsaw against the retreating Germans.
The Warsaw Uprising constitutes one of the most tragic and controversial events of the war. The AK planned to capture the capital and act on behalf of Mikołajczyk’s government as host to the entering Red Army. It was assumed that the Soviets would not dare to disregard this demonstration of the Polish right to self-determination. In the absence of Soviet military assistance, the rising was doomed, yet, had the AK not risen, it would have been accused of inactivity by the communists. The insurgents fought alone for 63 days, because the Soviets not only halted their own offensive but also refused to allow Allied planes to help resupply the AK. When Warsaw capitulated, the city had been almost totally destroyed, and 200,000 civilians and more than 10,000 combatants had perished.
Stalin had no interest in assisting the Polish underground and did not hesitate to defy world public opinion when, in March 1945, he had 16 leaders of the underground arrested and tried in Moscow. Their elimination was linked to the process of building a communist-dominated Polish state. In July 1944 a Polish Committee of National Liberation was set up in Moscow (“officially” in Chełm), issued its Lublin Manifesto (July 22), and signed a secret territorial accord with the U.S.S.R. Mikołajczyk, caught between British pressure and the resistance of his government, resigned in November 1944.
Ignoring the socialist Tomasz Arciszewski, who succeeded Mikołajczyk as premier, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed with Stalin at the Yalta Conference (February 1945) to create a Provisional Polish Government of National Unity. Its core was the Lublin Polish Committee of National Liberation (already recognized by Stalin as the government), to which some politicians from Poland and abroad were added. Britain and the United States recognized that government on July 5, 1945, simultaneously withdrawing recognition from the government in London. A large Polish political emigration emerged as a voice of a free Poland and remained active during the next 40 years.