By the end of 1943, the Polish Government had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Big Three: it had become diplomatically isolated, and eastern Poland had been given to Stalin by Churchill and Roosevelt at the Teheran conference. But for Stalin to be able to absorb eastern Poland into the Soviet Union after it had been liberated from German occupation, and for him to ensure political dominance over the entire population of Poland, the authority of the Polish Government in London had to be undermined. Hence Stalin sponsored communist Poles resident in the Soviet Union, who could be relied upon do his bidding. Stalin and the Polish communists had two powerful tools: the Polish people who remained in the Soviet Union after the evacuations in 1942, and the Polish Army formed from these people, which was for the most part loyal to the Polish communists. It would fight alongside the Red Army and bring many of the exiled Poles back to Poland.
Events in eastern Poland, of which the Polish Government had only a limited knowledge, facilitated the process of destroying its authority there. The Ukrainian insurgency and the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Wołyń and East Galicia began the process of depolonising the east. At the same time, there was a state of near anarchy in the forests of eastern Poland, which were an ideal terrain for partisan warfare against the Germans, and a safe haven for fugitives from German oppression. Only one group in the forests, the AK, was loyal to the Polish Government, while others owed allegiance to the Soviet Union, or to the Polish communists. All of these groups spent more time fighting each other than fighting the Germans, and only one thing was certain: that no one group of any political persuasion or loyalty was in total control.
The Ukrainian population of pre-war Poland had felt no great loyalty to the Polish Government, and in September 1939 they had greeted the Soviet invasion hopeful that they would be freed from Polish rule. They were, but far from the independent Ukrainian state the nationalists desired, the new ‘Western Ukraine’ was incorporated into the Soviet Union and many of their leading agitators were deported to Siberia. Consequently, in June 1941, the Ukrainians greeted the Germans as liberators, and the OUN declared the independence of Ukraine in Lwów on 31 June. The Germans, however, responded by imprisoning OUN leaders, such as Stepan Bandera, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and killing or imprisoning about 80 per cent of the Ukrainian leadership. Worse still, the lands the Ukrainians laid claim to were split between two Nazi administrations: Wołyń was included in Ostland Ukraine, ruled over by Reichskommissar Erich Koch, while East Galicia was incorporated into the General Government. But the Germans also exploited the disloyalty of the Ukrainians towards the Poles by recruiting large numbers into their auxiliary units and into the Roland and Nachtigel battalions. They became the Germans’ most willing assistants and received German uniforms, arms and training before undertaking their main task, the destruction of the Jews: both in the concentration camps, where the Ukrainians acted as guards, and by shooting huge numbers of Jews in the eastern provinces. The Ukrainians also provided the Gestapo with lists of prominent Poles, whom the Germans then shot.
The German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 and the prospect of a Soviet advance into eastern Poland led the ethnic Ukrainian Poles to reconsider how they could win their independence. The OUN feared a rerun of the end of the First World War, when German defeat and Russian exhaustion had left a power vacuum in the region which the Poles had filled through armed action. Indeed, this appears to have been exactly what the Poles themselves were thinking: the AK informed the Polish Government that a rapid campaign against the Ukrainians would be necessary as a corollary to the national armed uprising against the Germans, and Wołyń and East Galicia would have to be subjected to an ‘armed occupation’. The OUN had split into two parts in 1940, with the older and more moderate members supporting the OUN-M led by Andriy Melnvk, but the younger and more radical members supporting the aims of their mentor Bandera and establishing the OUN-B. At a meeting of the OUN-B in February 1943, they decided to create their own army, the Ukrainian Insurrectionist Army (Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, UPA), which at its height numbered 40,000 men. The principal aim of the UPA was not to attack the Germans but to cleanse eastern Poland/Western Ukraine of all Poles:
We should undertake a great action of liquidation of the Polish element. We should take advantage of the occasion, before German forces withdraw, to liquidate the entire Polish population from 16 to 60 … We cannot lose this battle and, without counting the cost, we should diminish the Polish strength. Forest villages and those near forests should disappear from the face of the earth.1
A later order urged the UPA to ‘pay attention to the fact that when something remains that is Polish, then the Poles will have pretensions to our land’.2
In April 1943, the UPA began their attacks on the defenceless Polish population of Wołyń before extending their operations southwards to encompass East Galicia and westwards into the province of Lublin. Sometimes the UPA repeated the tactics used against the Jews, gathering the Poles together in a large group before marching them to a sheltered spot to murder them: ‘They drove us from the clearing into a field of stubble. There, they took a few people at a time, made them lie down, and shot them.’ Between 300 and 400 Poles in this group had been killed before the UPA abandoned the remainder when they learned that the Germans were approaching. Elsewhere whole villages were slaughtered:
In the garden by a linden tree, a pit was dug. In it lay about 70 murdered, half-buried people. The blood, which flowed like a river onto the road from the pit, was now congealed. They threw the children into a potato cellar and covered them with dirt. Those still alive were finished off with clubs that still lay nearby, all bloody. Dead children floated in the well. The buildings were burned to hide all traces.3
A feature of the UPA action was its sheer barbarity. They were not content merely to shoot their victims but often tortured them first or desecrated their bodies afterwards. A fifteen-year-old girl, Bronisława Murawska-Żygadło came home to find a dreadful scene:
I saw my father lying in a pool of blood by the entrance to the house. Not too far away lay the butchered remains of my brother, Adam. Two-year-old Basia lay outside by the window. She was also dead, pierced through either with a bayonet or a knife. I found my mother’s lifeless body next door in my uncle’s yard; her head was cut to shreds. Not far away lay my Uncle Aleksander, murdered together with his two daughters aged seven and nine.4
The Poles were murdered with guns, knives, scythes, burnt alive, buried alive, thrown down wells to drown: it appeared that the UPA left no method of killing untried. Simple methods were used to distinguish between the Poles, who were normally Roman Catholic, and the Ukrainians, who were usually Eastern Orthodox. For example, a UPA member would ask his victim to make the sign of the cross, since each faith did this differently, and if the victim did it the Catholic way then death followed. The UPA also took advantage of the fact that the Poles celebrated Christmas earlier than those Ukrainians who followed the Eastern rite, and murdered hundreds of Poles as they prayed in their highly flammable wooden churches. Not all Ukrainians joined the UPA and many Ukrainians tried to shelter their Polish neighbours and ended up sharing the same appalling fates.
The local AK reported back to its headquarters, which transmitted the news of the slaughters to the government in London. The AK seemed unable to save the Poles from the wrath of the UPA. Orders were received to retaliate against the UPA and those villages which supported them, but not to mount indiscriminate attacks on the Ukrainian population.5 Tens of thousands of Poles fled the region, but others remained and formed self-defence units to take revenge against the Ukrainians. These avengers faced a difficult choice: the only people able to give them protection and arms were the Germans and the Soviet partisans. In April 1943, the Germans had stood aside and taken no action while the UPA murdered 600 Poles in Janowa Dolina.6 In July 1943, however, shocked by the scale of the anarchy, the Germans deployed a battalion of Polish policemen, Schutzmannschaftbataillon 202, recruited to replace Ukrainian deserters, in Wołyń to attack Ukrainian villages in retaliation for the night of 11–12 July when the UPA coordinated attacks on 167 localities and killed around 10,000 Poles.7 The AK attempted to reassert the authority of the Polish Government by calling for the self-defence units to place themselves under its command, but it was not in a strong position in Wołyń and took time to build up its forces. In January 1944, the 27th Volhynian Infantry Division was formed by the AK and its 6,558 members fought the UPA and then the Germans.8
The campaign of ethnic cleansing was most successful in Wołyń because its Polish population was more scattered and so did not learn of events elsewhere until it was too late to run and hide, and also because the AK was relatively weak there. While Ukrainian nationalism was probably stronger in East Galicia, the UPA had less success there. It mainly recruited from Ukrainians who had previously served the Germans but had now either deserted or had their units disbanded. In East Galicia the Germans offered an alternative to the UPA: the SS Galizien Division. This was the brainchild of the German governor, SS Grüppenführer Dr Gustav Wächter, who saw the recruitment of a Ukrainian division as part of the solution to the growing manpower shortage in the Wehrmacht. On 28 April, the formation of SS Galizien Division was announced, and within ten days, 32,000 recruits had come forward and 26,000 were accepted for training: by the beginning of July, this number had risen to 28,000.9 The AK issued a warning that anyone joining this division would be branded as a traitor and face the ultimate penalty, death. The SS Galizien recruits were sent for training in Dębrica in south-east Poland, while their officers went to officer training camps scattered throughout German-occupied Europe. SS Galizien first saw action in July 1944 when it was sent to reinforce the 13th German Army Corps near Brody in south-east Poland, but only 3,000 of the 11,000 men survived the Soviet attack. Some of the survivors deserted; the remainder were sent to Germany for further training and received reinforcements before seeing action in Slovakia in autumn 1944 and in Slovenia in early 1945.10
As the German-Soviet front neared the pre-war Polish frontier at the beginning of 1944, the UPA attacks grew more desperate and daring and extended into East Galicia. Adela Zacharko in the county of Boków in Tarnopol province recalled of February 1944:
At this time, Podhajce was caught in a game of see-saw between Soviet and Germans troops. Once, when the Germans reoccupied it, the Ukrainian Nationalists struck again to finish off the survivors of their previous attacks now convalescing in hospital. During that siege Wiktor Jażwinski and Sister Janina, the head nurse in the hospital, gathered all their patients (predominantly children) into one room, barricaded the door, and began to pray.
As the Ukrainian Nationalists hacked away at the door, shots rang out in the rear of the hospital and shouts were heard in the Russian language. Under Soviet threat, the UPA abandoned its attack and retreated.11
The AK was much stronger in East Galicia and was able to protect the Poles. The Germans also protected the Poles there. For example, the Carmelite monastery in Wiśniowiec became a Polish sanctuary under the protection of the German and Hungarian troops stationed there. The UPA launched an attack as soon as they left and murdered almost all the Poles together with the monks who had been sheltering them. The slaughter was stopped only when the Germans briefly returned.12 When the Soviets had secured an area, they would help the Poles flee westwards, because it suited their political purposes to denude the provinces of former eastern Poland of the Polish population. After the war the Soviets would turn their attention to the UPA, to destroy it in turn. It has been estimated that 30,000–40,000 Poles died in Wołyń, 10,000–20,000 in eastern Galicia and 10,000–20,000 in Lublin province in this often-overlooked civil war. About 10,000 Ukrainians were killed by Polish self-defence units, Soviet partisans and the German military and police.13
Poles fled from the Ukrainians into the forests of eastern Poland, and so did Ukrainians who no longer wanted to serve the Germans, adding another layer to the confusion already existing there. These forests were both dense and extensive and became the safe haven for numerous groups: Soviet deserters from 1941; escaped Soviet POWs; Jews who had fled from the ghettos, some of whom would form family camps and hope to escape the Germans, and others who formed partisan bands to take their revenge on the Germans; and local people of Polish, Belorussian or Ukrainian ethnicity who wanted to escape being rounded up and transported to Germany as forced labour. All had one aim in common: the desire to survive. They had few means at their disposal and consequently preyed on the local population for food: ‘At night the partisans would come with their demands; during the day, the Germans.’14 There were also more organised groups sheltering in the forests: the AK, lying in wait for the opportune moment to launch a national uprising against the Germans, and the Soviet partisans and units of the Polish communist People’s Army (Gwarda Ludowa-Armia Ludowa, GL-AL). Their strategies were very different. The AK engaged in sabotage and diversionary operations but launched no direct attacks on the Germans so as to save the local population from severe German reprisals. Their units were led by the Cichociemni, the ‘unseen and silent’, Polish paratroopers trained in Britain and despatched to Poland by SOE. The GL-AL had no such scruples and launched small-scale and largely purposeless attacks against German outposts regardless of the consequences. The result could be tragic for the local population: for example, in May 1942, after the GL-AL had assassinated one German officer and two German officials, 1,200 Poles were shot by the Germans in Święciany (Švenčionys).15
During 1943 the situation in the forests of eastern Poland became more complicated because both the Poles and the Soviets were determined to stamp their authority over it. In May 1942, a Central Partisan Staff had been established at Soviet headquarters under the command of Marshal Voroshilov, and Soviet parachutists were despatched into pre-war Polish territory to organise the disparate Soviet soldiers into cohesive partisan units; this process really took effect during 1943. The first Polish partisan units loyal to the AK also began operating at this time. The unit commanded by Flying Officer ‘Dzwig’ started with 44 men but, after a successful raid on a German garrison to steal arms and ammunition, grew rapidly so that soon it was battalion strength with 3 infantry companies and 1 cavalry squadron. A member of the group recalled: ‘We had all sorts of difficulties. Equipment, food, liaison, intelligence, training – everything was badly lacking or non-existent … Thanks to the generosity of the population we were also fed and armed, as, after the defeat of General Popov’s Soviet armies, the peasants hid a lot of ammunition and arms.’16
The history of the partisans operating in eastern Poland is controversial. From German records it is possible to establish that a great deal of sabotage was conducted against the German rail communications to the front, but not necessarily by whom.17 Indeed, one historian has claimed:
Among all partisans a discrepancy existed between the value placed on fighting and the actual number of attacks on Germans. It was as if the pressure to oppose the Germans lost its momentum somewhere on the way to the real strikes. This lack of correspondence between ideas and actions was probably responsible for some of the exaggerated claims about extraordinary anti-Nazi escapades.18
Historiography has further confused the matter: for post-war political purposes, the communists claimed that only the GL-AL and Soviet partisans undertook armed action against the Germans. Jewish historians tend to agree with this claim, adding that the AK not only failed to attack the Germans but concentrated on killing Jews. In its defence, loyalists to the AK claim that both the Soviet partisan bands and the GL-AL attacked the Polish partisans and that the Jews often helped. It does not help that the loyalty of units such as the Kościuszko unit operating in the Nalibocka forest in the Nowogródek province is claimed by both the AK and the GL-AL.19 To make matters still more confusing, individuals sometimes moved from one group to another. For example, Florian Mayevski began with the AK and then was persuaded by the Soviets that as a Jew he would be happier working with the Soviet partisans.20 The position of the Jews who wished to fight was undoubtedly the most complex. Some AK units were anti-semitic but others allowed Jews to join them, while the Soviet partisans claimed to welcome Jews, particularly if they possessed their own weapons, but also accepted Ukrainian recruits who earlier had shot large numbers of Jews at the behest of the Germans. Poles sometimes even joined Jewish partisan groups. For example, a Jewish partisan recalled: ‘15 Poles joined us. Their homes had been burned and they barely escaped alive. They stayed with us for 4–5 months, and we fought the Banderites four times. Each time Jews and Poles were killed, as were Banderites.’21
An American report by the OSS accurately summed up the situation in the forests: ‘One thing is certain, the Germans are helped by the lack of unity in the underground and by the fact that each side has other aims than fighting the Germans.’22 Nevertheless, the Germans were extremely disturbed by the anarchy prevailing in part of the territory they claimed to control – and by the extent of the sabotage. They were clear about classifying the inhabitants of the forests: they were not ‘partisans’, which would necessitate treating them as POWs, but were ‘bandits’ who could be executed upon capture. Indeed, they had an entire doctrine devoted to the eradication of what they termed banditry: Bandenbekämpfung.23 In the summer of 1943, the Germans devoted 10 per cent of their forces on the Eastern Front to the destruction of the partisans, and, on 1 August, launched a ‘Big Sweep’ of the Nalibocka forest, which led to a temporary alliance between the Polish partisans and a local Soviet partisan unit commanded by Comrade Sidoruk. As the Germans entered the forest, with several thousand troops, including an SS division, and with armoured cars and tanks, the Poles managed to ambush and destroy their advance guard. The Germans soon, however, regained the initiative.
The German round-up resulted in the complete disintegration of the battalion and in the loss of most of the arms. Our losses were about twenty killed and about a hundred missing. Some of them dispersed over the countryside, and some were picked up by the Germans from the villages, as civilians, and sent to concentration camps.24
The Soviet partisans attempted to place the blame for the debacle on the Poles, and relations between them worsened. After the ‘Big Sweep’, which failed to capture or kill many partisans, the Germans burnt all villages within a 10-mile radius and deported 20,000 local peasants for forced labour in Germany.25
The German anti-partisan action exacerbated the poor relations already existing between Polish and Soviet partisan units. In late August, the Soviet ‘Voroshilov’ Brigade attacked an AK unit, disarmed it and executed 8 of its members; the AK retaliated by attacking Belorussian villages in the Nowogródek region where the peasants were suspected of giving aid to the Soviet partisans.26 At the end of November 1943, as the Soviet forces neared the pre-war Polish-Soviet frontier, General Panteleimon Ponamarenko, the chief of staff of the Soviet partisan command, issued an order calling for the disarming of all Polish partisan units and the shooting of those who resisted.27 As the Polish partisans knew nothing of this order, their commanders had no fear when invited to meet the Soviet partisan commander, Major Wasiliewicz, on 1 December 1943. The Soviets asked the Poles to assemble their units and then surrounded the Poles with sub-machine guns at the ready and disarmed them.28 On the one hand, Poles operating with the AK noted that on occasion the Germans and Soviets would collaborate: ‘Sometimes the Germans and Russian-led communists were quite close to each other, each in turn attacking the Home Army partisans while leaving the other alone.’29 On the other, the duplicity of the Soviet partisans led to some AK units giving a favourable response to the suggestion by the Germans in the Nowogródek and Wilno provinces that the AK should accept arms and supplies from the Germans in return for engaging in anti-partisan warfare. On 9 December 1943, days after the bulk of his unit had been disarmed by the Soviet partisans as described above, Captain Adolf ‘Góra’ Pilch signed an agreement with the Germans and began to receive supplies from them, as did Lieutenant Józef ‘Lech’ Świda in Lida and Aleksander ‘Wilk’ Krzyżanowski in the Wilno area. All these agreements were condemned by AK command and by General Sosnkowski in London.30
There have been claims that the AK attacked Jews rather than Germans. Again this is a misunderstanding of what was really happening in the forests. In general, Jews were killed in armed clashes not because they were Jews but rather because their ideological leanings had led them to join the GL-AL rather than the AK. Indeed, the Jews sometimes killed the Poles: in late 1943, the Soviet partisans mounted an attack on the Polish Kościuszko unit in the Nalibocka forest and the Bielski camp was requested to send 50 men to help the Soviets and did so. When in September 1943, a rogue AK unit Orzeł, commanded by Lieutenant Leon Szymbierski, wiped out a ŻOB unit in the Koniecpol area, killing 5 Jews, he was put on trial by the AK in Kielce and condemned to death.31 The principal perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence in the name of anti-communist activity were units owing allegiance to the right-wing NSZ, which remained outside the structure of the AK until March 1944 and even after then some units retained their independence. The NSZ newspaper, The Rampart, called for action against the communists:
It is time to awake and commence with the systematic liquidation of centres under the command of the Communists, and as soon as territory is cleared in this fashion to undertake the planned struggle with the German occupier. The sincere joint work of Polish military and civilian organizations will certainly make it possible for us to pull out the Bolshevik weeds and cleanse the terrain. The PPR, Peoples’ Guard, and various ‘red’ partisans must vanish from the surface of the Polish land.32
The NSZ was quick to take up the sword. On 22 July 1943, they destroyed a GL-AL unit Waryński at Stefanów near Kielce in retaliation for a GL-AL attack on the NSZ earlier that year. The most notorious clash between the two groups came on 9 August 1943, when a NSZ detachment ambushed and murdered 26 GL-AL partisans and 4 civilians near the village of Borów in Lublin province.33 The NSZ was openly anti-semitic and would kill Jews in the forests or betray them to the Germans. When Marian Skowerski was released from Gestapo custody in Kielce, he went into the forests in search of the AK. He instead found the NSZ, who asked him to kill some nearby Jews as a test of faith before being allowed to join them. Skowerski refused and travelled on until he found an AK unit, which he joined.34 The AK condemned the anti-semitic conduct of the NSZ and its part in the murders at Borów.35
Stalin wanted to create a Polish government that was ‘friendly’ towards the Soviet Union and he followed several strategies simultaneously. He cultivated the Polish communists, who were despatched to Poland to seek support for a new communist-dominated government and to create its own underground army, the GL-AL, which would challenge the claim of the AK to be the principal resistance movement. At the same time Stalin encouraged the Polish communists in the Soviet Union to become an organised political force, whose strength was to be underpinned by the creation of a communist Polish army. His policies preceded the break in diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in London and continued apace after it and as the Soviet armies began to approach the pre-war Polish-Soviet frontier.
The pre-war history of the Polish Communist Party, the KPP, had not been a happy one. It had had few members, mostly concentrated in the cities, and many future important personalities, such as Władysław Gomułka, Bolesław Bierut, Stefan Jędrychowski, Edward Orhab and Aleksander Zawadzki, had been imprisoned by the Polish Government. This, ironically, saved their lives because in 1938 Stalin disbanded the KPP for its ‘Trotskyist and nationalist tendencies’, and during the Great Terror 46 full members and 24 non-voting so-called candidate members of the Central Committee of the KPP who had fled to the Soviet Union were shot. Following the German invasion of Poland, the surviving communists fled to the Soviet zone of occupation, where they were now welcomed, and settled in Lwów, Białystok and Mińsk. There they disseminated Soviet propaganda through their newspaper Czerwony Sztandar (Red Banner). After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, they were evacuated with Soviet officials, first to Moscow and then to Kuibyshev where they continued to produce a number of journals and also made Polish-language broadcasts for Poland.36
Soon after his meeting with Sikorski at the Kremlin in early December 1941, Stalin began to explore the possibilities of creating a new Communist Party in Poland and designated the head of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov, as his spokesman. In late December, a group of Polish communists, led by Marceli Nowotko, Paweł Finder and Bolesław Mołojec, were parachuted into Poland, with the aim, as discussed with Dimitrov, not to re-form the old Communist Party, but to appeal to a broader front of left-wing parties. The Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR) was formally established in Warsaw on 5 January 1942, and throughout the year Nowotko sent Dimitrov optimistic reports concerning the possibilities of collaboration with the Polish Socialist Party and the Peasant Party. Actually recruitment for the PPR was slow, and by June 1942 it had only between 3,000 and 4,000 members and about the same number in its military wing, the Gwarda Ludowa (GL). Indeed, this congruity has led to the suggestion that the PPR was inflating its membership figures by deliberately assuming that every GL member was also a party member.37 This was likely to be the case since communism had already been unpopular in Poland before the war and had became more so since 1939 with the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. Communism was perceived by most people as an agency of a foreign power.
On 15 January 1943, the PPR issued an open letter to the Underground Government calling for active armed resistance to the Germans and for a statement from the Polish Government in London condemning the anti-Soviet stance of the pre-war Sanacja regime. With Sikorski’s permission, the Underground Government held talks with the PPR in February, but they were unsure of the PPR’s motivation: it was calling for a new ‘democratic’ government without defining its interpretation of ‘democracy’. The Underground Government leaders were highly suspicious of the PPR’s links with the Soviet Union. Before they could reply to the PPR’s proposals, the PPR had issued a political programme – ‘What are we fighting for?’ – and TASS had put out a new statement castigating the Polish Government over its refusal to allow the ethnic minorities in Kresy to be reunited in one country, the Soviet Union. The PPR also suggested that it wanted to forge closer links between its army, the GL, and the AK, and attempts had been made in this direction earlier. However, as Jan Karski reported to the American ambassador to the Polish Government, Drexel Biddle, in March 1943, when contacts were established and the PPR and GL had discovered the identities of those working in the Underground Government and AK, those men had been betrayed and were arrested by the Gestapo. As a result anyone who was contacted by the communists had to be immediately quarantined from his colleagues.38 The Underground Government consequently broke off all contacts with the PPR and the GL.
Events had intervened to grant the PPR a period of temporary independence from Soviet control during which it could develop its own programme. On 28 November 1942, Nowotko had been killed by an unknown assassin in Warsaw and his position as leader of the PPR had been taken over by Mołojec. Members of the PPR suspected that he might have had something to do with Nowotko’s murder and in late December 1942, Mołojec himself was killed in Warsaw, and the party leadership passed to Paweł Finder.39 Contact with the Soviet Union was then broken in November 1943 when the Gestapo penetrated the PPR, arrested a number of leaders, including Finder, who was later executed by the Germans, and seized a crucial codebook. The leadership was now taken over by Władysław Gomułka. This freed the surviving PPR to abandon the Popular Front approach favoured by the Soviet Union and to launch a radical programme blatantly designed to establish communist rule in post-war Poland. It established a National Council for the Homeland (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN) with Bierut as its president. The first manifesto was issued on 31 December 1943. This expressly denied that the Polish Government in London had any right to represent the Polish people, and stated that the future frontiers of Poland were to follow the Curzon Line in the east and reach the Oder and the Baltic in the west and north. This was much the same policy as that adopted by the Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich, ZPP), sponsored by Stalin, in the Soviet Union. The KRN, however, adopted a far more radical programme: only the PPR was to be viewed as a party, all other parties were relegated to the status of ‘groups’. The economic programme was more radical than that promoted by the Polish communists in the Soviet Union: industry was to be nationalised, and large estates and those owned by Germans were to be expropriated by the state without compensation. Furthermore, the PPR/KRN created its own army, which it would later use to impose its will over the country after liberation. The Gwarda Ludowa was renamed the Armia Ludowa (AL), with General Michał ‘Rola’ Żymierski as its head. Rola-Żymierski, as he became known, claimed command of all Polish armed forces whether in Poland or abroad in the Soviet Union or in the west.40
Stalin cultivated the friendship of prominent Polish communists in the Soviet Union. The most important undoubtedly was Wanda Wasilewska. Her father Leon had been active in left-wing politics in pre-war Poland and a close associate of Piłsudski. Wanda shared his interest from a young age, finally turning towards the communists in the mid-1930s. She married Aleksandr Korniejczuk, a deputy commissar of Soviet foreign affairs, and was admitted to membership of the Soviet Communist Party. Wasilewska had a direct telephone line to Stalin, and this indicated her far greater influence with Stalin than many older and more experienced members of the former KPP. According to one of them, Jakub Berman, they bore no resentment for this state of affairs but rather ‘we were rather glad that she was clearing the way with Stalin for reactivating the Polish communist party, since this reactivation had, after all, been the most sacred aim of our efforts’.41
In February 1943, despairing of ever achieving what he wanted from the Polish Government, Stalin summoned Wasilewska, Hilary Minc and Wiktor Grosz to a meeting to discuss the future of Polish communism and left-wing activism. He made it clear that he expected a formal break in diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish Government in London to be only a matter of time. The result of this meeting was the establishment of the Union of Polish Patriots. Wasilewska claimed that Stalin proposed the name of the party, deliberately choosing one that was vague enough to appeal to Poles of all political persuasions.42 This broad appeal was confirmed by the articles published in the Union of Polish Patriots’ new weekly newspaper, Wolna Polska (Free Poland), the first issue of which appeared on 1 March 1943. It concentrated on the promotion of patriotism and tried to conceal its political origins, aiming at ‘uniting all Polish patriots living in the USSR, regardless of their past, their views and convictions, in the joint task of waging an uncompromising struggle against the German invaders’. A number of articles called for lasting friendship with the Soviet Union and denounced the Polish Government in London.43
Stalin did not want the ZPP to be an overtly communist party since that would alienate the Polish population in the Soviet Union, and his sponsorship would risk alarming the Allies, who might then thwart his desire for the Curzon Line. Consequently, the membership of the presidium of the Union of Polish Patriots was deliberately designed to persuade everyone that the Union was a broad-based political movement based on the Popular Front model that had ruled France between 1936 and 1937. To further this end, the chairmanship was given to Andrzej Witos, the brother of Wincenty Witos, who had been a famous and popular leader of the Peasant Party in pre-war Poland. At its first congress in Moscow on 9 and 10 June 1943, the Union of Polish Patriots announced its economic programme, which was designed to appeal to as many people as possible. It included policies such as the confiscation of large landed estates and the free redistribution of land to small farmers and landless agricultural workers. The landowners, except for the Germans, would receive compensation. Industries would be nationalised and cartels broken up, but this nationalisation would end after the post-war reconstruction of industry.44
Towards the end of 1943, with the advance of the Soviet armies towards the frontier of pre-war Poland, the ZPP established the Polish National Committee (Polski Komitet Narodowy, PKN). Jakub Berman later explained the reasons:
The rapidly changing international situation demanded that we take some steps. The idea was born of establishing a representative body in the form of the Polish National Committee. The ZPP was concerned with refugees, welfare and education, while we wanted to broaden our base of influence and, in the face of the rapid progression of the war, to prepare the ground for a Polish government.45
The PKN hoped to be the precursor of a provisional Polish government that would care for Polish interests in Poland until the liberation of the country when elections would be held. It still planned to appear to be a coalition of all but the Sanacja parties, while actually ensuring that the communists controlled all the key ministries.46
The Union of Polish Patriots claimed to represent those Poles who were still in the Soviet Union. So who were these Poles and how many of them were there? They fell into several categories. There were many who had been unable to reach the Anders army before the evacuation; some had been in remote labour camps and heard of the amnesty too late or not heard of the amnesty at all. Others had been stopped on their way south and directed to work in kolkhozy and in industry to alleviate the acute manpower shortage occasioned by the call-up of every able-bodied male for the Red Army. Then there were those families of servicemen who qualified for evacuation but who lacked the money to travel, or who, fearing an uncertain future, did not make their way independently to the evacuation port of Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea. In addition, the NKVD had informed many Poles that they did not qualify for recruitment to the Anders army and thus for evacuation: most commonly because they were not considered to be ethnic Poles. Accurate statistical information on their numbers is hard to find. A Polish Government estimate in April 1943 gave a number of 271,325 Polish citizens with many thousands still unaccounted for, while a report submitted to Stalin by Beria that January had given a lower total figure and a more detailed breakdown: 92,224 ethnic Poles, 102,153 Jews, 14,202 Ukrainians and 6,502 Belorussians, making a total of 215,081 pre-war Polish citizens.47
These Polish citizens were now a tool in Stalin’s policy towards Poland. He had issued a challenge to the freedom of operation granted to the Polish Government by the Sikorski–Maisky agreement when, in the summer of 1942, the NKVD began arresting members of the Polish Delegatura, the network through which the Polish Government communicated with the scattered Poles and looked after their welfare. Stanisław Kot resigned his post as Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union in July 1942, on the grounds of ill-health and was replaced by Tadeusz Romer. Prior to his departure he held a final conversation with Andrei Vyshinsky, the deputy commissar for foreign affairs, on 8 July. Kot brought up the question of the arrests of the delegates, but Vishinsky was adamant that they had been arrested because they had been engaged in espionage rather than welfare activities. Kot denied this charge and referred to specific delegates, such as Arlet and Rola-Janicki, but Vyshinsky was unwilling to discuss the cases of individuals. Kot asked who was now to look after the welfare of the Poles, many of whom were too young, too old or too sick to work, and was not content with the reply that the Soviet authorities would take up the responsibility. Further proof of the Soviet authorities’ determination to curb the independence of the delegates came when the Polish chargé d’affaires, Juliusz Sokolnicki, reported to Kot, by then in Teheran, that there had been further arrests. Vyshinsky had issued a statement: ‘because all the delegation had engaged in hostile activity and espionage instead of welfare they are to be liquidated and the authorities have been given instructions’.48 Some of the delegates disappeared into the Gulag, but international intervention on behalf of those who held diplomatic passports ensured the release of 93 in October 1942. Romer suggested that the Poles and Soviets should set up a joint agency to distribute the aid, but this appeal was rejected by the Soviets.49
In January 1943, Stalin made an overt challenge to the Polish Government’s refusal to recognise the 1941 borders as the new Polish-Soviet frontier, when his government informed the Polish embassy in Moscow that henceforward all Polish deportees in the Soviet Union were to be regarded as Soviet citizens. The reason given was the lack of recognition of the validity of the Curzon Line by the Polish Government. The Polish Government immediately appealed to the British and United States governments: on 2 February, the Polish foreign minister, Raczyński, approached Eden, and on 16 February, the Polish ambassador in Washington, Jan Ciechanowski, met Roosevelt. Churchill and Roosevelt were, however, in a very weak negotiating position because of the disparity between the military fortunes of the Allies. While Stalin was in the process of inflicting a crucial defeat on the Germans at Stalingrad, the western allies were taking a long time to clear North Africa, the Arctic convoys were slow in bringing substantial levels of aid to the Soviet Union, and the launch of the Second Front appeared no closer.
All over the Soviet Union the 25,000 Poles who had received Polish passports were summoned to their local NKVD office and forced to surrender their papers and their amnesty documents which they had received in the second half of 1941. Then they would either be issued with a Soviet passport or have to sign a form applying for such a passport. Their despair over relinquishing their precious documents, the only papers which could secure their release from the living hell of life in the Soviet Union, is not hard to imagine. Whereas in November 1939, traumatised by the complete upheaval in their lives occasioned by the German and Soviet invasions, relatively few Poles in eastern Poland had resisted the issue of Soviet citizenship papers, the situation was very different now. It seemed that all hope of survival and of departure was being extinguished and so the majority resisted: they felt that they had nothing to lose. Tens of thousands of Poles refused to sign and were imprisoned, and one wrote of their treatment:
We were placed in cells, one Pole in each. Into these cells, almost at once, five or six Soviet prisoners of the criminal class were also introduced. These criminals not only stole our food but also beat us and persecuted us day and night. The NKVD chief or other officials would summon me several times a day and ask me whether I would not now accept a Soviet passport.
Small children, terrified and starving, were brought to see their mothers in prison to persuade them to change their minds.50 Janka Tuzinkiewicz, in Kazakhstan, was imprisoned until, weak with hunger and deeply concerned about the Kochański children in her care, she accepted a Soviet passport. Those who held out were tried by the Soviet courts and received sentences of from 2 to 5 years in the Gulag.
Concern about the plight of their families in the Soviet Union adversely affected the morale of the Anders army. The British recognised the seriousness of the problem and in February, March and August 1943, both the British and American governments appealed to Stalin to allow the remaining members of military families and orphans to leave the Soviet Union.51 The number was estimated at 50,000, which caused a degree of concern among the British authorities in the Middle East as to their ability to care for so many.52 In September Stalin responded:
The Soviet Government on several occasions has stated and states again that from the side of the Soviet Government no obstacles were placed in the way of the departure from the Soviet Union of Polish citizens in the USSR, the number of which was not large, or of the families of Polish soldiers who have been evacuated to Iran.53
This was disingenuous, for the challenges of the previous evacuations had already been considerable: reaching the nearest railway and then travelling to the Caspian Sea before taking a ship across to Pahlevi. At least the Soviets had provided transport then: now the situation was very different, and the amnesty documents and Polish passports had been taken away. Indeed, it can be safely assumed that any Poles who had attempted to leave the Soviet Union would have been arrested and thrown into the Gulag. The Soviets were taken aback by the scale of the protest and the international reaction, and on 1 April 1943, issued a new decree on Polish citizenship which exempted ethnic Poles who in 1939 had been living in the part of Poland occupied by the Germans.54
Later that month the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in London in the wake of the Katyń dispute. The Polish Government approached the British asking them to look after the Poles in the Soviet Union but Cadogan informed Raczyński on 4 May: ‘Had to tell him we can’t take on active charge of Polish interests in Russia. I’m awfully sorry, but I’m sure that could only lead to disaster.’55 The Australian embassy stepped in. The closure of the welfare agencies run by and loyal to the Polish Government provided the Union of Polish Patriots with an opportunity to appeal to as many Poles as possible through action and not just rhetoric. The Union established a social welfare department, Wydzial Opieki Społecznej, to take over the welfare activities of the former Delegatura. The Soviets set up a parallel organisation, Uprosobtorg, and the Poles and Soviets worked together to reach the widely dispersed Polish population.56
The Soviets wanted the Poles to remain in the Soviet Union because by the summer of 1943, the creation and organisation of a new Polish army, owing its allegiance to the Union of Polish Patriots, was well under way. There had been a proposal to create a Polish rifle division within the Red Army in 1940, when Colonel Zygmunt Berling and his fellow pro-Soviet officers were invited to draw up plans. During discussions with Beria and his deputy, General Vsevolod Merkulov, Berling learnt that most of the officers he planned to work with were ‘unavailable’; he was not told explicitly that they had been murdered but some other officers present at the relevant meeting later claimed that Beria told them: ‘We made a big mistake.’ The plans became irrelevant in the chaos following the German invasion of the Soviet Union.57 When the creation of the Anders army was announced, Berling made his way to and was employed by the Polish headquarters but deserted when that army left for Iran, and in July 1943 was court-martialled in absentia. In September 1942 and during the following winter, Berling and Wasilewska appealed to Stalin for permission to form a Polish division. On 8 April 1943, Berling approached the Soviet authorities with a proposal to establish a new Polish army and permission was granted after the break in diplomatic relations between the Soviet and Polish governments.
On 6 May 1943, the day after the Polish ambassador left the country, the Soviets moved ahead with the creation of a Polish army. On 8 May, an announcement appeared in Wolna Polska:
The Soviet Government has decided to comply with the request of the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR to create a Polish division named after Tadeusz Kościuszko on the territory of the USSR, which is to fight jointly with the Red Army against the German invader. The formation of the Polish division has already been started.58
The division was to be formed in Seltsy, about 110 miles from Moscow.* There would be three infantry regiments and a regiment of light artillery and also a women’s regiment, with a strength of 1,095 officers, 3,258 NCOs and 7,093 rank and file. Its name, ‘Kościuszko’, after the general who led the uprising in 1794 against Russia and Prussia, was a deliberate attempt to stress the patriotic nature of the division, reinforced by the use of Polish uniforms and of the Piast eagle as its symbol.59
Recruitment was open to all ‘people formerly living in the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia who, though Polish by nationality, were in fact Soviet citizens’.60 On enlistment the recruits would be offered the opportunity to regain their Polish citizenship and the offer was extended to their family members.61 The recruits were people who had not heard of the amnesty in time to join the Anders army, those who had been told they were ineligible to join, and those who were too young for military service in 1942, and some were Poles who had been living in the Soviet Union for generations since their ancestors had been deported to Siberia in the nineteenth century, or those who had entered the Soviet Union voluntarily after the outbreak of war. Although the impression was given that recruitment was to be voluntary, there was an element of conscription. At the end of May 1943, Nina Kochańska received a summons to appear before the Wojenkomaty, the military commissariat, and after a perfunctory medical inspection, she was ordered to return to her work and lodging until June when she received her call-up papers and left for Seltsy. She was reluctant to leave her mother alone but was given no choice.62
So many recruits flooded into Seltsy that by July 1943, there were already 14,380 men at various stages of training, and a second infantry division, under Colonel Antoni Siwicki, had to be formed. By August it was clear that there were sufficient numbers to justify the creation of the 1st Polish Army Corps. On 10 August, a decree was published sanctioning its formation and Berling, now promoted to the rank of general, was appointed to command it with General Karol Świerczewski as his deputy.63 Berling was appalled by the state of the recruits: ‘There were people in rags which had once been jackets, with bundles, or with some kind of boxes which had once been suitcases, in shoes, moccasins, and felt boots.’64 The motives of the recruits were varied. For most of them service in the army represented an opportunity for revenge against the German invaders and despoilers of Poland, a chance of a regular supply of food and clothing, and, ultimately, a way to return home to Poland. It was also quickly apparent that political motivation played little part: the recruits had seen too much of communism in action to be open to the political overtures of the Union of Polish Patriots.
The Union of Polish Patriots recognised that the composition and political outlook of the Polish army presented numerous challenges. There was a shortage of officers of Polish descent, and the solution was to send Red Army officers on secondment. The scale of this shortage is revealed by the statistics: between May 1943 and July 1944, 7,206 Soviet officers served with the Poles, making up nearly three-quarters of the officer corps. The Red Army sent the Poles 6 generals, 17 colonels, 54 lieutenant-colonels and 113 majors. Later a cadet school was established to train Polish officers.65 Few of the Soviet officers spoke Polish well, if at all, which created endless communication difficulties within the army and caused a great deal of resentment among the Poles.66
Approximately half the Polish population remaining in the Soviet Union after the departure of the Anders army were Jewish. The majority of the members of the committee of the Union of Polish Patriots and the PKN as well as many of the most prolific journalists on the Polish-language newspapers were Jews. Because the Union wished to emphasise the Polish nature of the Berling army, it took steps to restrict their recruitment and to conceal the Jewish background of those who did join. No clear orders appear to have been given on whether the recruitment of Jews was permitted, so some commissions enlisted all the Jews who wanted to join, others restricted the numbers and some forbade such recruitment. Indeed, the Union of Polish Patriots received over 6,000 letters from Jews pleading to be allowed to join the army. Ultimately the desire to see the Polish army as large as possible dictated the Union’s policy: as the available source of non-Jewish Polish manpower began to dry up, more Jews were accepted. Jewish officers, usually serving as political officers, were encouraged to conceal their origins by adopting Polish-sounding names; for example, Garber became Garbowski and Rozental became Rozański.67
The vast majority of the Polish recruits were not favourable to the communists and retained their loyalty to the Polish Government-in-Exile. Indeed, the NKVD warned Wanda Wasilewska that her safety was in doubt when she planned to visit the Polish army in the summer of 1943.68 Since the Union of Polish Patriots had a secret plan to form the new communist government of Poland and to use the army to enforce its position in power, a massive programme of political indoctrination was initiated. Jews were very prominent in the political department: its first two heads, Major Hilary Minc and Captain Roman Zambrowski, were Jewish. All but one of the regimental deputy commanders for political affairs was Jewish, and more Jews filled the lower ranks of the political education structure, including most of the journalists of the divisional newspaper, Żołnierz Wolności.69 Political education took the form of compulsory lectures on Marxist-Leninist doctrine, usually in the evenings, but few Poles took much notice, preferring instead to use the time to mend their kit or surreptitiously to catch up on sleep.70
The Polish army received the same three-month basic training as a Red Army Guards infantry division. Men and women alike were trained in the use of the modern weapons of war. Although the women were not expected to take part in front-line fighting, they would undertake patrols in the rear areas. The training was arduous and the marches grew longer as the starved Poles regained their physical strength. The Soviets demonstrated their commitment to the establishment of a Polish army through a generous allocation of weapons. The Soviet liaison officer, General Georgi Zhukov, remarked that the Poles were seven times better armed than a pre-war Polish division: 80 per cent of the equipment was automatic or semi-automatic, every company had some anti-tank rifles, and there were specialist machine-gun and artillery units. The Poles also received about 30 T-34 tanks. Heavy equipment was transported on American-made trucks and jeeps.71
On 15 July 1943, the Polish army was shown to the public. War correspondents, including Alexander Werth of the BBC, were invited, along with allied representatives to view a ceremony at which the men and women of the Kościuszko Division would swear their oath of allegiance, and be presented with the divisional banner before a march past. The day was designed to emphasise the Polish character of the division with lavish symbols of Polish statehood. It was also Grunwald Day, celebrated in Poland as the day on which, in 1410, the Polish army had successfully held back any further advance by the Teutonic Knights. The ceremony began with an open-air Mass celebrated by the Polish army chaplain, Father Kupsz. Then the division was presented with its banner, which showed the white Polish eagle on a red and white background and was inscribed with the words ‘For Country and Honour’ on one side and with a portrait of Kościuszko on the other. The oath of allegiance, however, showed the political nature of the division: the soldiers swore to liberate Poland from the Germans but also swore fidelity to their Soviet allies. At a press conference given by Berling and Wasilewska after the parade, she made some political points of which the most important was that the Union of Polish Patriots ‘had no pretension of being an ersatz Polish Government. But it strongly felt that the future Government of Poland must come from the people, not from the émigrés.’72
In August 1943, the Kościuszko Division held a large tactical exercise, and at the end of the month a special Soviet army commission with Polish representatives declared the division ready for combat, despite the fact that it was actually only half trained. It seems likely that Wasilewska was the main proponent of this premature despatch, as she was very politically aware. She contacted Stalin directly and asked permission for the division to enter combat. According to Wasilewska:
Stalin asked me: ‘Are you telling me that they will fight properly?’ To that question I answered with a one thousand per cent conviction that they would. And I stated it in such a way that the question would not be repeated. The division received permission to move to the front.73
There was no military urgency for the Poles to take to the battlefield so soon. Since the battle of Kursk the Red Army had been steadily pushing the German army back: on 25 September, Smolensk was captured and, at the end of the month, the Red Army had reached the Dnieper river and was starting to clear its eastern bank of German forces.74 There was, however, a political necessity for the Polish army to take the field. The Big Three were soon to meet at Teheran and Stalin wanted to be able to show the western allied leaders that ‘his’ Poles were already fighting the Germans in contrast to ‘their’ Poles in the Anders army, who remained in training in the desert after leaving the Soviet Union over a year earlier.
The Red Army autumn campaign, in which the Poles were to take part, aimed at the liberation of Mińsk, the capital of Belorussia, and Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. The Kościuszko Division was transferred to Wiaźma by train and then began to march towards Smolensk. They marched 10 to 20 miles every night because the front line was close and the Luftwaffe still controlled the skies. In Smolensk Nina Kochańska and the women auxiliaries
were positioned along the roads and had to show the army the direction of the march. My place was near the corner of the square where some gallows still stood. The town was being bombed. Some bombs landed nearby and some further away. In the light of the explosions and through the glow of the fire which followed, these gallows kept appearing before me. It was a bad night and I cannot forget it.75
The division went through the Smolensk marshes to where the battle would take place on 12–13 October 1943.
The battle of Lenino was a tactical engagement that has been overlooked by western historians of the Eastern Front but which received enormous publicity in post-war communist Poland.76 The Kościuszko Division had 3 infantry regiments and was accompanied by tanks from the 1st Polish Tank Regiment and was placed under the Soviet 33rd Army, commanded by General Vasili Gordov. Light artillery regiments from the Soviet 144th and 164th Infantry Divisions would provide support, and the 42nd and 290th Rifle Divisions would cover the Poles’ flanks. Berling was not told by Gordov that the attack on Lenino was only a subsidiary operation to tie down German forces while the main action took place elsewhere; in fact part of Gordov’s army had been sent to reinforce the right flank of the main advance. The Poles were facing the battle-hardened German 113th and 337th Infantry Divisions. The Germans were well aware that it was the Poles who would attack their positions: careless reconnaissances-in-force prior to the opening of the main assault had alerted the Germans, and they reinforced their positions with men from the 36th Infantry Division on the 11th.
When the battle proper began on 12 October, it was a disaster. Fog delayed the artillery barrage, and when it had eventually started Gordov called it off prematurely. The infantry assault was reminiscent of the trench warfare on the Western Front during the First World War. The Germans had dug narrow trenches and strung barbed wire in front of them, but they had also had time to build more substantial shelters. As the artillery barrage opened, the Germans moved to their reserve trenches to take cover, but because it stopped too early they had ample time to return to the front-line trenches. As the Polish infantry crossed the open ground to the front-line German trenches, they were massacred by German machine guns and, unfortunately, simultaneously shelled by the Soviet artillery. The Polish tanks lost half their complement crossing the Mereya river and the surviving tanks then became bogged down in the marshy terrain and so took little part in the battle. Throughout that first day, the Poles fought hard to retain the ground they had gained, despite being short of ammunition and left unsupported because the adjacent Soviet forces had not reached their objectives, and also fought off numerous German counterattacks. The Poles took their objectives on the 13th but were so weakened that the division had to be replaced by the Soviet 164th Division.77
The casualties suffered by the Kościuszko Division were appalling: 510 men killed in action, 1,776 wounded and 765 men missing, or roughly 30 per cent of the troops sent into the battle. The Germans also lost heavily, with 1,500 men killed or wounded. They announced that 600 of the missing Poles had in fact deserted because they did not want to fight alongside the Soviets. Wasilewska was so appalled by the casualty rate, although it was a normal rate for a Red Army division, that she demanded that the division be withdrawn from the front line on the grounds that the casualty rate ‘meant that within the next three days we would not have a division left’. It was moved to Bobyry for further training and expansion and would not see action again until the middle of 1944. During the post-mortem on the battle, the Soviet general with overall responsibility, Gordov, strongly criticised the performance of the Poles, stating that it was ‘below any standards’, but his superiors did not agree and he was removed from his command. It was clear that the Poles had received an insufficient amount of ammunition, because at one point the front-line troops ran out completely. Cooperation with the Soviet forces had been poor, for not only were the Soviets slow to reinforce the Poles but their artillery frequently shelled their ally. Nevertheless, for propaganda purposes, the battle was seen as a success since the 1st Polish Division had been in battle with the Germans. Highly controversially the Union of Polish Patriots usurped the status of the Polish Government by awarding Polish military medals, including the Virtuti Militari and the Krzyż Walecznych.78
The Polish army remained in training throughout the Soviet 1943 winter campaign, which brought the Soviets to the pre-war frontier on the night of 3–4 January 1944. On the 5th the Polish Government in London issued a statement: ‘In their victorious struggle against the German invader, the Soviet forces are reported to have crossed the frontier of Poland’ and repeated the assertion that it was ‘the only and legal steward and spokesman of the Polish nation’. But even the first part of this statement was open to challenge by the Soviets and the Polish communists, for the Soviets believed that they were liberating Soviet territory. For them the Polish frontier now lay along the river Bug.