Polish fortunes were at a nadir at the end of 1944. The battle for the restoration of the pre-war eastern frontier had been lost, and Mikołajczyk was unable to convince his government to accept this and resigned as prime minister in November. His replacement, Tomasz Arciszewski, was largely ignored by the British and American governments, and the Polish Government-in-Exile was not recognised by the Soviets. Since the middle of 1944, Poland had been effectively split into three zones of occupation: east of the Bug river, the Curzon Line, the Soviets remained in control; west of the Bug river and in territory liberated from the German occupation, the communist-dominated Lublin Committee, sponsored by Stalin, held sway; all of western Poland and much of the central region were still under German occupation. The failure of Operation Burza and the Warsaw Uprising had left the Underground Government and the AK in a state of considerable disarray and with their reputations badly damaged. The battle was now for the restoration of Poland’s independence, and the omens were not good.
The opening shot was fired by Stalin when, on 3 January 1945, he informed Churchill that on 31 December 1944 the Supreme Soviet had recognised the Lublin Committee as the Provisional Government of Poland. He justified this decision on the grounds:
The decision to make it the Provisional Government seems to us quite timely, especially now that Mikołajczyk has withdrawn from the émigré Government and that the latter has thereby lost all semblance of a government. I think that Poland cannot be left without a government.1
Churchill immediately replied deprecating Stalin’s action, and making it clear that neither the British nor the American governments would follow suit. He wanted the discussion of the make-up of the future Polish government left to the next meeting of the Big Three, scheduled to take place in Yalta in early February. The Polish Government also issued its own statement criticising Stalin’s action.2
On the eve of the Yalta conference, both the British and American governments considered how to approach the question of the future governance and with it the independence of Poland. Neither believed that the new Provisional Government nor the Arciszewski government was representative of the Polish people. In an important memorandum of 8 January, Sir Orme Sargent argued against trying to reform the Polish Government in London and urged that attention should now be focused on broadening the support base of the Provisional Government by persuading Mikołajczyk and some of his colleagues to join it. Eden’s opinion was that ‘there are no good candidates from the Government in London’, but that Mikołajczyk and perhaps others like Romer and Grabski could be persuaded to join the Provisional Government to make it ‘far more representative’ of Poland. Although the Arciszewski government was still officially recognised by the British Government, it was held at arm’s length and not approached for its views. Instead, the British preferred to deal with Mikołajczyk, who was seen as being more of a realist. In a series of meetings at the Foreign Office, he was questioned on his willingness to return to Poland and collaborate in ‘a government which would include, and no doubt, be based largely on, the Lublin party as well as Poles from liberated Poland’. Mikołajczyk tentatively agreed but put forward his own ideas: efforts should be made to secure equal representation for each of the five major political parties in Poland, and that, in the interim period before elections could be held, Poland should be run by a presidential council, to be formed ‘of the most widely known leaders and representatives of political life, the churches and science’.3
The Arciszewski government reacted sharply to the rumours of Mikołajczyk’s negotiations with the Foreign Office and saw the dangers implicit in the forthcoming meeting at Yalta. On 22 January, it sent a memorandum to Roosevelt and Churchill demanding that all discussion of Poland’s frontiers should be postponed until the peace conference and that, in the interim and until elections could be held, an inter-allied commission should be formed to administer the country.4 Cadogan told the Polish ambassador, Raczyński, that this was ‘not very realistic’, to which ‘he, with a wry smile, agreed’. Cadogan then saw the Polish foreign minister, Adam Tarnowski, and said much the same thing. Tarnowski was, however, very defensive, and, in the privacy of his diary, Cadogan voiced his indignation, especially regarding the Polish Government’s claim ‘that it was up to us to save Poland’.5
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin all approached the Yalta conference with different aims. Churchill was in a position of considerable weakness since Britain was financially bankrupt, her fighting efforts dwarfed by the manpower of the United States and the Soviet Union, and her imperial prestige gravely damaged by her early defeats in the war. The advance of the Soviets into the Balkans in the latter half of 1944 and the ensuing Soviet political dominance of the region greatly alarmed Churchill, who felt honour-bound to obtain a satisfactory settlement for Poland. The Foreign Office briefing paper for Yalta stipulated that Churchill and Eden should work towards a completely new Polish government, based on neither the existing Polish Government in London nor the Provisional Government.6
Roosevelt had lost interest in European affairs, and either did not realise or did not care about the danger of Soviet domination in Europe. He was concerned with two issues: to obtain a promise from the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan as soon as the war in Europe had ended; and to win Soviet support for and participation in the United Nations Organisation. With regards to Poland, the State Department briefing paper suggested that the Provisional Government should not be recognised ‘until more conclusive evidence is received that it does in fact represent the basic wishes of the Polish people’. Roosevelt personally liked Mikołajczyk’s idea of a presidential council, but was willing to settle for an enlargement of the Provisional Government by the incorporation of ‘democratic’ Poles from inside and outside Poland.7 Stalin’s position was the simplest: he wanted the western allies to agree to what can only be termed a ‘Russian peace’, achieved by the force of Soviet arms, which would give him domination over eastern Europe.
Several factors affected the relative negotiating powers of the Big Three at Yalta. The armed forces of the western allies were still engaged in undoing the damage wrought by Hitler’s desperate thrust through the Ardennes in mid-December 1944 – better known as the Battle of the Bulge – and the Soviet January offensive in Poland had been brought forward to relieve the pressure on the western allies. Indeed, Churchill opened proceedings at Yalta by acknowledging the western allies’ debt to the Soviet forces. The British and American negotiating positions were weakened because each did not know what the other hoped to achieve or what tactics it would be employing. The blame for this lies firmly with Roosevelt, who, as with the run-up to the Teheran conference, had taken deliberate steps to avoid holding meetings with Churchill prior to Yalta lest Stalin feel that they were ganging up on him. This ignorance would prove to be damaging because Stalin in fact ‘knew what questions the British considered important, what they were planning to raise themselves, and what would be raised by the Americans. The Soviets were also aware of points of agreement and discord between the western allies and of their intended line of approach to Stalin on all these issues.’ Stalin’s British spies, Guy Burgess in London and Donald Maclean in Washington, had provided him with this priceless information.8
The Yalta conference opened on 4 February and, although the future of Poland was only one of the many issues to be discussed, it dominated the proceedings. The two points to be settled were the future frontiers of Poland and its future government. The agreement made at Teheran that the Curzon Line should be Poland’s eastern frontier was confirmed without challenge at Yalta, but there was considerable discussion over the extent of the geographical compensation Poland should receive to the north and west. No challenge was made to Poland’s absorption of East Prussia, with the exception of Königsberg, which Stalin claimed for the Soviet Union. The discussion centred on Silesia. Upper Silesia had been claimed by both Germany and Poland after the First World War and had been split between them. There was general agreement that the Polish frontier should certainly advance as far as the river Oder, but considerable disagreement over who should control the territory lying south of where the Oder turned eastwards. There were two tributaries running southwards from the Oder: the Eastern Neisse and the Western Neisse. Stalin stated that he had promised the Lublin Committee the Western Neisse and thereby the whole of Lower Silesia, centred on the city of Breslau (Wrocław). Churchill was alarmed, remarking that ‘it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion’, since he knew that Lower Silesia had a predominantly German population. Stalin dismissed the concerns of the two western leaders that millions more Germans than anticipated would have to be relocated from the territory to be given to Poland by assuring them that the Germans had already run away.9 Poland’s western frontier was not settled at Yalta and required lengthy discussion at the post-war Potsdam conference.
At the third plenary session on 6 February, Churchill raised the question of the composition of the future government of Poland. He insisted on a new provisional government representative of all shades of Polish political opinion and wanted guarantees of free elections in Poland. Stalin launched into a lengthy tirade arguing that the Lublin Committee was truly representative of the Polish people, the agents and supporters of what he now termed the ‘émigré’ government in Poland were little more than terrorists, and if the Provisional Government wished to invite Polish politicians from outside Poland to join it, it was free to make that decision.10 That evening Roosevelt intervened by writing to Stalin with the ingenious suggestion that the leaders of various Polish political parties should be brought to Yalta and made to agree on a new government.11 This took Stalin by surprise and he initially prevaricated. At the fourth plenary session, Stalin informed the western leaders that neither Bierut nor Osóbka-Morawski could be contacted since they were not in Warsaw, and no one knew where the two men Roosevelt wanted brought to Yalta, Wincenty Witos, leader of the Peasant Party in Poland, and Archbishop Sapieha, were. Stalin also argued there was no time to bring these men there. Molotov then made a proposal to break the deadlock: a commission of himself, Clark Kerr and Harriman should be formed in Moscow to confer with Polish political leaders in the hope of augmenting the existing Provisional Government with the inclusion of other Polish politicians until elections were held.12 The fifth plenary session made no progress, and that evening Eden recorded in his diary: ‘Stuck again over Poland’.13
At the sixth plenary session on 9 February, Roosevelt introduced a new proposal which had been discussed by the foreign ministers earlier that day. This called for ‘the present Polish Provisional Government [to] be reorganised into a fully representative government based on all democratic forces in Poland and including democratic leaders from Poland abroad, to be termed “The Provisional Government of National Unity” ’. Its composition would be settled by Molotov, Clark Kerr and Harriman. Molotov requested that ‘non-fascist and anti-fascist’ be added in reference to the democratic parties. This spelled great danger to Churchill since he already had ample evidence from Poland of the Soviet and Polish communist habit of labelling all their opponents ‘fascist’, but Roosevelt appeared oblivious to this danger. He was, however, determined to ensure that the elections in Poland should be ‘free and unfettered’, as was Churchill. Indeed, Eden had already informed the meeting of the foreign ministers that he thought it essential that the western ambassadors should act as observers for the elections, but this proved a sticking-point. Stalin was clearly insulted that the western allies should suspect that his puppets would not hold free elections.14
The accords signed at Yalta by the Big Three reflected their satisfaction at the end of the conference. In many ways it is true to say that ‘Yalta was basically a summary of every discussion that had taken place between the Big Three up to 1944. There was little new, little that had not already been conceded to the Soviet Union by force of arms.’15 Agreement had been reached on how to bring about the final defeat of Germany, the subsequent occupation and control of Germany, German reparations, the United Nations, Yugoslavia, the intention to try major war criminals, the repatriation of each other’s national POWs after their liberation, and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war with Japan within three months of the conclusion of the war in Europe. A Declaration on Liberated Europe was issued, and among its points were two with a bearing on Poland:
To foster the conditions in which the liberated people may exercise their rights [sovereign rights and self-government], the three governments will jointly assist the people … to form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people; and … to facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections.16
The declaration showed signs of being written in haste, with no definitions given to ‘democratic’, nor to ‘broadly representative’, terms which Stalin was highly likely to interpret in a different light from Churchill and Roosevelt.
There were also signs of haste in the drafting of the accord on Poland, which would have serious consequences for the negotiations of the commission soon to start proceedings in Moscow:
A new situation has been created in Poland as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army. This calls for the establishment of a Polish Provisional Government which can be more broadly based than was possible before the recent liberation of Western Poland. The Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland should be reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad. This new government should then be called the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity.
Mr Molotov, Mr Harriman and Sir Archibald Clark Kerr are authorized to consult in the first instance in Moscow with members of the present Provisional Government and with other Polish democratic leaders from within Poland and from abroad with a view to the reorganization of the present government along the above lines. This Polish Provisional Government of National Unity shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot. In these elections all democratic and anti-Nazi Parties shall have the right to take part and put forward candidates.
After the formation of the Provisional Government of National Unity, the governments of the three Great Powers would recognise it and exchange ambassadors with Poland. On the subject of frontiers, the Curzon Line was confirmed but, as to the western frontier, the resolution was restricted to the generality that Poland would receive substantial territories to the north and west: but that the final delineation of the western frontier would be left until the peace conference.17 Charles Bohlen, a member of the American delegation, later highlighted a fundamental weakness: no stipulation was made regarding the ratio of communist to democratic politicians from inside and outside Poland.18 The gravest weakness was in the phrase ‘to consult in the first instance in Moscow’. As will be seen, Molotov interpreted this phrase in a very different way from Clark Kerr and Harriman.
The importance of the Yalta conference lies far less in what was agreed there and far more in the fact that, unlike those of the Teheran conference, the Yalta agreements were made public, on 13 February. At last the world learnt what its armed forces had been fighting for. It was only to be expected that the Poles in the west would be hostile. On 17 February, Anders met Alexander at Caserta in Italy and asked him: ‘By a conference at which Poland was not represented, not invited to state her views, the Government is displaced, the Constitution annulled and hence all treaties abrogated, what therefore is the position of the loyal Poles?’19 A few days later a deeply distressed Anders was in London and had a meeting with Churchill during which Anders threatened to take the II Corps out of the line, and Churchill challenged him to do so.20 Indeed, Churchill was so furious with Anders and offended by his appointment as acting commander-in-chief that the two men only ever had that one meeting, a stormy one, Churchill cancelling a second.21 Only an announcement by the Polish Government persuaded Anders and the other Polish commanders to keep the Polish troops in the war against Germany.22 The Polish Government made a series of protests, arguing that the Yalta agreements were ‘a fifth partition of Poland, now accomplished by her Allies’.23 A more measured response was sent to London by the Underground Government, now operating in hiding near Warsaw:
The Council of National Unity expresses the conviction that the decisions of the Crimean Conference taken without the participation or consent of the Polish State … impose new, arduous and unjust sacrifices on Poland. The Council of National Unity, whilst strongly protesting against the unilateral decisions of the Conference, is nevertheless, obliged to adapt itself to them, seeing in them a chance of saving the independence of Poland, to prevent the further destruction of the Polish nation and to lay the foundation for the organisation of her own forces which would enable Poland to carry out an independent policy in the future …
By adopting this line of policy – a painful one for the Polish nation – the Council of National Unity wishes to show its willingness to come to an agreement with its eastern neighbour and establish with it durable, friendly and peaceful relations …
The council expected that the Allies would ensure that the Provisional Government of National Unity would be truly representative of all parties, and its pragmatic reaction also signalled a split from the intransigence of the Arciszewski government and reflected what it knew of the prevailing realities in Poland.24
On 27 February, the debate on Yalta began in the House of Commons. Churchill covered all the main points of the agreements reached, but the issue of Poland held centre stage. Churchill began by confirming and approving of the Curzon Line, and repeated the assertion, first made public in the Commons in December 1944, that Poland would gain East Prussia and an undefined amount of territory in the west as compensation. He then turned to the vexed matter of its future government, and, after explaining that the composition of a new provisional government would be decided in Moscow by a commission of the two western ambassadors and Molotov, Churchill placed the blame for the delay in the formation of a new government squarely on the shoulders of the Polish Government in London:
Let me remind them that there would have been no Lublin Committee or Lublin Provisional Government in Poland if the Polish Government in London had accepted our faithful counsel given to them a year ago. They would have entered into Poland as its active Government, with the liberating Armies of Russia. Even in October, when the Foreign Secretary and I toiled night and day in Moscow, M. Mikolajczyk could have gone from Moscow to Lublin, with every assurance of Marshal Stalin’s friendship, and become the Prime Minister of a more broadly constructed Government, which would now be seated at Warsaw, or wherever, in view of the ruin of Warsaw, the centre of government is placed.
He went on: ‘The impression I brought back from the Crimea, and from all my other contacts, is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond.’ Yet almost immediately he added that he recognised that the Polish forces fighting under British command were deeply unhappy about the Yalta agreements and so made the extraordinary offer: ‘I earnestly hope it may be possible to offer the citizenship and freedom of the British Empire’ to those members of the Polish forces who did not wish to return to Poland. It seemed then that Anders’s impassioned reaction to the news of the Yalta agreements had made some impact on Churchill.25
Churchill’s speech was subject to frequent interruptions, reflecting the growing disquiet among the Members of Parliament. Harold Nicolson reflected the mood of the House with his summary of Churchill’s performance:
He makes an extremely good case for arguing that Poland in her new frontiers will enjoy an independent and prosperous existence. But in his closing words before luncheon he rather destroys all this by saying that we will offer British citizenship to those Polish soldiers who are too frightened to return.26
Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, noted in his diary that the under secretary at the Foreign Office, Orme Sargent, ‘tells me that the Polish Government’s propaganda against the Crimea Agreement has been both extensive and effective’.27 On the second day of the debate, the effectiveness of their campaign was shown by the proposal of an amendment by the Conservative MP Maurice Petherick that the House
regrets the decision to transfer to another power the territory of an ally contrary to treaty and to Article 2 of the Atlantic Charter and furthermore regrets the failure to ensure to those nations which have been liberated from German oppression the full right to choose their own government free from the influence of any other power.28
The supporters, mainly Conservative MPs, objected to the imposition of the Curzon Line by ‘an act of force’, and voiced deep concern that elections in Poland would not be free. A junior minister, H. G. Strauss, resigned his office. The amendment was defeated by 396 votes to 25.29 Across the Atlantic, Roosevelt addressed Congress on the Yalta agreements on 1 March. His speech was very well received, and Roosevelt suffered no criticism of the Polish clauses. A Gallup poll showed that the majority of those Americans surveyed thought that the Yalta agreements were the best possible solution to the Polish question, but a larger majority also believed that they were not ‘fair’ to the Poles.30
Ultimately the success of the Yalta conference would rest on whether or not Churchill and Roosevelt had been correct in assuming that the Soviets could be trusted not to impose communist-dominated governments on the countries of eastern Europe. The omens were not good from the outset. The Soviets rapidly made a mockery of the Declaration on Liberated Europe in six countries: in Austria the Soviets allowed Dr Karl Renner to form a provisional government without agreement with the other occupying powers; in Bulgaria the Soviets backed the communists’ plans for elections to be held on a single electoral list, which would give them a disproportionate number of seats; in Hungary the Soviets pushed for immediate land reform; in Rumania Soviet pressure forced King Mihai to dismiss the Rădescu government and install the Soviet stooge Petru Groza; in Yugoslavia an agreement was made between Josip Tito and Ivan Šubašić without reference to the western powers; and in Czechoslovakia Beneš faced communist demands out of all proportion to their electoral strength. On 8 March, Churchill confessed to Roosevelt that, although he wanted to publicise his displeasure at these events, he was unwilling to do so lest Stalin turn round and remind him that he, Stalin, had stood aside while the British had crushed the pro-communist rising in Greece at the end of 1944.31
The tripartite commission of Clark Kerr, Harriman and Molotov began work in Moscow on 23 February. Harriman’s first report to Stettinius was optimistic: Molotov appeared to have agreed that the Provisional Government would be invited to send representatives to Moscow, and that invitations would be issued to five other Poles from Poland. This, however, turned out to be an erroneous impression. The British and American position was:
the Commission should at once invite representatives of ‘Lublin’ and an unspecified number of representative Poles from inside and outside Poland to Moscow to discuss among themselves under the Commission’s auspices how representative government can be formed, allocation of key posts and how presidential functions should be performed pending elections.32
But Molotov was adamant that the agreement at Yalta stipulated that the Provisional Government should be called to Moscow first and be given the right of veto over the list of names from outside its ranks who might be invited to join the government. The dispute rested on the different interpretations of the words ‘to consult in the first instance in Moscow’. Dean Acheson, the acting secretary of state, advised Harriman that Bohlen, who had drafted that section of the agreement, had been consulted:
In the English text the words ‘In the first instance’ come before the words ‘in Moscow’ and could therefore only relate to the fact that consultations of the Commission were to begin in Moscow but could later be transferred elsewhere. The consultations were however clearly stated to be with three specified categories of Poles, one of which was ‘Members of present Provisional Government’. There is nothing in [the] English text to suggest that they should take place with the present Provisional Government before ‘other Polish Democratic leaders from within Poland and abroad’.33
Molotov’s response to the receipt of this information was that the phrase meant ‘that the Commission should consult in the first instance with the Polish Provisional Government’.34 Bohlen later wrote that he did not think that the Soviets had agreed to the words ‘in the first instance’ at Yalta with the intention to misinterpret them later, but that they then ‘saw in this phrase a loophole allowing them to promote their own cause’.35 The determination of the Provisional Government to assume the dominant position in the new Provisional Government of National Unity is amply demonstrated by its reaction to the names of eight Poles the British and Americans wished to invite to Moscow. Of the eight names from outside the Provisional Government – the list included Mikołajczyk, Romer and Grabski from London – the communists rejected Mikołajczyk and Romer – and from those Poles inside Poland accepted only Professor Stanisław Kutzreba, a historian from Kraków.36 Molotov also refused to allow allied observers into Poland, arguing that their despatch would ‘sting the national pride of the Poles to the quick’.37
The Moscow Commission was making no progress. The Soviet position was the simplest: as Stalin had told Zhukov after Yalta, ‘Churchill wants the Soviet Union to share a border with a bourgeois Poland, alien to us, but we cannot allow this to happen.’38 Churchill was alarmed by the stalemate in Moscow. He had been badly bruised by the criticism in the House of Commons, and, for him, the creation of a broad-based new Provisional Government of National Unity was essential for the British Government to be able to convince Parliament and the public that Britain had discharged its debt of honour and loyalty to its longest-serving wartime ally. Furthermore, as Clark Kerr stated in a letter to Eden: ‘for us the Polish question is, and must remain, one of the utmost consequence, for upon its satisfactory solution rests a great part of our hope and belief in the possibility of a real and cordial understanding between the Soviet people and our own’.39
Roosevelt was also worried about the lack of progress in Moscow but had a different concern: the future of the United Nations. He was only interested in the negotiations on the new Polish provisional government insofar as they impacted on it. The League of Nations had been established after the First World War as a body designed to prevent quarrels between nations escalating into armed conflict. It was weak from the start because Russia, then in the throes of a civil war, was not invited to join, and the United States’ membership was not ratified by the Senate. Roosevelt’s ambition to create a more powerful organisation than the League had forced him to face similar challenges to those that had confronted Woodrow Wilson. In order to convince the Senate that the United Nations would be a body capable of preserving peace in the world, Roosevelt needed to ensure the participation of all allied and neutral countries, and the Soviet Union was the most important. To gain its support Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed at Yalta to allow the Soviet Union three votes in the assembly while all other countries would have one apiece. Poland, a signatory to the document launching the United Nations, introduced an unwelcome complicating factor into the negotiations leading up to the opening of the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco on 25 April. Molotov threatened to boycott the proceedings if the Soviet Union did not get its own way in the Moscow Commission, which caused Eden to question whether there was even any point in the conference: ‘How can we lay the foundations of any new World Order when Anglo-American relations with Russia are so completely lacking in confidence?’40
Churchill took the lead in communicating to Roosevelt his alarm at the stalemate in the Moscow Commission and repeatedly urged Roosevelt to join him in making a joint approach to Stalin. On 8 March, he wrote to Roosevelt voicing his fears: ‘if we do not get things right now, it will soon be seen by the world that you and I by putting our signatures to the Crimea settlement have underwritten a fraudulent prospectus’.41 A week later he asked Roosevelt: ‘Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?’ and warned: ‘the moment that Molotov sees that he has beaten us away from the whole process of consultations among Poles to form a new government, he will know that we will put up with anything’. Roosevelt agreed that something needed to be done to break the deadlock in Moscow but disagreed about the tactics.42 After Molotov’s rejection of the Anglo-American interpretation of the Yalta agreements, Churchill sent another barrage of communications to Roosevelt urging action. On 27 March, he asked Roosevelt whether he felt that Molotov’s threat not to attend the San Francisco conference could be interpreted either as a Soviet withdrawal from the entire concept of the United Nations or as an attempt at blackmail. He concluded: ‘if the success of San Francisco is not to be gravely imperilled, we must both of us make the strongest possible appeal to Stalin about Poland’.43 This threat to his beloved United Nations spurred Roosevelt into action. On 31 March, both he and Churchill wrote to Stalin independently, demanding that the commission be free to invite a representative set of Poles. Stalin’s response to them both, on 7 April, indicated that no progress had been made: he still demanded that the new Polish government be built around the Provisional Government and that its representatives would be consulted on which other Poles should be invited to Moscow. He also stipulated: ‘only those leaders should be summoned for consultation from Poland and from London who recognise the decisions of the Crimea Conference on Poland and who in practice want friendly relations between Poland and the Soviet Union’.44
Mikołajczyk had been approached by representatives of the Provisional Government who urged him to come to an agreement with them independently of the commission in Moscow. Mikołajczyk, however, rejected this attempt to separate him from the western powers and stated firmly that he would only meet the members of the Provisional Government when invited to do so by the Moscow Commission.45 He was prepared to do all he could to move the Moscow proceedings forward and therefore, when he was asked to make a public statement signalling his acceptance of the Yalta agreements, he did so and the statement was published in The Times on 15 April.46 This should have opened the way for Mikołajczyk to take part in the negotiations in Moscow, but Stalin was not satisfied, and stalled by insisting on a statement from Mikołajczyk explicitly accepting the Curzon Line.
Roosevelt died on 12 April and there was a brief hiatus before the new president, Harry Truman, took up the sword in the battle for Poland. In a joint letter to Stalin, Churchill and Truman attempted to make some progress by suggesting:
(1) That we instruct our representatives on the Commission to extend invitations immediately to the following Polish leaders to come to Moscow for consultation: Bierut, Osóbka-Morawski, Rola-Żymierski, Bishop Sapieha, one representative Polish political party leader not connected with the present Warsaw Government (if any of the following were agreeable to you he would be agreeable to us – Witos, Zuławski, Chachiński, Jasiukowicz), and from London: Mikołajczyk, Grabski and Stańczyk.
(2) That once invitations to come for consultation have been issued by the Commission, the representatives of the Warsaw Provisional Government would arrive first if desired.
(3) That it be agreed that these Polish leaders called for consultation could suggest to the Commission the names of a certain number of other Polish leaders from within Poland or abroad who might be brought in for consultation in order that all the major Polish groups be represented in the discussions.
(4) We do not feel that we could commit ourselves to any formula for determining the composition of the new Government of National Unity in advance of consultation with the Polish leaders …
Stalin was having none of it. His reply to this letter and to subsequent communications during April indicated that he would not change his mind on anything concerning the government of Poland. The only apparent good news was that Molotov would be attending the San Francisco conference after all.47
The negotiations in Moscow remained deadlocked and were now moved to the San Francisco conference, where the three foreign ministers were present. But before this conference opened, one outstanding issue had to be resolved: which Polish government would represent the Poles? The Soviet embassy in Washington sent several memoranda to the State Department demanding that an invitation should be issued to the Provisional Government, while the Polish Government in London sent appeals to the governments of Britain, the United States and China demanding an invitation on the grounds that it had signed the original charter launching the United Nations on 1 January 1942.48 Questions were asked in Parliament in support of the right of the Polish Government in London to send representatives to San Francisco, but Eden could only reply that invitations were issued by the four Great Powers and that, since the Soviet Union did not recognise the Polish Government in London, and Britain, the United States and China did not recognise the Provisional Government: ‘Poland can only be invited to the Conference if a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity, which will be recognised by all four Powers, can be formed in Poland in accordance with the recommendation of the Crimea Conference.’49
On 25 April, the San Francisco conference on the United Nations opened without the participation of Poland. The Polish ambassador to the United States, Jan Ciechanowski wrote:
The empty chair of Poland at the San Francisco conference weighed heavily on that assembly. There was something uncanny in the fact that, at the end of a victorious world war … Poland, an Allied nation … was prevented from taking her part in a gathering of nations allegedly held to apply the terms of justice and democracy to a future system of world security.50
Goebbels was unimpressed by the conference, terming it the ‘San Fiasco’ conference.51 The unofficial delegation led by Stanisław Kot sent to San Francisco by the Polish Government in London received mixed messages from the delegates: there was an apparent reluctance even to be seen talking to the Poles lest they be accused of anti-Soviet sentiments, while Kot gained the impression: ‘The idea of war with Russia is said to be growing in influential US circles, particularly Army and Navy whose influence is strongly growing.’52 A few days after the conference opened there was a concert by the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein at the San Francisco Opera House. After playing the United States national anthem, he stood up and announced to the audience that although the flag of his native country, Poland, was not displayed, he would like to play its national anthem, Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła (‘Poland is not yet lost’). This was followed by long and loud applause.53 On 26 June, the United Nations Charter was signed by 153 delegates, with a space left for the signature of Poland.
At San Francisco the three foreign ministers, Eden, Stettinius and Molotov, held numerous meetings to discuss Poland,54 but made no progress. On 21 April, the Soviet Union had demonstrated its firm commitment to the Provisional Government by concluding a treaty of friendship, mutual assistance and post-war cooperation with it. The Polish Government in London issued an immediate protest: ‘From the point of view of international law none of the treaties concluded by the Lublin Administration is valid, considering that this body is not the government of the Polish Republic and does not represent the will of the Polish nation.’55 Stettinius and Eden were equally appalled by the treaty. The Soviet Union also effectively made the talks pointless with the arrest of sixteen underground leaders in Poland by the NKVD. Among them were Józef Chachiński and Stanisław Jasiukowicz, whom Harriman and Clark Kerr had wanted to invite to consultations in Moscow. No one knew of the whereabouts and fate of the arrested men until, on 3 May, Molotov revealed that the men had indeed been arrested by the NKVD, transported to Moscow and would shortly be put on trial. The Polish Government in London immediately issued an appeal to Stettinius, as chairman of the San Francisco conference, asking him to intervene to secure their release.56 The arrests made it quite clear to the British and American governments that the Soviet Union had no intention of allowing the Polish people to choose their own government. The joy felt in San Francisco at the announcement of the end of the war in Europe on 8 May was tempered by fear for the Poles.
The London Poles had been sidelined, above all, by the brutal military facts of the eastern front at the beginning of 1945. The Soviet plan for the liberation of Poland, the clearance of East Prussia and the drive to the Oder was daring and dramatic in its execution. Witold Sa˛gajłło was awakened in the early hours of the morning of 11 January:
The whole house was shaking. I got up and went to the window. From it I could see well beyond Ostrowiec across the Plain of Sandomierz. From the foot of the Holy Cross Mountains to my right and stretching to the east, there was across the whole horizon a continuous band of fire – thousands of Russian guns delivering a heavy barrage. The Russian breakout from the Baranów bridgehead had started.57
The 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Ivan Koniev launched its attack from the Sandomierz bridgehead west of the Vistula and, by the night of the 15th, had advanced 60 miles on a broad front. Polish cities fell one after the other: on 16 January Radom, Częstochowa and Kielce were liberated, and a Polish girl recalled the advent of Soviet troops in Kielce:
Then a door opened with a great noise and the soldiers barraged [sic] in, strange, I thought, they were wearing extremely worn out uniforms, they were unshaven with a rifle hanging on a string, they were shouting and kept running everywhere, knocking anything on the way, there were lots of them.58
The soldiers then searched the house, looking not for German soldiers but for watches and vodka. She was lucky that these Soviet soldiers were only interested in loot, because the fate of other Polish women was far worse. The escaped British POW John Ward heard that ‘within a few days the Russians had raped every female in the district over fourteen years of age’.59 It is commonly assumed that the Soviet soldiers only raped German women but in fact the rapes began as soon as the Soviet frontier had been crossed. The subject is, naturally, an extremely sensitive one.
The 1st Ukrainian Front then advanced on Kraków, from which Hans Frank and the German administration had fled on 17 January, and the city fell to the Soviets two days later. On 27 January, the Soviets advanced into Upper Silesia and liberated Auschwitz. There they found 7,600 survivors: 1,000 at Auschwitz I; 6,000 at the extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau; and 600 at Auschwitz III, the Buna works.60 The Germans had begun the reduction of the camp population during the last half of 1944, despatching around 65,000 westwards to the concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau and Ravensbrück. On 17 January 1945, most of the remaining 56,000 prisoners, mostly Jews from all over Europe, were marched westwards out of the camp, and many died on the road, too weak from starvation or too poorly clad to withstand the harsh winter conditions. The SS attempted to hide the evidence of the exterminations by blowing up the crematoria and gas chambers but much remained to reveal to the world the extent of the crimes of the SS.61
The Soviet armies continued to drive towards the Oder, which Koniev’s troops reached in early February and created bridgeheads across the river to the north and south of Breslau. Adjacent to the 1st Ukrainian Front, the armies of the 1st Belorussian Front, commanded by Marshal Zhukov, operated on the Poznań–Łódź axis and went on to the Oder. Further to the north, the 2nd Belorussian Front, commanded by Rokossovsky, attacked north-west from Warsaw towards the Baltic, aiming to cut off the German forces in East Prussia which were under attack from the 3rd Belorussian Front, commanded by Ivan Chernyakhovsky. The 1st Polish Army, operating under Rokossovsky, was given the honour of liberating Warsaw, which it achieved on 17 January, four days after the offensive had opened. The Germans had withdrawn most of their troops before the Poles attacked. Warsaw was a deserted and destroyed city where only a few intrepid survivors such as Władysław Szpilman had eked out a tenuous existence between the evacuation of the city at the beginning of October and its liberation three months later. It was during this period that Szpilman met Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who supplied him with food in return for Szpilman playing the piano for him.62
The Germans put up a strong defence at certain points, and one strongpoint was the ancient fortress of Poznań, which was left to Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army while the forces of Zhukov and Rokossovsky were directed northwards to relieve pressure on the 3rd Belorussian Front, which was facing a fierce and lengthy battle for Königsberg in East Prussia. The battle for Poznań took nine days, and Chuikov described the battle for the fortress to the Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman: ‘Our men were walking around on top of it, and Germans were shooting up at them [from inside]. Then sappers poured in one and a half barrels of kerosene, set it on fire, and the Germans sprang out like rats.’ Finally, after a total of 28,000 of the 40,000 German defenders had been killed, its commander, Major-General Ernst Gomell, shot himself and the fortress surrendered.63
The 1st Polish Army was tasked with guarding Zhukov’s flank by mounting a direct assault on the Pomeranian Wall. This complex defensive position had been constructed by the Germans using the advantages presented by the ‘post-glacial landscape, with rolling hills cut across with sequences of deep lakes and densely wooded areas’. The rapidity of the Soviet advance had led to complacency and to a strong belief that the Germans were finished as a fighting force, but the Poles were to discover that this was not true. The Polish offensive in western Pomerania opened at the end of January in appalling weather conditions, and a lack of reconnaissance meant that the advance of German units, including the SS division Lettland, had gone unnoticed. Command mistakes made the situation worse: on 31 January, the 1st Polish Infantry Division was ordered to cross the Gwda river near Grudna and advance in the direction of Jastrow (Jastrowie), but its commander, Colonel Aleksander Archipowicz, became disorientated and advanced instead towards Flederborn (Podgaje), which lay outside the operational area. The German resistance was so strong that the Poles only breached the Pomeranian Wall on 5 February.64
The 2nd Belorussian Front aimed at the East Pomeranian coast between Kolberg (Kołobrzeg) and Köslin (Koszalin). The Poles were given a leading role in the assault on Kolberg. This Prussian port was famous for having resisted five sieges, including one by the French in 1807, and for that reason had been the subject of Goebbels’s last, lavish propaganda film. In 1945, however, it was defended by a motley group of Wehrmacht units, two Volkssturm battalions and assorted personnel of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. The port was home to 68,000 civilian refugees fleeing the Soviet advance through East Prussia and awaiting evacuation to the Reich.* Kolberg was a natural defensive position, surrounded by the sea or by marshes, which limited the use of tanks and heavy artillery. The battle opened at the beginning of March and again the Poles suffered from the excessive optimism of their commanders. The ferocity of the German defence forced the Polish commander, General Stanisław Popławski, to feed more and more troops into the battle. The Germans held out until all the civilians and wounded had been evacuated before withdrawing on the night of 17 March, which went unnoticed by the Poles. The battle cost the Poles 4,004 casualties, of which 1,266 were dead. In contrast the German casualties were only 2,300 men.65
The 2nd Belorussian Front then attacked eastwards towards Gdynia and Danzig and reached the Baltic at Sopot, thereby splitting the German defences and leaving each city to be destroyed in turn. The Soviets were assisted in the attack on Gdynia when a Polish girl reached the commander of the VIII Guards Mechanised Corps, I. F. Dremov, and handed him a map of the entire German defensive positions: ‘Mixing Polish words with Russian, the girl drew attention to the most vulnerable locations of the fortresses and the sectors where it could be attacked to the best advantage.’66 Gdynia was liberated on 28 March, and on 30 March Danzig fell to the Soviet armies.
Poland was now liberated from the Germans, and the Polish armies had played their part. A report from the 1st Belorussian Front to Beria testified to the anger the Polish soldiers felt towards the German soldiers who had occupied their country:
Soldiers of the 1st Polish Army are known to be particularly ruthless towards Germans. There are many places where they do not take captured German officers and soldiers to assembly points, but simply shoot them on the road. For instance, [in one place] 80 German officers and men were captured, but only two were brought to the POW assembly point. The rest were shot. The regimental commander interrogated the two, then released them to the Deputy Chief of Reconnaissance, who shot these men too. The deputy political officer of 4th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Urbanovich, shot nine prisoners who had voluntarily deserted to our side, in the presence of the divisional intelligence officer.67
Not all the soldiers in the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies wanted to fight under Soviet command. Most had been forcibly conscripted and some took any opportunity to desert. Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary:
Desertions from the Polish army are increasing. Lately many soldiers have left the garrison in Zamość. The underground is trying to take care of the deserters by giving them lodging and food. Even the nuns in Michalów are hiding six deserters. Mass desertions are expected in the spring, probably into the forest.68
His diary entries for the following month record the difficulties encountered in feeding the growing number of deserters. Other examples include: in March the commanding officer of the Polish 9th Infantry Division, who persuaded 380 soldiers to desert on their way to the front; and a junior officer at the Polish army tank school, who was also a member of the AK, who called on 70 cadets to desert and take their weapons with them. The NKVD hunted down deserters ruthlessly and killed many of those they recaptured.69
All the Polish armies took part in the final battles of the Second World War. The Polish armies in the west continued fighting to the end, with Maczek’s armoured division crossing into Germany and occupying Wilhelmshaven, and the II Corps in Italy ending the war having taken Bologna. The Polish armies on the Eastern Front had also played their part in the final defeat of the Third Reich. The 1st Polish Army was tasked with forcing the Oder river at Siekierki and then advancing with the 2nd Belorussian Front to approach Berlin from the north. Operations commenced on 16 April, but crossing the Oder was no easy task, as General Jurij Bordziłowski, the 1st Army’s chief engineer, recalled:
I have forced many rivers, I saw many more, sometimes I crossed them, sometimes I defended them, but the Oder in early spring 1945 looked the worst and made a depressing impression. I did see rivers that were larger and wider, but they were just rivers, and here we saw an infinite expanse of water, where it was hard to tell the river bed from the shallow backwaters, often a kilometre or more in width. I knew very well what we could be in for – there was no way to swim and no way to walk.
The 1st Polish Army then broke the German defensive line at Stara Odra, advanced on the Hohenzollern Canal and pursued the Germans back to the Laba river, which they reached on 6 May. Further south, elements of the 1st Polish Army, including the 1st Division, took part in the final battles for Berlin, reaching the centre as the city capitulated.70
The 2nd Polish Army, under General Karol Świerczewski, operated under the command of the 1st Ukrainian Front. These troops had been conscripted in the second half of 1944 and they were undertrained and underequipped, and many even lacked uniforms and were forced to go into battle wearing their civilian clothing. The 2nd Polish Army contained many former AK soldiers who were politically unreliable and took any opportunity for desertion. Nonetheless, the Soviets threw these men into the battles to cross the Neisse river and then advance towards Dresden. The operation opened on 16 April, and poor reconnaissance meant that the Poles were ignorant of the strength of the Germans. Worse was to unfold when the Germans managed to gather together sufficient forces to mount a counterattack which decimated the rear of the 2nd Polish Army near Bautzen and led to the successful recapture of Bautzen. The seriousness of the situation necessitated the withdrawal of Polish and Soviet troops from the Dresden area and the evacuation of Bautzen. Towards the end of April, the officer carrying the order of retreat was killed and his papers captured by the Germans who now knew exactly how and when to attack the Polish troops. The result was a slaughter and, by the time the situation had been restored, the 2nd Polish Army had suffered 4,902 dead and 13,000 wounded or missing, and had lost over half its tanks and over 20 per cent of its artillery. Despite these losses the 2nd Polish Army took part in the final operations for the capture of Dresden before turning south, crossing into Czechoslovakia and taking part in the final battles of the war for Prague, which it entered on 11 May.71
The reaction of the Poles to the liberation of Poland by the Soviet armies was mixed. For most it appears that there was a feeling of quiet relief that the Germans had gone, but little joy and a great deal of suspicion directed towards the Soviets. Michał Zylberberg, a Jew who had survived hidden in Warsaw and then moved to the country when Warsaw was evacuated after the uprising, wrote of the Soviet liberation of the village where he was sheltering:
It was silent and shuttered, without a soul in the street. The local population were awaiting a different sort of liberation. They hoped that the Polish government in exile would set them free. The market square was filled with thousands of Russian soldiers, playing on mouth organs and performing Cossack dances.72
The Soviet soldiers were equally unimpressed by their reception by the Poles: ‘When you look at them, you feel such anger, such hatred. They’re having fun, loving and living. And you are fighting to liberate them! They just laugh at us Russians. Bastards!’73 The Jews who had survived, whether in camps, in hiding or as partisans in the forests, were naturally overjoyed to see their Soviet liberators.
The Poles faced several choices after the liberation of Poland and its occupation by the Soviet armies and administration by the communist-dominated Provisional Government: leave Poland, wait and see what would happen, or resist the new occupation. The winter of 1944–5 provided the last opportunity for those in the south of Poland to flee the Soviet advance by crossing into Austria, a move for which the Germans would grant permission. Among those who took the opportunity were Teresa Kicińska, her half-brother Jurek Strążewski and the Smorczewski family. The decision at the Moscow conference of the foreign ministers in 1943 to treat Austria as the first victim of Hitler’s aggression meant that as Germany moved inexorably towards defeat the Austrians tended to adopt a more friendly approach towards the recent Polish arrivals. For example, in Vienna Ralph Smorczewski’s father approached a police officer for residential permits:
‘What do you need them for?’
‘Well, if somebody enquires as to the reason why we are here, we will be in trouble.’
‘Nobody will enquire.’
‘We need these permits to obtain some food.’
‘You can get it on the black market.’74
Also in Vienna, Teresa Kicińska and her half-brother, although they were technically members of a subject race, were offered a suite in a hotel in Vienna in exchange for cigarettes on the grounds that: ‘soon the war will be over and you will be coming here as visitors’. Finally, however, the Austrians were desperately short of food and wanted to get rid of the refugees. Just as the war was ending the Smorczewski family crossed into Bavaria, and the Austrians all but threw Teresa Kicińska and her half-brother across the border into Switzerland.75
Away from the south, no escape was possible and the situation was far worse. The Germans forced the Poles into labour gangs to dig defences against the Soviet attack, and as the Germans withdrew westwards, so the Poles were forced to follow:
In the course of two weeks we covered on foot tens of miles, both during the day and night. Without any supplies. We were starving, begging, and stealing whatever we could eat, sleeping along the way in whatever farm buildings we came across. Along the way we met terrified people from Prussia escaping with their things. The look of them reminded us of our own September 1939, except then the direction of the exodus was different.76
Indeed, all over Poland various marches were taking place westwards under the German jackboot: Jews who had survived the concentration camps and labour camps and allied POWs – and, of course, the German administrators and their families were fleeing westwards along with the Germans who had been settled in Poland as part of Himmler’s great resettlement programme. A German prison governor ordered to move his prisoners westwards described the problems:
The weather conditions were disastrous. The progress of the trek was hindered by the heavy snowfall, the cold, the mass of refugees and army vehicles as well as the flooding back of masses of troops, prisoners of war, etc. Every road was jammed, so that the treks sometimes had to wait for hours in one spot, just to move a few hundred metres forward.77
Also going westwards were the Poles from east of the Curzon Line under the repatriation agreements signed between the PKWN and the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1944, of which more in Chapter 17.
As the Soviet armies liberated the country, the Provisional Government extended its rule over the whole of Poland. It aimed to consolidate its position as the sole ruling body in Poland before any agreement on a new Provisional Government of National Unity, including non-communist elements, was decided by the Moscow Commission. To this end the Provisional Government began by reforming the economy. It caused total chaos through a sudden abolition of the złoty issued by the Germans in Kraków and its replacement by a new złoty printed in Lublin. The Provisional Government took the first steps towards the nationalisation of industry by seizing the cash stocks of businesses and granting short-term credits in their place, with failure to repay these leading to the seizure of the businesses. The 2,000,000 troops in the Soviet armies attempted to live off the land; for the peasants this meant an immediate replacement of German agricultural quotas by those imposed by the Soviets and the Provisional Government. The quotas were enforced with draconian efficiency, leading to great shortages of food for the Poles in the countryside and near starvation in the towns and cities.78 The Provisional Government attempted to woo the peasants away from its greatest political rival, the Peasant Party, by quickly introducing agrarian reform, a subject about which all parties were in fact in agreement. A Soviet soldier, Vsevolod Olimpiev, noted the impact of agrarian reform on the village where he was billeted:
Our host had abandoned his work and was spending his time at meetings of some sort. When asked by me he answered that land redistribution was underway in the village then. After one of those meetings he came back home upset and gloomy because he had been given a bad allotment. He declared that he would write a letter of complaint not to Lublin but to Comrade Stalin in Moscow and asked me for a piece of paper for it. I gave him a double sheet torn away from a notepad. Next day the host came back in a good mood for he had received a better allotment. To achieve this it was enough to show a piece of paper obtained from ‘Mister Russian Sergeant’ and announce the address he was intending to write to!79
The agrarian reform was put into practice so incompetently that many peasants received under 4 hectares, too little even to provide a living for their families.
The tool used by the Provisional Government in alliance with the NKVD to impose its rule on liberated Poland was the application of terror against all those it viewed as its opponents. These opponents were all members of the AK and the Underground Government. Okulicki assumed command of the AK after Bór-Komorowski had gone into German captivity, and the reports he sent to London during the last months of 1944 reflect the extreme demoralisation within the ranks of the AK and the belief that there was no point in harassing the German retreat solely to replace the German occupation with a Soviet one.80 The Polish Government in London agreed with his assessment and on 19 January 1945 Okulicki issued his final order disbanding the AK:
Conduct your future work and activity in the spirit of the recovery of the full independence of the state and defence of the Polish population from annihilation. Try to be the nation’s guides and creators of an independent Polish state. In this activity each of us must be his own commander. In the conviction that you will obey this order, that you will remain loyal only to Poland, as well as to make your future work easier, on the authorisation of the President of the Polish Republic, I release you from your oath and dissolve the ranks of the AK.81
The Underground Government remained in existence in secret, hoping that some of its members would be invited to take positions in the future government of Poland.
Although continued resistance to occupation might have seemed futile, nonetheless the Poles were not going to see their country occupied by the Soviets without a fight. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, General Emil ‘Nil’ Fieldorf was ordered to set up a new conspiratorial underground organisation from the ranks of the AK, which became known as Independence (Niepodłegłość, NIE).* It aimed at infiltrating and undermining the organs of the Provisional Government where possible and the boycotting of government decrees. Okulicki took over command after disbanding the AK, but NIE had little chance of success given the widespread terror perpetrated by the NKVD and the Provisional Government, and it withered away when Okulicki was arrested in March.82 In its place, as the war in Europe ended, Colonel Jan Rzepecki established the Delegation of the Armed Forces (Delegatura Sił Zbrojnych), which aimed to bring some organisation to the resistance, necessary because many AK units were refusing to give up the fight. This Delegatura was in turn replaced by Freedom and Independence (Wolnośc i Niezawisłość, WiN), aimed at organising the resistance for political ends rather than military activities and to give some sense of purpose to those former AK soldiers who refused to accept that Poland had been abandoned to the communists.83
The National Armed Units (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ) had operated in loose cooperation with the AK during 1944 but completely separated itself in November 1944. The NSZ was loyal to the aims of the National Party, representing the right wing of Polish politics, and was highly anti-semitic. The NSZ had been the main culprit in attacks on Jewish partisan bands during the German occupation. It was equally anti-Soviet, and so continued to fight the Soviet forces even after the disbandment of the AK. The most famous brigade in the NSZ was the Świętokrzyska Brigade of 700 men, commanded by Colonel Antoni Dąbrowski, which managed to cross into Czechoslovakia in February 1945 and establish contact with the US 3rd Army as the war came to an end.* NSZ units unable to leave Poland continued hit-and-run attacks on the Soviet forces and on the Polish security forces.84
The Polish resistance might have been fragmented after the dissolution of the AK, but it was active and widespread. It has been estimated that before the end of the war there were 80,000 anti-government guerrillas operating across Poland, particularly in the Lublin, Białystok and Rzeszów provinces. Their death count rose during the first five months of 1945: 800 PPR members were murdered and 2,000 militiamen. The Red Army was also attacked, with 317 soldiers killed and a further 125 wounded. The response of the Provisional Government was to depend largely on the NKVD for assistance. As early as October 1944, Beria had already established a special NKVD division, Division 64, to arrest not only members of the AK but also Polish professionals, such as lawyers and professors, who had somehow survived the German occupation. The Provisional Government set up its own Internal Security Corps, but with mixed results: one unit was sent out before its training was complete and as Gomułka wryly noted: ‘the 3rd Battalion of the Internal Army went out into the terrain and 2,000 people deserted’.85
The situation was worst in the area of Poland that now lay beyond the Curzon Line, where the NKVD had launched Operation Sejm, designed to stamp out the AK and any sign of Polish nationalism. The transcripts of NKVD interrogations of the Poles reveal the chief preoccupation of the Soviet authorities: to cut off all communication between eastern Poland and the Polish territories west of the Curzon Line, and indeed also with London. The Soviets knew that the AK and some members of the Underground Government had radio contact with the west and the tenor of many interrogations was to identify who had access to these now forbidden communications. Those arrested were either transported to Siberia or, if they were fortunate, despatched across the river Bug into Poland.86 The NKVD could change their minds very quickly as to who was a threat. For example, Leon Kochański had been tried by the Soviet authorities in May 1940 because of his former position as a senior Polish civil servant in Stanisławów, but had been acquitted, and during the German occupation he had worked in the Underground Government. At the beginning of 1945, he was re-arrested by the NKVD because they were convinced that he had the means of communicating with the west. In fact, the records of the interrogation of another underground operative, Adam Ostrowski, suggest that a radio was supposed to reach Kochański but had never done so. Because the NKVD were uncertain, they released Kochański and ordered him to cross into Poland where he hoped to join his family. On 29 March, he embarked on the train to Poland but was then taken off it and re-arrested by the NKVD. He contracted spotted typhoid in prison and died a broken man, twelve days later on 10 April 1945.87
In Poland itself, NKVD tactics were to surround a village and seize all the men in it for interrogation. A report to London stated:
The NKVD are keeping those arrested in cellars, air raid shelters and in every possible place. Those arrested sit in darkness, without any bedding or warm clothes. In the course of interrogations, the NKVD beat prisoners, torture them morally, keep them in the cold without clothes. They accuse those arrested of espionage on behalf of the British and of the Polish Government in London, and of collaboration with the Germans. There is a high rate of mortality among the prisoners.88
It has been estimated that at least 50,000 Poles were sent to labour camps in Siberia between November 1944 and May 1945, and at least twice as many were interned in camps in Poland. In May 1945, there were 8,000 prisoners in the Royal Castle in Lublin, and large camps were established in Rebertów, Piotrków and Skrobów and other places.89 It was small wonder that many people took to the woods to escape the Soviet round-ups and joined together to form resistance units.
As early as February 1944, Mikołajczyk had become sufficiently disturbed by the reports of the hostile attitude of the Soviet authorities to the AK in the Wołyń province to appeal to Churchill to despatch a mission of British observers to provide independent reports. Churchill and SOE were keen but the Foreign Office objected on the grounds that it could be viewed as a hostile act by the Soviets. Therefore, in April, Churchill replied to Mikołajczyk that there would be no mission. This reluctance to send a mission may in part be blamed on the fact that the initial Soviet advance and its hostile reaction to the appearance of the AK took place in the provinces the Soviet Union laid claim to, which might have been interpreted as some sort of excuse. By July this was no longer the case, as the Soviet armies had crossed the Curzon Line and showed no signs of altering their attitude towards the AK. The Soviet failure to support the Warsaw Uprising greatly disturbed the British Government, and as a result the continued Polish appeals for a mission began to bear fruit. In October the members were nominated and their purpose decided, and they were despatched to Italy to await an opportune moment for insertion into Poland. On 2 November 1944, Clark Kerr informed Molotov that the British were sending liaison officers to Poland to obtain ‘direct trustworthy information about events in Poland’. This was to be Operation Freston.90
The Freston mission was led by Colonel Bill Hudson, and the members were Major Peter Kemp, Sergeant-Major Donald Galbraith, Major Peter Solly-Flood and Major Alun Morgan. The interpreter was a Polish lieutenant, Antoni Pospieszalski, using the nom de guerre Captain Tony Currie. Adverse weather conditions and British vacillations on the desirability of the mission after Mikołajczyk’s resignation caused further delays. Finally, on the night of 26–27 December 1944, the mission parachuted into Poland, landing near Włoszczowa Końskie in the district of Radom. They kept on the move, escorted by the AK, but lost their radio equipment after a brief skirmish with the Germans. At the beginning of January 1945, the mission met Okulicki and was briefed on the state of the resistance in Poland and the attitude of the Red Army. On the night of 13 January, the sound of Soviet artillery was heard and the mission managed to send a message back to London asking for confirmation, which they received, of their orders to hand themselves over to the Soviets. Peter Kemp recalled that London reassured them that ‘our names and location and the nature of our mission had been communicated to the Russian political and military authorities’. This appeared not to be the case. On 15 January, the British mission presented themselves to the nearest Soviet unit and were taken to the Soviet Army corps headquarters at Zytn and interrogated by an NKVD general who asked them: ‘Why have you been spying on the Red Army? Allied soldiers would not be found living with bandits, collaborators, war criminals and enemies of the Red Army.’ They were all arrested and, in the middle of February, arrived in Moscow before being repatriated via Cairo. The mission had accomplished nothing other than prove the hostility of the Soviets towards the AK, which had in any case been officially disbanded while the mission was still on Polish soil.91
In January 1945, Churchill and Eden, alarmed at the scale of arrests in Poland, approached the Polish Government with a new proposal: if they supplied the British with a list of the names of the main underground leaders, the British would pass this on to Stalin at Yalta in order for these men to receive protection against arrest. It was a wildly optimistic assumption by the British that Stalin would offer Soviet protection to the Polish Underground Government given that he had recognised the Lublin Committee as the Provisional Government and that it was the NKVD who was making most of the arrests in Poland. The Polish Government was extremely wary. In a memorandum submitted to the Foreign Office, the Poles raised two important points: the Polish Government would release the names of the most prominent members of the underground ‘if they could rest fully assured that such a disclosure would not bring about fatal consequences for those concerned’, and ‘The Polish Government would be grateful to learn what steps designed to assure the safety of the Polish citizens are visualised by the British Government.’ This was much further than the British were prepared to go.92 Nevertheless, on 8 March, the Polish Government decided to furnish Eden with the names of the four party leaders – Jan Stanisław Jankowski, Antoni Pajdak, Stanisław Jasiukowicz, and the pseudonym ‘Walkowicz’, whose name was undisclosed but was in fact Adam Bień – in the hope that these men would be invited for consultation with the Polish Commission in Moscow.93
On 1 March, NKVD General Ivan Serov was appointed head of the Polish Ministry of Public Security and wasted little time in attempting to crush the Polish Underground Army and Underground Government. Okulicki and the government delegate, Jankowski, received invitations from Soviet Colonel Pimienov to attend a meeting with General Ivanov, a representative of Marshal Zhukov, to discuss cooperation.94 In fact Ivanov was the pseudonym of Serov. The first meeting between Jankowski and Serov took place on 17 March at Pruszków, and in his report to the Polish Government in London Jankowski was optimistic about the possibilities of cooperating with the Soviets and received permission from the government to continue the talks.95 Okulicki had already been a ‘guest’ of the NKVD in the Lubyanka prison in 1941, after having been arrested in Lwów in January 1941, and this made him wary of accepting the invitation to the talks. Indeed, the Polish Government forbade him to reveal himself, but, under pressure from the politicians in Poland, he decided to do so. On 27 March, Jankowski and Okulicki, accompanied by Jankowski’s three deputies – Bień, Pajdak and Jasiukowicz – the chairman of the Council of National Unity, Kazimierz Pużak, and members of the Council – Kazimierz Bagiński Eugeniusz Czarnowski, Stanisław Mierzwa, Franciszek Urbański, Józef Chachiński, Kazimierz Kobylański, Stanisław Michałowski and Zbigniew Stypułkowski – and their translator Józef Stemler Dąbski, met Serov. On 28 March, they were all arrested, and on, 1 April, Stefan Korboński, the most senior surviving member of the Underground Government, informed London of this and of the suspicion that they had been taken by plane to Moscow to await trial. A sixteenth Polish politician, Aleksander Zwierzyński, was already in prison there.96
Raczyński immediately informed Eden of the arrests and appealed for British assistance. The Soviet authorities did not disclose that they had arrested the sixteen Polish leaders; even the Provisional Government was not informed and, according to Korboński’s sources, considered the arrests a great mistake. With the San Francisco conference about to open, the Polish foreign minister, Tarnowski, sent an impassioned appeal to Eden and Stettinius at the end of April to find out from Molotov the fate of the arrested men. Finally, on 3 May, Molotov did admit that the Soviets had arrested and imprisoned them, and Eden and Stettinius angrily confronted him and demanded their immediate release. As both Eden and Cadogan noted: ‘I have never seen Mr Molotov look so uncomfortable.’ On 5 May, Eden and Stettinius issued identical statements at the San Francisco conference deprecating the conduct of the Soviets and demanding a full explanation. This came in a statement by TASS on 5 May: Okulicki was accused of ‘preparing diversionary activities in the rear of the Red Army’, and the others were accused of ‘the installation and maintenance in the rear of Soviet troops of illegal radio transmitters’. The British and American governments responded by breaking off the talks on the future composition of the Polish Government and continued to appeal for the release of the sixteen men.97
The arrest of the Polish leaders cast a dark shadow over the celebrations accompanying the end of the war in Europe on 8 May.* Polish armies had contributed to the final success of the Allies but found little satisfaction in the advent of peace. The soldiers of Anders’s II Corps in Italy in particular had mixed feelings about the end of the war. For them, the decisions taken at Yalta had deprived them of their home, and apparently had left Poland at the mercy of the communists. One officer at Bologna described the mood of his soldiers:
Our soldiers look down from their vehicles on the enthusiastic crowd, return smiles and greetings, but they do not share the general joy; they are rather serious and sad … In a few days the life in town will return to normal, while we will go further north. We will continue to liberate towns and villages, to carry on bloody battles, because all roads lead to Poland. And this Poland is closer and closer but so desperately distant.98
In Germany, the soldiers of General Maczek’s division were caring for a large number of Polish displaced persons (DPs) who had been brought to Germany as forced labour and now faced an uncertain future. Maczek took over the town of Harn, evacuated the German population, and for the next two years Harn became Maczków, a Polish town in Germany. Polish POWs, most of whom had been in camps since 1939, were also liberated, and one of them, Piotr Tareczyński, noted:
We were unofficially told that anyone who had any personal grievance to settle with any German could do so within a fortnight of the announcement, and would be immune from prosecution, regardless of what form his revenge took. Personally, I had no personal accounts to settle with anyone, and just wanted to be left alone.99
Many Polish DPs and POWs began to travel south to enlist in the II Corps in Italy. Polish Jews, who formed a large proportion of the DPs, now faced the challenge of coming to terms with the scale of the slaughter of their people and the search for any family members who might have survived. One Polish Jew, George Topas, summed up his feelings: ‘I began to feel a sense of anxiety that displaced the mood of hopeful expectation. I was not yet fully aware that the world I had once known existed no more.’100
Within Poland the mood was despondent. Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary: ‘The war with Germany is over; the people are free in many countries, but we still live in difficult conditions, exposed to violence, terror, and barbarian attacks from our so-called friends who are in fact no better than the occupying Germans.’101 Other Poles were even more forthright. Stefan Baluk, whose war had taken him to France and Britain before being parachuted back to Poland as one of the unseen and silent, wrote:
As the smoke cleared from the battlefield it began to emerge that we had suffered a huge national defeat, yet we did not want to, or were simply unable to, believe this. We clutched at the last illusory straws of hope. We had yet to adapt to the new situation, and now faced an enemy within.102
Of the 24,000,000 Poles who had survived the war, over 5,000,000 were abroad: in the Polish armed forces in the west, in DP camps scattered across the world, in other countries as refugees and in what had been eastern Poland, waiting to be repatriated to the new Polish state.103 The shape and government of the new Poland were as yet undecided. There were many battles still to be fought.