Polish Underground State

Polish Underground State Polskie Państwo Podziemne
1939–1945[1][2]
Flag Emblem
Motto: "Honor i Ojczyzna" ("Honor and Homeland")
Anthem: "Mazurek Dąbrowskiego" (English: "Poland Is Not Yet Lost")
Status	Government in exile
Common languages	Polish
Government	Republic
President of the Polish government-in-exile
• 1939–1945	Władysław Raczkiewicz
Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile
• 1939–1940 (first)	Władysław Sikorski
• 1944-1945 (last)	Tomasz Arciszewski
Legislature	Political Consultative Committee (1940–1943) Home Political Representation (1943–1944) Council of National Unity (1944–1945)
Historical era	World War II
• Constitution adopted	23 April 1935
• Invasion of Poland	1 September 1939
• Provisional Government of National Unity established	28 June 1945[1][2]
Preceded by Succeeded by Second Polish Republic Provisional Government of National Unity

The Polish Underground State (Polish: Polskie Państwo Podziemne, also known as the Polish Secret State)^[a] was a single political and military entity formed by the union of resistance organizations in occupied Poland. They were loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London. The armed wing of the Polish Underground State is called the Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa, AK).

Home Army

Warsaw Uprising in Poland, 1944. Polish Home Army soldiers defending a barricade.

Band of Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa).

Membership

The size of the Home Army throughout its existence is outlined as follows.

Year	Size
1942	100,000[3]
1943	200,000[3]
1944	400,000[4]

Structure

Home Army's regional organization, 1944.

The Home Army Headquarters was divided into two bureaus, five sections and several other specialized units:^[3][5]

• Section I: Organization – personnel, justice, religion
• Section II: Intelligence and Counterintelligence
• Section III: Operations and Training – coordination, planning, preparation for a nationwide uprising
• Section IV: Logistics
• Section V: Communication – including with the Western Allies; air drops
• Bureau of Information and Propaganda (sometimes called "Section VI") – information and propaganda
• Bureau of Finances (sometimes called "Section VII") – finances
• Kedyw (acronym for Kierownictwo Dywersji, Polish for "Directorate of Diversion") – special operations
• Directorate of Underground Resistance

The Home Army's commander took orders from the Polish Commander-in-Chief (General Inspector of the Armed Forces) of the Polish government-in-exile and the Government Delegation for Poland.^[3][5]

Home Army commander	Codename	Period	Replaced because	Fate	Photo
General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski Technically, commander of Służba Zwycięstwu Polski and Związek Walki Zbrojnej as Armia Krajowa was not named such until 1942	Torwid	September 27, 1939 – March 1940	Arrested by the Soviets	Joined the Anders Army, fought in the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Emigrated to the United Kingdom (UK).
General Stefan Rowecki	Grot	June 18, 1940 – June 30, 1943	Discovered and arrested by German Gestapo	Imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. executed by personal decree of Heinrich Himmler following the start of the Warsaw Uprising.
General Tadeusz Komorowski	Bór	July 1943 – September 2, 1944	Surrendered after end of Warsaw Uprising.	Emigrated to United Kingdom.
General Leopold Okulicki	Niedźwiadek	October 3, 1944 – January 17, 1945	Dissolved the AK trying to lessen the Polish-Soviet tension.	Arrested by the Soviets, sentenced to imprisonment in the Trial of the Sixteen. Likely executed in 1946.

Mass grave of Armia Krajowa members at Zasanie municipal cemetery in Przemyśl.

Persecution under Soviet occupation

See the main article: Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II

After Nazi Germany was defeated, the Soviet Union set up a puppet state in Poland,^[6] subjecting Poland to communist totalitarianism until 1989,^[7][8] while Soviet troops did not leave Poland until 1993.^[9] The puppet state's founding came with the arrest of 25,000 Polish Home Army soldiers,^[10] who were deported to Gulag camps in Russian mainland.^[10] As many as 100,000 Polish women were also raped by Soviet soldiers.^[11]

Some anti-communist Poles rose up in arms against the Soviet occupiers right after the war.^[12] However, the armed resistance failed due to the lack of external support.^[12] Tens of thousands of them were deported to Gulag camps as well,^[12] with a few to no confirmed survivors.^[12] Among them consisted of 6,000 Poles being jailed in Borowicze (now Borovichi, Russia) and 6,300 in Stalinogorsk (now Novomoskovsk, Russia).^[12] The exact number is unknown due to the lack of access to all of the relevant Soviet documents.^[12]

Related pages

• Katyn massacre
• Volhynia massacre
• Guerrilla war in the Baltic states

Further reading

1980s

• Jan Nowak (1982). Courier from Warsaw. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-1725-9.

2000s

• Jan Karski (2001). Story of a Secret State. Simon Publications. ISBN 978-1-931541-39-8.
• Stefan Korboński; Francis Bauer Czarnomski; Zofia Korbonski (2004). Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State, 1939–1945. Hippocrene Books. ISBN 978-0-7818-1035-7.

2010s

• Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski (2011). The Secret Army: The Memoirs of General Bór-Komorowski. Pen & Sword Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-84832-595-1.
• Halik Kochanski (2012). The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-06816-2.

References

1. Grzegorz Ostasz, The Polish Government-in-Exile's Home Delegature Archived 2008-04-10 at the Wayback Machine. Article on the pages of the London Branch of the Polish Home Army Ex-Servicemen Association. Retrieved 4 April 2011.
2. Józef Garliński (April 1975). "The Polish Underground State 1939–1945". Journal of Contemporary History. 10 (2): 219–259. doi:10.1177/002200947501000202. JSTOR 260146. S2CID 159844616., p.253
3. (in Polish) Armia Krajowa Archived 14 February 2008 at the Wayback Machine. Encyklopedia WIEM. Retrieved 2 April 2008.
4. Roy Francis Leslie (19 May 1983). The History of Poland Since 1863. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-27501-9.
5. Marek Ney-Krwawicz (1993). Armia Krajowa: siła zbrojna Polskiego Państwa Polskiego (in Polish). Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne. pp. 18–25. ISBN 978-83-02-05061-9.
6. The Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs By William Bullitt, Francis P. Sempa  
7. "Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, 1989". Office of the Historian (US Government). Retrieved March 11, 2025.
8. • Lappin, Shalom (2006), ‘How Class Disappeared from Western Politics’, Dissent, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 73-78.
   • Nirenberg, David (2013). Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. Retrieved February 9, 2025.
   • Tabarovsky, Izabella (2022). "Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse". Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA). Academic Studies Press. doi:10.26613/jca/5.1.97. Retrieved February 9, 2025.
   • Troy, Gil (February 1, 2024). "How Palestine Hijacked the U.S. Civil Rights Movement". Tablet magazine. Retrieved February 9, 2025.
   • Kirsch, Adam (2024), On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London.
   • Lappin, Shalom (2025). "The Nazification of the Postmodernist Left". Fathom Journal. Retrieved February 9, 2025. When Jews insisted on highlighting antisemitism [...] they were accused of reactionary particularism [. ...] much of the left resisted attempts to present the Nazi genocide as a Jewish cataclysm [. ...] It did not see the oppression of Soviet Jewry, or the desperate flight of Ethiopian Jews, as issues [. ...] Stalinist purges [...] Jews [...] as cosmopolitans and Zionist agents. In 1968-69 the Polish Communist Party conducted an anti-Zionist attack on [...] its Jewish population of 35,000, resulting in the forced emigration of approximately 25,000 of them.
9. • Murphy, Dean E. (September 19, 1993). "Last Russian Troops Depart From Poland : Military: The Red Army arrived to battle Nazis 54 years ago. Its successors' exit leaves the nation free of foreign interveners for the first time since then". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved March 11, 2025.
   • Kornat, Marek (September 16, 2023). "Why did Russian troops leave Poland as late as in 1993, not in 1989?". Wszystko co najważniejsze. Retrieved March 11, 2025.
   • Sieradzka, Monika (September 17, 2018). "The day Soviet troops left Poland". DW News. Retrieved March 11, 2025.
10. Paczkowski, Andrzej (1999). "Enemy Nation". Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression. London: Harvard University Press. pp. 372‒375. Archived from the original on January 31, 2023. Retrieved March 11, 2025.
11. Joanna Ostrowska, Marcin Zaremba, "Kobieca gehenna" (The women's ordeal) Archived 2019-03-23 at the Wayback Machine, Polityka - No 10 (2695), 2009-03-07; pp. 64-66. (in Polish) 
    Dr. Marcin Zaremba Archived 2011-10-07 at the Wayback Machine of Polish Academy of Sciences, the co-author of the article cited above – is a historian from Warsaw University Department of History Institute of 20th Century History (cited 196 times in Google scholar). Zaremba published a number of scholarly monographs, among them: Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm (426 pages),[1] Marzec 1968 (274 pages), Dzień po dniu w raportach SB (274 pages), Immobilienwirtschaft (German, 359 pages), see inauthor:"Marcin Zaremba" in Google Books.
    Joanna Ostrowska Archived 2016-03-14 at the Wayback Machine of Warsaw, Poland, is a lecturer at Departments of Gender Studies at two universities: the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, the University of Warsaw as well as, at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of scholarly works on the subject of mass rape and forced prostitution in Poland in the Second World War (i.e. "Prostytucja jako praca przymusowa w czasie II Wojny Światowej. Próba odtabuizowania zjawiska," "Wielkie przemilczanie. Prostytucja w obozach koncentracyjnych," etc.), a recipient of Socrates-Erasmus research grant from Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, and a historian associated with Krytyka Polityczna.
12. The establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 By Norman Naimark