The Home Army was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej established in the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasions in September 1939. Over the next two years, the Home Army absorbed most of the other Polish partisans and underground forces. Its allegiance was to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and it constituted the armed wing of what came to be known as the Polish Underground State. Estimates of the Home Army's 1944 strength range between 200,000 and 600,000. The latter number made the Home Army not only Poland's largest underground resistance movement but, along with Soviet and Yugoslav partisans, one of Europe's largest World War II underground movements.
The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, children, and elderly, many of whom were locked in a barn and burned alive.
National Armed Forces was a Polish right-wing underground military organization of the National Democracy operating from 1942. During World War II, NSZ troops fought against Nazi Germany and communist partisans. There were also cases of fights with the Home Army.
Around six million Polish citizens are estimated to have perished during World War II. Most were civilians killed by the actions of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian Security Police, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its offshoots.
Salomon Morel was an officer in the Ministry of Public Security in the Polish People's Republic, and a commander of concentration camps run by the NKVD and communist authorities until 1956.
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).
John Sack was an American literary journalist and war correspondent. He was the only journalist to cover each American war over half a century.
Following the establishment of the Second Polish Republic after World War I and during the interwar period, the number of Jews in the country grew rapidly. According to the Polish national census of 1921, there were 2,845,364 Jews living in the Second Polish Republic; by late 1938 that number had grown by over 16 percent, to approximately 3,310,000, mainly through migration from Ukraine and the Soviet Russia. The average rate of permanent settlement was about 30,000 per annum. At the same time, every year around 100,000 Jews were passing through Poland in unofficial emigration overseas. Between the end of the Polish–Soviet War of 1919 and late 1938, the Jewish population of the Republic grew by nearly half a million, or over 464,000 persons. Jews preferred to live in the relatively-tolerant Poland rather than in the Soviet Union and continued to integrate, marry into Polish Gentile families, to bring them into their community through marriage, feel Polish and form an important part of Polish society. Between 1933 and 1938, around 25,000 German Jews fled Nazi Germany to sanctuary in Poland.
The Ministry of Public Security, was the secret police, intelligence and counter-espionage agency operating in the Polish People's Republic. From 1945 to 1954 it was known as the Security Office, and from 1956 to 1990 as the Security Service.
In Poland, the resistance movement during World War II was led by the Home Army. The Polish resistance is notable among others for disrupting German supply lines to the Eastern Front, and providing intelligence reports to the British intelligence agencies. It was a part of the Polish Underground State.
The "cursed soldiers" or "indomitable soldiers" were a heterogeneous array of anti-Soviet-imperialist and anti-communist Polish resistance movements formed in the later stages of World War II and in its aftermath by members of the Polish Underground State. The above terms, introduced in the early 1990s, reflect the stance of many of the diehard soldiers.
Hlybokaye or Glubokoye is a town in Vitebsk Region, Belarus. It serves as the administrative center of Hlybokaye District. As of 2023, it has a population of 17,707.
The Ponary massacre, or the Paneriai massacre, was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and the Lithuanian Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 20,000 Poles, and 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.
The Białystok Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto set up by the German SS between July 26 and early August 1941 in the newly formed District of Bialystok within occupied Poland. About 50,000 Jews from the vicinity of Białystok and the surrounding region were confined into a small area of the city, which was turned into the district's capital. The ghetto was split in two by the Biała River running through it. Most inmates were put to work in the slave-labor enterprises for the German war effort, primarily in large textile, shoe and chemical companies operating inside and outside its boundaries. The ghetto was liquidated in November 1943. Its inhabitants were transported in Holocaust trains to the Majdanek concentration camp and Treblinka extermination camps. Only a few hundred survived the war, either by hiding in the Polish sector of the city, escape following the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising, or by surviving the camps.
Anti-Jewish violence in Poland from 1944 to 1946 preceded and followed the end of World War II in Europe and influenced the postwar history of the Jews as well as Polish-Jewish relations. It occurred amid a period of violence and anarchy across the country, caused by lawlessness and anti-communist resistance against the Soviet-backed communist takeover of Poland. The estimated number of Jewish victims varies and ranges up to 2,000. In 2021, Julian Kwiek published the first scientific register of incidents and victims of anti-Jewish violence in Poland in 1944–1947, according to his calculations, the number of victims was at least 1,074 to 1,121. Jews constituted between 2% and 3% of the total number of victims of postwar violence in the country, including the Polish Jews who managed to escape the Holocaust on territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, and returned after the border changes imposed by the Allies at the Yalta Conference. The incidents ranged from individual attacks to pogroms.
In the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, which took place in September 1939, the territory of Poland was divided in half between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. Since 1939 German and Soviet officials coordinated their Poland-related policies and repressive actions. For nearly two years following the invasion, the two occupiers continued to discuss bilateral plans for dealing with the Polish resistance during Gestapo-NKVD Conferences until Germany's Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, in June 1941.
Janowska concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 1941 on the outskirts of Lwów in what had become, after the German invasion, the General Government. The camp was named after the nearby street Janowska in Lwów of the interwar Second Polish Republic.
Around 6 million Polish citizens perished during World War II: about one fifth of the pre-war population. Most were civilian victims of the war crimes and crimes against humanity during the occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Approximately half were Polish Jews killed in The Holocaust. Statistics for Polish World War II casualties are divergent and contradictory. This article provides a summarization of these estimates of Poland's human losses in the war and their causes.
During the German occupation of Poland, citizens of all its major ethnic groups collaborated with the Germans. Estimates of the number of collaborators vary. Collaboration in Poland was less institutionalized than in some other countries and has been described as marginal, a point of pride with the Polish people. During and after the war, the Polish government in exile and the Polish resistance movement punished collaborators and sentenced thousands of them to death.
The Radziłów pogrom was a World War II massacre committed on 7 July 1941 in the town of Radziłów, in German-occupied Poland. Local Poles, under SS orders or with German encouragement, forced most of the Jews of the town into a barn and set it on fire, Jews were also murdered in surrounding villages. Death toll estimates vary between 600 and 2,000; only some 30 Jews survived the massacre due to help from local Poles.
