The General Government, formally the General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region, was a German zone of occupation established after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Slovakia and the Soviet Union in 1939 at the onset of World War II. The newly occupied Second Polish Republic was split into three zones: the General Government in its centre, Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany in the west, and Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union in the east. The territory was expanded substantially in 1941, after the German Invasion of the Soviet Union, to include the new District of Galicia. The area of the Generalgouvernement roughly corresponded with the Austrian part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth after the Third Partition of Poland in 1795.
The Polish People's Republic was a country in Central Europe that existed from 1947 to 1989 as the predecessor of the modern-day Republic of Poland. From 1947 to 1952 it was known as the Republic of Poland, and it was also often simply known as Poland. With a population of approximately 37.9 million near the end of its existence, it was the second most-populous communist and Eastern Bloc country in Europe. A unitary state with a Marxist–Leninist government, it was also one of the main signatories of the Warsaw Pact alliance. The largest city and official capital since 1947 was Warsaw, followed by the industrial city of Łódź and cultural city of Kraków. The country was bordered by the Baltic Sea to the north, the Soviet Union to the east, Czechoslovakia to the south, and East Germany to the west.
The kotwica was an emblem of the Polish Underground State and Armia Krajowa used during World War II. It was created in 1942 by members of the Wawer minor sabotage unit within the AK, as an easily usable emblem for the struggle to regain the country's independence. The initial meaning of the initialism PW was "pomścimy Wawer", in reference to the 1939 Wawer massacre, which was considered to be one of the first large scale massacres of Polish civilians by German troops in occupied Poland.
Biuletyn Informacyjny was a Polish underground weekly published covertly in General Government territory of occupied Poland during World War II. The magazine was edited by Aleksander Kamiński and distributed as the main organ of ZWZ-AK headquarters in Warsaw, initially in order to inform the AK soldier about ongoing resistance activities. By 1944 Biuletyn Informacyjny had a circulation of 42,000-43,000 copies. The publishers recommended readers to have the articles reprinted in provincial underground publications throughout Poland.
The Polish Radio is a national public-service radio broadcasting organization of Poland, founded in 1925. It is owned by the State Treasury of Poland. On 27 December 2023, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, due to the President's veto on the financing of the company, placed it in liquidation.
Jan Nowak-Jeziorański was a Polish journalist, writer, politician, social worker and patriot. He served during the Second World War as one of the most notable resistance fighters of the Home Army. He is best remembered for his work as an emissary shuttling between the commanders of the Home Army and the Polish Government in Exile in London and other Allied governments which gained him the nickname "Courier from Warsaw", and for his participation in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war he worked as the head of the Polish section of Radio Free Europe, and later as a security advisor to the US presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded him with America's highest civilian award the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church, commonly known as the Polish Orthodox Church, or Orthodox Church of Poland, is one of the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches in full communion. The church was established in 1924, to accommodate Orthodox Christians of Polish descent in the eastern part of the country, when Poland regained its independence after the First World War.
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.
Kurier Wileński is the main Polish-language newspaper in Lithuania. Printed in Vilnius, it is the only Polish-language daily newspaper published east of Poland. A direct descendant of both the 19th-century newspaper of the same name and the Czerwony Sztandar newspaper, created by the Soviet authorities in 1953 as a means of Sovietization of the Polish diaspora left in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. The newspaper is a member of the European Association of Daily Newspapers in Minority and Regional Languages (MIDAS). According to TNS Gallup media research, Kurier Wileński 36,800 people or 1.4% of Lithuania's population read at least one issue out of the last six in summer 2008, but that measure dropped to 0.3% in spring 2010.
The Kurier Warszawski was a daily newspaper printed in Warsaw, Poland from 1821 to 1939, with two editions daily from 1873. It was selling 4,000 copies in 1868, and over 20,000 copies after 1883.
The Warsaw Barbican is a barbican in Warsaw, Poland, and one of few remaining relics of the complex network of historic fortifications that once encircled Warsaw. Located between the Old and New Towns, it is a major tourist attraction.
Polish culture during World War II was suppressed by the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of whom were hostile to Poland's people and cultural heritage. Policies aimed at cultural genocide resulted in the deaths of thousands of scholars and artists, and the theft and destruction of innumerable cultural artifacts. ''The maltreatment of the Poles was one of many ways in which the Nazi and Soviet regimes had grown to resemble one another", wrote British historian Niall Ferguson.
Operation N was a complex of sabotage, subversion and black-propaganda activities carried out by the Polish resistance against Nazi German occupation forces during World War II, from April 1941 to April 1944. These activities were organized by Office N, which in October 1941 was transformed into an Autonomous Sub-Department N of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Armed Resistance, later of the Home Army. It was headed by Tadeusz Żenczykowski.
Jerzy Borejsza was a Polish communist activist and writer. During the Stalinist period of communist Poland, he was chief of a state press and publishing syndicate.
Dom Prasy was a Polish news corporation of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as a name of the eponymous building in Warsaw, where it had its headquarters. It published numerous daily newspapers and weekly journals. Taken over by the Germans during World War II, the company's assets became the cornerstone of the Nowy Kurier Warszawski propaganda newspaper. After the war the Dom Prasy's assets became the foundation of several modern newspapers, including Życie Warszawy.
Various kinds of clandestine media emerged under German occupation during World War II. By 1942, Nazi Germany occupied much of continental Europe. The widespread German occupation saw the fall of public media systems in France, Belgium, Poland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Northern Greece, and the Netherlands. All press systems were put under the ultimate control of Joseph Goebbels, the German Minister of Propaganda.
Karski's reports were a series of reports attributed to Jan Karski, an investigator working for the Polish government-in-exile during World War II, describing the situation in occupied Poland. They were some of the first documents on the Holocaust in Poland received by the Polish government in exile, and, through it, by the Western Allies.
Adam Franciszek Józef Siedlecki or Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki (AGS) (1876–1967) was a Polish literary and theater critic, playwright, translator, prose writer and director.
The tombakowa młodzież were members of a youth subculture in Warsaw during World War II.
