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 massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The ruling Germans also actively encouraged both Ukrainians and Poles to kill each other. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. The massacres were exceptionally brutal and affected primarily women and children. The UPA's actions resulted in up to 100,000 deaths. Other victims of the massacres included several hundred Armenians, Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, and Ukrainians who were part of Polish families or opposed the UPA and sabotaged the massacres by hiding Polish escapees.
27th Volhynian Infantry Division was a World War II Polish Armia Krajowa unit fighting in the Volhynia region in 1944. It was created on January 15, 1944, from smaller partisan self-defence units during the Volhynia massacre and was patterned after the prewar Polish 27th Infantry Division.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was a Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary and partisan formation founded by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists on October 14, 1942. During World War II, it was engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and both the Polish Underground State and Communist Poland.
Operation Vistula was the codename for the 1947 forced resettlement of close to 150,000 Ukrainians(Boykos and Lemkos) from the south-eastern provinces of post-war Poland, to the Recovered Territories in the west of the country. The action was carried out by the Soviet-installed Polish communist authorities to remove material support to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army continued its guerilla activities until 1947 in Subcarpathian and Lublin Voivodeships with no hope for any peaceful resolution; Operation Vistula brought an end to the hostilities.
A partisan is a member of an irregular military force formed to oppose control of an area by a foreign power or by an army of occupation by some kind of insurgent activity.
The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS , commonly referred to as the Galicia Division, was a World War II infantry division of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the German Nazi Party, made up predominantly of volunteers with a Ukrainian ethnic background from the area of Galicia, later also with some Slovaks.
The war crimes and crimes against humanity which were perpetrated by the Soviet Union and its armed forces from 1919 to 1991 include acts which were committed by the Red Army as well as acts which were committed by the country's secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the orders of the Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet government's policy of Red Terror. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany took place during the occupation of Poland and the Ukrainian SSR, USSR, by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
The Huta Pieniacka massacre was a massacre of the Polish inhabitants of the village Huta Pieniacka, located in modern-day Ukraine, which took place on February 28, 1944. Estimates of the number of victims range from 500 to 600-800 to 1,200.
Sluzhba Bezpeky or SB OUN, was the Ukrainian partisan underground intelligence service, and a division of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists responsible for clandestine operations and anti-espionage during World War II. In its short history, the SB committed acts of terror against civilians and non-civilians and their families, including people suspected either of collaborating, or serving with the Soviet forces in western Ukraine. In this capacity, the SB also played a significant role in the ethnic cleansing and killing of the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia.
Huta Stepańska was an ethnic Polish village, located in prewar Kostopol county, Wołyń Voivodeship, in the Second Polish Republic. In 1943, during the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia, it became an important Polish self-defence centre, captured by the UPA between 16 and 18 July 1943. Some 2,000 UIA soldiers, supported by 3,000 local Ukrainian peasants, killed 300 Poles, as they were trying to break out of the encirclement.
Zawadka Morochowska is a former village in the administrative district of Gmina Komańcza, within Sanok County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in south-eastern Poland, close to the border with Slovakia. It was approximately 16 kilometres (10 mi) north-east of Komańcza, 15 km (9 mi) south of Bukowsko, and 75 km (47 mi) south of the regional capital Rzeszów.
The Korosciatyn massacre took place on the night of February 28/29, 1944, during the province-wide wave of massacres of Poles in Volhynia in World War II. Korosciatyn, which now bears the name of Krynica and is located in western Ukraine, was one of the biggest ethnic Polish villages of the interwar Poland's within Buczacz County in Tarnopol Voivodeship (pictured). Located along the railway line from Tarnopol to Stanislawów, in 1939 it had some 900 inhabitants, all of them being ethnic Poles. Korosciatyn had an elementary school, a Catholic church and a railway station. It belonged to the Catholic parish of nearby Monasterzyska, which also covered several nearby villages. Among the most famous of the citizens of this parish, are Rev. Stanislaw Padewski, professor Gabriel Turowski as well as two scientists, professor Michal Lesiow of Lublin’s Maria Curie University and doctor Jan Zaleski of Kraków's Pedagogical College. Altogether, in 1939 the Deaconry of Buczacz had around 45,000 Polish inhabitants.
The Parośla I massacre was committed during World War II by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under the command of Hryhorij Perehijniak "Dowbeszka-Korobka" on 9 February 1943 against the ethnic Polish residents of the village of Parośla in the Nazi-controlled Reichskommissariat Ukraine. It is considered a prelude to the ethnic cleansing of Poles in the Volhynia region by the UPA, and is recognized as the first mass murder committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the area. Estimates of the number of victims range from 149 to 173.
The attack on Hrubieszów was a joint action of the Polish post-Home Army (AK) organization Freedom and Independence (WiN) and the Ukrainian partisans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which took place on the night of 27 May 1946. It was the most significant joint action carried out by both organizations, which had previously often fought each other, but they decided to co-operate in the face of the common threat from the Polish communists and the Soviet NKVD.
The 1946 pacification of villages by PAS NZW was the killing of 79 Polish nationals of Belarusian ethnicity in Bielsk County, north-eastern Poland, by partisans, members of the Polish Extraordinary Special Actions unit of the National Military Union. The murders took place in the aftermath of World War II.
The Wiązownica massacre occurred on 17 April 1945 in the village Wiązownica, located in Jarosław County Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in southeastern Poland, then located in Lwów Voivodeship. It was one of the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and was perpetrated by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The massacre occurred during a battle fought between the UPA and, initially, local Polish partisans, and, later, the Polish People's Army (LWP), towards the outskirts of Wiązownica. It saw the deaths of 91 civilians, including 20 women and children, alongside four LWP soldiers. The UPA also burned down 150 houses. In retaliation for the attack, the LWP led an attack on the village Piskorowice, given its large concentration of Ukrainians sympathetic for OUN.
The Anti-Soviet resistance by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, was a guerrilla war waged by Ukrainian nationalist partisan formations against the Soviet Union in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and southwestern regions of the Byelorussian SSR, during and after World War II.
Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict - a series of armed clashes between Ukrainian guerrillas and Polish underground armed units between 1942 and 1945, whose direct continuation was the struggle of the Polish People's Army against the Ukrainian underground until 1947, with periodic participation of Soviet guerrilla units and the regular Red Army, as well as Romanian, Hungarian and German armed formations. The fighting initially took place in the south-eastern areas of the Second Polish Republic occupied by the Third Reich, and later in the Rzeszów and south-eastern parts of the Lublin Voivodeship of the so-called "People's Poland" and in the western areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. There was also sporadic activity in the Romanian-occupied territories.
