crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Maciej Korkuć *
Poland – the victim of two totalitarian regimes
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Poland was the first country to take up arms to oppose the territorial claims and policies of the
leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. The country’s armed defence in 1939 marked the beginning of
the Second World War.
However, the specificity of Poland’s tragic destiny was that the country became the target of
aggressive attacks by two large totalitarian states at that time. As a consequence of a secret protocol
annexed to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which was signed on 23 August 1939, the Nazi invasion of 1
September 1939 was followed by the USSR army attack on Poland from the East which began on 17
September.
Nazi crimes against Polish citizens, mostly of Polish nationality or Jewish, on the territory under
occupation, are well known all over the world. The Auschwitz concentration camp established by the
Nazis stands as a symbol in this respect. Its first inmates were Poles arrested in the Małopolska region,
but soon the camp was transformed into a centre for the annihilation of Jews brought there from all over
Europe.
Murders, repression and enslavement, which became an everyday reality in Polish towns under
Soviet occupation, are much less well-known. Various social groups and nationalities fell victims to this
system of oppression.
Ultimately, Soviet Russian occupation covered an area of 201,000 km 2 – more than a half of the
country’s territory, and an area over six times as large as Belgium. In breach of international law and
Polish-Soviet bilateral agreements, the communist system began to be installed in the Soviet-occupied
part of the country. This involved terror and destruction of entire groups of the local population which
opposed the communist authorities.
In total, 110,000 people were arrested at that time in acts of everyday terror. Moreover, in the
years 1940–41 the Soviets organised four mass deportations of Polish people to the steppes of Kazkhstan
and labour camps in Siberia. These operations took place in February, April and June 1940 and in
May and June 1941. In total, at least 320,000 Polish citizens fell victims to such actions (according to
some estimates this figure might have even been as high as 1,000,000). Deportations were carried out
in inhuman conditions. Locked in cattle wagons, deprived of sanitary facilities and food, deportees
died during their journey east, which lasted several weeks. Survivors were let out in the middle of the
Kazakh steppes or were sent to slave conditions in labour camps.
One of the events of the extermination of Poland’s elites was the Katyń Massacre. It was an act of
mass slaughter committed on the direct orders of Stalin and the Political Bureau of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In March 1940, Stalin issued an order to execute 14,700
Polish officers and Prisoners of War detained in the Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków camps and 11,000
prisoners kept in prisons in Eastern Poland under Soviet occupation.
The action focused on the destruction of intelligentsia, the clergy, officials, army and police
officers. In this respect, the Soviets cooperated with the Nazis who carried out similar actions on Western
Poland which was under Nazi occupation. This campaign was named “the AB Action” which in the
years 1940–41 was coordinated also in the form of the Gestapo and the Soviet NKVD meetings,
organised in Kraków, Zakopane and other localities and held in a friendly atmosphere.
It should be noted that, contrary to Hitler and Stalin’s intentions, legitimate structures of the Polish
State continued to operate in exile during the entire period of World War Two, which ensured the
continuity of the state authorities. These structures were established in accordance with the Constitution
of the Republic of Poland then in force and were recognised by most of the countries of the world. The
Government of the Republic of Poland, appointed by the President of Poland temporarily relocated to
France, Poland’s ally at that time, and after the defeat of France, to the United Kingdom.
* Maciej Korkuć, PhD, The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, The
Ministry of Justice (Poland).
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