National Armed Forces: Difference between revisions
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==External links== |
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*[http://web.archive.org/web/20031127205743/http://wilk.wpk.p.lodz.pl/~whatfor/zw_nsz.htm Narodowe Siły Zbrojne] |
*[http://web.archive.org/web/20031127205743/http://wilk.wpk.p.lodz.pl/~whatfor/zw_nsz.htm Narodowe Siły Zbrojne] |
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*[http://www.doomedsoldiers.com/liquidation-of-henryk-flame-bartek-unit.html Doomed Soldiers - The Untold Story] |
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[[Category:World War II resistance movements]] |
[[Category:World War II resistance movements]] |
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Revision as of 04:16, 8 April 2009
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Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (English National Armed Forces, NSZ) was a right wing, anti-communist, anti-semitic paramilitary organization[1] which was part of the Polish resistance movement in World War II, fighting the Nazi German occupation of Poland in General Government, and later the Soviet puppet state known as the Polish People's Republic.
The NSZ was created on September 20, 1942, as a result of the merger of the Military Organization Lizard Union (Organizacja Wojskowa Związek Jaszczurczy) and part of the National Military Organization (Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa). At its maximum strength it reached approximately between 70,000 and 75,000 members, making it the third largest organization of the Polish resistance (after the Armia Krajowa and the Bataliony Chlopskie). NSZ units participated in the Warsaw Uprising.
In March of 1944 the NSZ split with the more moderate faction coming under the command of the Armia Krajowa. The other part of the organization became known as the NSZ-ZJ (after "Związek Jaszczurczy" or the "Salamander Union"). This wing of the NSZ that had split off conducted a vendetta against Polish leftists, Jewish intellectuals, and their own former leaders that claimed dozens of victims.[2] According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, hundreds of Polish Jews who had sought asylum amongst the Polish population, after having escaped from the ghettos, were murdered by the NSZ.[3] At the same time, a number of prominent members of the NSZ made personal efforts to aid and hide Jews.[4]
In January 1945, the NSZ Holy Cross Mountains Brigade (Brygada Świętokrzyska) retreated before the Red Army with military German approval into the Nazi-controlled (Czech) Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. However, it resumed the fight against the Nazis again on May 5, 1945 in Bohemia, where the NSZ brigade liberated female prisoners from a concentration camp in Holiszowo, including 280 Jewish prisoners.[5] The brigade suffered heavy casualties.
The NSZ occupied the right wing of the political spectrum, and after the split, the NSZ-ZJ, the extreme right. Its program included the fight for Polish independence against the Nazi Germany as well as against the Stalinist Soviet Union, with its focus on keeping the Second Polish Republics pre-war eastern territories and borders while gaining additional former German territories to the west which they deemed "ancient Slavic lands".
During the war the NSZ fought the Polish communists including their paramilitary organizations such as the Gwardia Ludowa (GL) and the Armia Ludowa (AL).[6]. After the war former NSZ members were targeted by the newly installed communist government of the People's Republic of Poland. Reportedly, communist partisans engaged in planting false evidence like documents and forged receipts at the sites of their own robberies in order to blame the NSZ.[7] It was a method of political warfare practiced against NSZ also by Polish secret police (UB) and Milicja Obywatelska (MO) right after the war as revealed by PRL court documents.[8] NSZ has been blamed for various pacification operations; yet, not taken to war crime tribunal for lack of evidence.[9] In the closing days of the war, the NSZ was among the antisemitic unites within the Polish underground that carried out murderous raids against surviving Polish Jews.[10] Units of the NSZ were allegedly involved in ethnic cleansing carried out against Belorussians in the Bielsko Podlaska region in January 1946.[11]
Due to policy of non-cooperation with the Soviets, and unlike Home Army (AK), which was completely transparent to communist security services, NSZ remained an independent and secret military and political power also after Poland was taken over by the Red Army and the communist Polish forces under Soviet control. The NSZ described and evaluated the communist activities in the following way:
"One can die by the method proven in Katyn, that is by a single shot in the back of the head, or in the Soviet Forced Labour Camps, or in German Nazi concentration camps (...) there is no real difference in the way one dies (...) therefore it is our duty to stamp out the Soviet agents in Poland. This is simply demanded by the Polish reasons of state."
The members of NSZ, as other cursed soldiers, were persecuted in the Stalinist years after the war. In Autumn of 1946 a group of 100-200 soldiers of NSZ group were lured into a trap and then massacred by Polish communist police and Polish army units loyal to the communist government in Warsaw.[12] However, in 1992, after Poland regained independence from the Soviet occupation, the National Armed Forces rightist underground soldiers were rehabilitated and given the official status of war veterans, receiving pensions and decorations.
Commanders:
- Colonel Ignacy Oziewicz
- Colonel Tadeusz Kurcyusz
- Colonel Stanislaw Kasznica
See also
Notes
- ^ Richard C. Lukas. The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939-1944. University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Page 81.
- ^ David Cesarani, Sarah Kavanaugh. Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies. Routledge, 2004, page 119.
- ^ Israel Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Page 1032
- ^ Chodkiewicz, Marek Jan, "Between Nazis and Soviets", pp.178-179 [1]
- ^ Antonin Bohun Dabrowski in "Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust" edited by Richard Lukas, pg 22. [2]
- ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz, "Poland's Holocaust" , pg 95. [3]
- ^ Gontarczyk, Piotr, PPR - Droga do władzy 1941-1944" pg. 347
- ^ Gontarczyk, Piotr, PPR - Droga do władzy 1941-1944" pg. 347
- ^ Żołnierze wyklęci... 1944-1956. Polskie podziemie niepodległościowe. Retrieved 11/27/2007.
- ^ Mordecai Paldiel. The Path of the Righteous. KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1993. Page 183
- ^ Joanna B. Michlic. Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present. University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Page 217. Attributed to Jerzy Kulak, "Pacyfikacja," pp 51-53.
- ^ Rzeczpospolita, 02.10.04 Nr 232, Wielkie polowanie: Prześladowania akowców w Polsce Ludowej (Great hunt: the persecutions of AK soldiers in the People's Republic of Poland), last accessed on 7 June 2006