Home Army
The Home Army, known in Polish as the Armia Krajowa, operated in the shadows of one of the most brutally occupied countries in World War II. At its peak in 1944, estimates of its membership ranged from 200,000 to 600,000 people. That upper figure made it one of the largest underground resistance movements in all of occupied Europe, rivaled only by Soviet and Yugoslav partisans.
Think about what that number means in practice. These were not soldiers in a conventional army. They were teachers, farmers, couriers, factory workers, and former officers, all living double lives under German occupation. Many used false names. Some hid in forests. Others attended German-run workplaces by day and sabotaged German equipment by night.
The Home Army answered to a government that no longer held any territory. Its political masters operated out of London, thousands of kilometers away. The men and women it directed were cut off from the Allies by enemy-held land in every direction. And yet they managed to supply the British secret services with nearly half of all intelligence reports received from continental Europe between 1939 and 1945.
How did such an organization come to exist? What did it actually accomplish? And what happened to the people who survived it, once the war was over?
General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski established the seed of the Home Army on the 27th of September 1939, just as the twin German and Soviet invasions of Poland were nearing completion. The organization he founded was called the Service for Poland's Victory. Within seven weeks, on the 17th of November 1939, it was superseded on orders from General Władysław Sikorski and renamed the Armed Resistance. Then, on the 14th of February 1942, it became the Home Army.
The Polish civilian government-in-exile in London envisioned it as a strictly apolitical force representing the entire nation. Its defined tasks were partisan warfare, rebuilding armed forces underground, and, when the time came, a general national rising to restore the prewar government. In practice, the Home Army absorbed dozens of smaller resistance organizations over the following years, which is partly why its membership numbers are so difficult to pin down. The constant integration of new groups meant the count shifted constantly.
Headquarters was divided into five sections and two bureaus. Section II handled intelligence and counterintelligence. Section III coordinated training and planned the nationwide uprising. A unit called Kedyw, shorthand for Kierownictwo Dywersji, ran special operations. The structure mirrored Poland's prewar administrative divisions; regional branches corresponded roughly to pre-war voivodeships.
The Home Army's first commander was Stefan Rowecki, whose codename was "Grot" - meaning Spearhead. He led until his arrest by the German Gestapo on the 30th of June 1943, after which he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and later executed on personal order of Heinrich Himmler. Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, whose codename was "Bór" meaning Forest, commanded from July 1943 until his surrender following the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944. The final commander was Leopold Okulicki, codename Niedźwiadek, meaning Bear, who formally dissolved the organization on the 19th of January 1945.
When the Home Army was formally established in February 1942, it numbered around 100,000 members. Less than a year later, at the start of 1943, it had reached roughly 200,000. By the summer of 1944 most estimates placed the total around 400,000, with a cadre of over 10,000-11,000 officers, some 7,500 officers-in-training, and 88,000 non-commissioned officers.
Members fell into three distinct groups. The first were undercover operatives, mostly in cities, living under false identities. The second were uniformed partisans living in forests, called leśni or "forest people," who openly engaged German forces. In early 1943 these forest groups numbered an estimated 1,200-4,000 people across some 40 groups. The third and largest group were part-time members who lived under their real names in their real homes, received no pay, and waited to be called up only for the planned nationwide rising.
Women formed a significant portion of the organization. Approximately a seventh to a tenth of the Home Army insurgents were female. Most served in communications, where many held leadership roles or worked as couriers. Elżbieta Zawacka is among the most notable; she was sometimes called the only female Cichociemna, a reference to the elite British-trained operatives parachuted in from the West. An entirely female sabotage unit led by Wanda Gertz carried out assassinations of female Gestapo informants. During the Warsaw Uprising, two all-female units were created: one focused on demolition, another on navigating the city's sewer system.
By the end of the Warsaw Uprising, the women's toll was severe. About 5,000 female casualties were recorded among the insurgents, and over 2,000 female soldiers were taken captive. Contemporary press coverage of that latter figure caused what sources describe as a "European sensation."
Polish intelligence contributed to the Allied war effort in ways that far outweighed the Home Army's size and resources. Between 1939 and 1945-48 per cent of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe came from Polish sources. The total reached an estimated 80,000 reports, and 85 per cent of them were assessed as high quality or better. Near the end of the war the Polish network had over 1,600 registered agents registered.
With the fall of France and the disruption of other Allied networks early in the war, Polish intelligence was described by one assessment as "the only Allied intelligence assets on the Continent." The Western Allies had almost no independent assets in Central and Eastern Europe, making the Home Army network a critical resource for understanding the Eastern Front.
The most dramatic single intelligence coup came through a mission called Operation Wildhorn III, known in Polish as Most III, or "Bridge III." A stripped-down RAF twin-engine Dakota flew from Brindisi, Italy, to an abandoned German airfield inside occupied Poland. There it collected intelligence prepared by Polish aircraft designer Antoni Kocjan: some 100 pounds of V-2 rocket wreckage retrieved from a Peenemünde launch, key V-2 components, photographs, and drawings. That mission gave the Allies their most detailed look yet at Germany's rocket program.
Polish agents also delivered the first reports on German concentration camps and the Holocaust to reach the Western powers. Witold Pilecki was the only person known to have volunteered to be imprisoned at Auschwitz. He spent three and a half years there, organizing an internal resistance and transmitting intelligence about the killings to the Allies. Scholars who produced the 2005 Anglo-Polish Historical Committee report on intelligence cooperation concluded that Polish contributions to the Allied victory were "disproportionally large."
Between January 1941 and June 1944, confirmed Home Army sabotage operations damaged 6,930 locomotives and 19,058 railway wagons. Saboteurs derailed 732 transports, set 443 on fire, and blew up 38 railway bridges. Richard J. Crampton estimated that an eighth of all German transports to the Eastern Front were either destroyed or substantially delayed because of Home Army operations.
Beyond the railways, the Home Army's underground workshops produced their own weapons. Gunsmiths manufactured copies of the British Sten submachine gun, as well as indigenous designs called the Błyskawica and the KIS. They also produced pistols, flamethrowers, road mines, and hand grenades including the Filipinka and Sidolówka. Built-in manufacturing sabotage added another dimension: Home Army members inserted flaws into 4,710 aircraft engine parts, 92,000 artillery projectiles, and 70,000 condensers while working inside German-run factories.
Assassination was a deliberate tool. In total, Home Army and affiliated forces carried out 5,733 assassinations of Nazi Germans over the same period. The most prominent individual operations targeted Gestapo officials. Igo Sym, a German collaborator and actor, was killed in 1941. Franz Kutschera, SS and Police Leader of the Warsaw District, was assassinated on the 1st of February 1944 in Operation Kutschera. Franz Bürkl, commandant of the Pawiak prison, was killed on the 7th of September 1943.
Despite all this activity, the Home Army faced chronic shortages of weapons. By 1944, when membership was at its highest, the organization possessed enough arms to equip only about 32,000 soldiers. On the 1st of August 1944, when the Warsaw Uprising began, only a sixth of Home Army fighters in Warsaw carried weapons. Allied air drops - 485 missions delivering around 600 tons of supplies - were limited by Stalin's refusal to allow Western planes to land on Soviet territory for refueling.
Operation Tempest, launched in January 1944, was the Home Army's attempt to seize control of cities before Soviet forces arrived, so that Polish civil authorities could establish legitimate governance ahead of a Soviet takeover. Its largest and most famous phase began on the 1st of August 1944, when the Home Army rose in Warsaw.
Polish forces took control of substantial sections of the city and held on for 63 days, resisting until the 2nd of October 1944. The Soviets, whose forces had reached the eastern bank of the Vistula, did not cross to support the uprising. Without that aid, the Germans systematically crushed the insurrection and then burned Warsaw to the ground.
During the fighting, Home Army units briefly captured several German armored vehicles, including a Jagdpanzer 38 Hetzer light tank destroyer and an armored troop transport SdKfz 251, both renamed by their Polish crews. The Zośka Battalion liberated hundreds of Jewish inmates from the Gęsiówka concentration camp within Warsaw during the uprising. Female fighters made up roughly 75 per cent of the insurgent medical personnel. By the end, there were approximately 5,000 female casualties among the insurgents.
Other Operation Tempest actions included Operation Ostra Brama in Wilno and the Lwów Uprising. In the Lublin area, regional Home Army structures briefly established a functioning underground government. But Soviet hostility ultimately prevented the government-in-exile from returning to Poland, which had been the entire strategic purpose of the general rising.
On the 19th of January 1945, Leopold Okulicki formally disbanded the Home Army, hoping to avoid civil war with the Soviets. The decision did not protect its veterans. Władysław Gomułka, who would later become Secretary General of the Polish United Workers' Party, was quoted at the time calling Home Army soldiers "a hostile element which must be removed without mercy." Roman Zambrowski, another senior Polish communist, said they had to be "exterminated."
By the end of the war, around 60,000 Home Army soldiers had been arrested. About 50,000 of those were deported to Soviet gulags and prisons, many of them captured during or after Operation Tempest while trying to cooperate with Soviet forces against the Germans. Others were arrested after approaching communist officials who had offered amnesty, only to find the promises broken.
In 1944-56, the Stalinist repression in Poland reached far beyond former Home Army members. Approximately 2 million people were arrested across the country. Over 20,000 were executed in communist prisons, among them Witold Pilecki, who had volunteered to enter Auschwitz during the war. Six million Polish citizens - described as every third adult Pole - were classified as "reactionary" or "criminal elements" and placed under surveillance.
All members of the Batalion Zośka, which had fought in the Warsaw Uprising, were locked up in communist prisons between 1944 and 1956. An amnesty in 1956 released 35,000 former Home Army soldiers. Some partisans, called the cursed soldiers, refused to surface at all. The last known AK partisan, Józef Franczak, known as "Lalek," was killed in 1963 - nearly two decades after the war ended. Adam Boryczka, a Cichociemny operative trained in Britain, was not released from prison until 1967. It was only in 1989, after the fall of communism, that Polish courts declared the sentences of Home Army soldiers null and void.
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Common questions
What was the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) and when was it formed?
The Home Army, known in Polish as the Armia Krajowa or AK, was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. It was formally established on the 14th of February 1942, growing out of an earlier organization called the Armed Resistance (Związek Walki Zbrojnej), which itself descended from the Service for Poland's Victory founded on the 27th of September 1939. The Home Army was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile based in London.
How large was the Home Army at its peak?
At its peak in 1944, estimates of Home Army membership ranged from 200,000 to 600,000 people, with most estimates averaging around 400,000. The organization included over 10,000-11,000 officers and 88,000 non-commissioned officers. Despite these numbers, chronic weapons shortages meant that only about 32,000 soldiers could be armed at any one time.
What intelligence did the Home Army provide to the Allies in World War II?
The Home Army supplied 48 per cent of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe between 1939 and 1945, totaling an estimated 80,000 reports, 85 per cent of which were rated high quality or better. Key contributions included the first reports on the Holocaust and German concentration camps, intelligence on German submarine operations, and critically, technical details on the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, including 100 pounds of V-2 wreckage recovered in Operation Wildhorn III.
What was the Warsaw Uprising and what role did the Home Army play?
The Warsaw Uprising began on the 1st of August 1944 as part of Operation Tempest, the Home Army's nationwide strategy to seize cities before Soviet forces arrived. Polish fighters took control of substantial parts of Warsaw and held them for 63 days before surrendering on the 2nd of October 1944. With Soviet forces halted on the eastern bank of the Vistula and providing no aid, the Germans defeated the uprising and then burned the city to the ground.
What happened to Home Army soldiers after World War II ended?
Around 60,000 Home Army soldiers were arrested after the war, with approximately 50,000 deported to Soviet gulags and prisons. Over 20,000 people were executed in communist prisons, including Witold Pilecki, who had volunteered to be imprisoned at Auschwitz during the war. An amnesty in 1956 released 35,000 former soldiers, and the sentences of Home Army members were not formally declared null and void by Polish courts until 1989, after the fall of communism.
Who were the commanders of the Home Army?
The Home Army had three main commanders. General Stefan Rowecki, codename Grot (Spearhead), led until his arrest by the Gestapo on the 30th of June 1943; he was later executed on personal order of Heinrich Himmler. General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, codename Bór (Forest), commanded from July 1943 until his surrender after the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944. General Leopold Okulicki, codename Niedźwiadek (Bear), led the organization in its final days and formally disbanded it on the 19th of January 1945.
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