Polish government-in-exile

• 1. Introduction

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  The Polish government-in-exile began with a proclamation issued in Kuty, a small town near Poland's southern border, on the 17th of September 1939. President Ignacy Mościcki was cut off there, as German, Soviet, and Slovak forces closed in on Poland. He announced he would name a successor rather than let the presidency collapse. Within two weeks, the presidency, and the claim to rule Poland, had crossed into France.

  What followed was a government that fought on from exile and kept a resistance movement alive inside occupied Poland. Its own recognition eroded, country by country, over the decades that followed. How did a government that had lost its territory hold together for so long? And why did some countries keep recognizing it long after others gave up?

• 2. A Government With No Land

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  Władysław Raczkiewicz was already in Paris when he took his constitutional oath at the Polish Embassy, becoming President of the Republic of Poland. Raczkiewicz appointed General Władysław Sikorski as prime minister soon after taking office. When Edward Rydz-Śmigły stepped down, Sikorski also became Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces.

  Article 24 of the Polish constitution, adopted in April 1935, had made this succession possible. It provided that the president's term would be prolonged in wartime, extending 'until three months after the conclusion of peace.' Under the same article, the president could name his successor by a special act published in the Official Gazette.

  The government was based first in Paris, then in Angers. There, Raczkiewicz lived at the Château de Pignerolle from the 2nd of December 1939 until June 1940. After the Fall of France, the government escaped to London, where every Allied government recognized it. Politically, it was a coalition of the Polish Peasant Party, the Polish Socialist Party, the Labour Party, and the National Party. These parties kept only a vestigial existence for as long as the war lasted.

  Recognized by every Allied government, the coalition in London still controlled no lever of power inside Poland itself. Its only real strength lay in the loyalty of soldiers scattered across distant fronts.

• 3. Soldiers Without a Country

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  Most of the Polish Navy escaped to Britain. Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and airmen crossed through Hungary and Romania, or over the Baltic Sea, to keep fighting from France. Poles fought at Narvik in Norway, in France in 1940 and again in 1944, and in the Battle of Britain. They also fought in the Battle of the Atlantic, in North Africa at Tobruk, and in Italy at Monte Cassino and Ancona. Polish units reached as far as Arnhem and Wilhelmshaven.

  Under the Sikorski-Mayski agreement of July 1941, Polish soldiers held prisoner by the Soviet Union since 1939 were released to form Anders' Army. The plan was to fight Nazi Germany inside the USSR, but the army instead transferred through Iran to join US and British forces. A Kremlin amnesty signed on the 12th of August 1941 extended to thousands of Polish soldiers and civilian prisoners, including deportees trapped in Siberia. It allowed the Poles to form eight military divisions, known together as the Anders Army. They were evacuated to Iran and the Middle East, where British forces, hard pressed by Rommel's Afrika Korps, badly needed them. These units became the basis of the Polish II Corps, led by General Władysław Anders, fighting alongside the other Allies.

  Not every Polish unit answered to London. Berling's Army, raised inside the Soviet Union in 1944, stayed there and fought entirely under Soviet command, a split in allegiance that would only widen.

• 4. Voices Nobody Heeded

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  From 1942 onward, the exile government supplied the Allies with some of the earliest, most detailed accounts of the Holocaust. Foreign Minister Count Edward Raczyński and Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish underground movement, both called for action to stop it, without success.

  On the 10th of December 1942, Raczyński sent a note to the governments of the United Nations. It was the first official denunciation by any government of the Nazi aim of total extermination of the Jewish population. It was also the first official document to single out the suffering of European Jews as Jews, not only as citizens of their home countries. The note, and the Polish government's efforts, helped trigger the Declaration of the Allied Nations on the 17th of December 1942.

  The calls for intervention went unanswered.

• 5. The Break With Stalin

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  In April 1943, German authorities announced they had found mass graves at Katyn Wood, near Smolensk, holding 10,000 Polish officers. A later German investigation found 4,443 bodies of officers taken prisoner in 1939 and killed by the Soviets. The Soviet government claimed the Germans had fabricated the discovery, and the other Allied governments formally accepted this explanation for diplomatic reasons. The Polish government in exile refused to accept it.

  Stalin responded by severing relations with the Polish government in exile. Since the Soviet Union, not the western Allies, would be the one to liberate Poland, the breach carried lasting consequences. General Sikorski, widely regarded as the most capable of the Polish exile leaders, was killed in an air crash at Gibraltar in July 1943. Stanisław Mikołajczyk succeeded him as head of the Polish government in exile.

  Through 1943 and 1944, Winston Churchill repeatedly tried to bring Stalin and the Polish government in exile back to the table. Talks broke down over the Katyn massacre, over similar killings at Kalinin and Kharkiv, and over Poland's postwar borders. Stalin wanted to keep the territory the Soviets had annexed in 1939, home to millions of Poles as well as Ukrainians and Belarusians. He proposed compensating Poland instead with land taken from Germany. Mikołajczyk refused to compromise on Poland's sovereignty over its prewar eastern territories, known as the Kresy, and insisted Stalin would not install a Communist government. Stalin, however, already occupied the territory in dispute, a fact the exiled leaders could not overcome.

  In the end, the exiles lost on both counts. Stalin re-annexed the eastern territories. On the 31st of December 1944, he renamed the Polish Committee of National Liberation as the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland. The committee itself had been set up on the 22nd of July 1944. Poland kept its status as an independent state, despite Wanda Wasilewska and other influential Communists arguing it should become a Soviet republic. In November 1944, still mistrustful of the Soviets, Mikołajczyk resigned and returned to Poland.

• 6. A Government of Ghosts

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  On the 28th of June 1945, Mikołajczyk took office in the newly formed Provisional Government of National Unity in Warsaw. This let the western Allies tacitly accept Poland's place in the Soviet sphere while withdrawing recognition of the exile government. France withdrew recognition on the 29th of June 1945, and the United States and United Kingdom followed on the 5th of July. The Polish Armed Forces in exile were disbanded that same year, and most of their members, unable to safely return to Communist Poland, settled elsewhere.

  Many exiled Poles saw the new government as a façade for Communist rule. That suspicion was confirmed in 1947, when the Communist-dominated Democratic Bloc won a rigged election. Official results credited the bloc with over 80 percent of the vote, a margin only large-scale fraud could produce. The opposition believed it would have won by a similar landslide in a genuine vote, with Mikołajczyk likely becoming prime minister.

  That November, at a meeting with the Silesian society, Mikołajczyk was told the arrest order against him and Paweł Zaleski was already signed. The two men fled at once, Mikołajczyk heading north while Zaleski escaped through a southern route. Zaleski was carried out of the danger zone in a straw cart, helped by his brother Jan Zaleski from Boyko. He waited several days with his father-in-law, Aries of Kamionka, in Korfantów near Głuchołazy, before crossing through the Czech Republic to the west. Mikołajczyk himself left by ship from Szczecin, in what turned out to be his last time in Poland.

  The London Poles soon lost their embassy on Portland Place, left with only the president's private residence at 43 Eaton Place. The government in exile became largely symbolic, though it kept hold of important archives from prewar Poland.

  In 1954, political differences split the ranks of the government in exile. One faction claimed to speak for 80 percent of the 500,000 anti-Communist Poles exiled since the war. It opposed President August Zaleski remaining in office past his seven-year term. In July 1954, it formed a Council of National Unity, along with a Council of Three to act as head of state. Its members were Tomasz Arciszewski, General Władysław Anders, and Edward Raczyński. The two factions only reunited after Zaleski's death in 1972.

  Some supporters eventually returned to Poland, among them Prime Minister Hugon Hanke in 1955 and his predecessor Stanisław Mackiewicz in 1956. The Soviet-installed government in Warsaw campaigned for their return, promising dignified employment and forgiveness of past transgressions. The Republic of Ireland, Francoist Spain, and finally, on the 19th of October 1972, the Holy See were the last states to withdraw recognition. The Vatican had already withdrawn diplomatic privileges in 1959, under Secretary of State Domenico Tardini.

  By 1989, when Soviet influence over Poland finally ended, the exile government still kept a president and a cabinet of eight. They met every two weeks in London, commanding the loyalty of some 150,000 Polish veterans and their descendants in Britain, 35,000 of them in London alone.

• 7. Handing Back the Crown

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  On the 22nd of December 1990, a ceremony took place at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. There, Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last president of the government in exile, handed over the presidential banner, the presidential and state seals, and the presidential sashes. He also passed on the original text of the 1935 constitution. The recipient was Lech Wałęsa, the first non-Communist president of Poland since the war.

  The liquidation of the London-based government apparatus was declared complete on the 31st of December 1991. In 1992, Poland officially recognized the military medals and decorations the exile government had awarded over the decades.

  In 1996, Poland adopted the Act on Emoluments of a Former President of the Republic of Poland. It set out the rights, privileges, and remuneration due a former head of state. The law explicitly extended those benefits to the last president-in-exile as well.

  That clause was exhausted only with Kaczorowski's death in the 2010 Smolensk plane crash. It happened near the same city where the Katyn graves had been uncovered, decades before.