Polish Underground State
The Polish Underground State ran secret courts, taught students in defiance of the occupiers, and even convened something like a parliament. Its Polish name was Polskie Państwo Podziemne, and it was also called the Polish Secret State. It brought together resistance organisations in occupied Poland that stayed loyal to the Polish government in exile in London. Supporters saw it as the lawful continuation of the pre-war Republic of Poland. That republic, in their view, was waging an armed struggle against its two occupiers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Hundreds of thousands of people worked directly for its agencies. Millions of Polish citizens quietly supported them. How does a state function when two foreign powers occupy its territory? Who paid its officials, and why did ordinary people obey them? And why, in 1945, did its own leaders dissolve its key institutions instead of fighting on?
General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski received his orders from Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the Polish Commander-in-Chief: organise and carry out the struggle in occupied Poland. He founded the Service for Poland's Victory, Służba Zwycięstwu Polski or SZP, on the 27th of September 1939. Warsaw would surrender the next day. The Polish defeat in the German invasion, accompanied by the Soviet one, already looked inevitable. Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski wanted more than a military body. Following the example of the underground Polish National Government of the 19th century and the Polish Military Organisation of World War I, his organisation would have to reach into civilian life. The SZP answered to the government in exile. It saw itself as an armed force and as a means for the Polish state to keep governing occupied territory.
The government itself had left Poland on the 17th of September 1939, and President Ignacy Mościcki was interned in Romania. Under the Polish Constitution he resigned and appointed General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski as his successor. The French government disliked that choice, so on the 29th of September Władysław Raczkiewicz took the office instead. General Władysław Sikorski, a long-time opponent of the Sanacja regime, was living in France with French government backing. He became Commander-in-Chief on the 28th of September and Prime Minister two days later. France and the United Kingdom quickly recognised his government. Raczkiewicz was described as "weak and indecisive", with far less influence than the charismatic Sikorski.
On the 13th of November 1939 the SZP was reorganised as the Union of Armed Struggle, Związek Walki Zbrojnej or ZWZ. The cause was friction among factions in the exile government, in particular the SZP's ties to the Sanacja regime. That regime had dominated Polish government since the mid-1920s. Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski backed the change, hoping to bring in parties the Sanacja had pushed aside, and he supported the creation of the Main Political Council. Sikorski named General Kazimierz Sosnkowski head of the ZWZ and Colonel Stefan Rowecki commander of its German occupation zone. Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski took the Soviet zone, but Soviet forces arrested him in March 1940 as he tried to cross the new German-Soviet border. In June, Sikorski gave Rowecki command of both zones. That left one man at the head of the whole army, while the civilian side of the underground still had no clear shape.
Cyryl Ratajski, nominated on the 3rd of December 1940, became the first Government Delegate for Poland, in a post called Delegatura Rządu na Kraj. The creation of this office marked the official beginning of the Underground State. Three more Delegates followed him: Jan Piekałkiewicz, Jan Stanisław Jankowski and Stefan Korboński. The Delegation held budgetary control over the military. Its task was to oversee the army and to recreate the civilian administration.
Paris, and later London after the fall of France, was home to the exile government's President, Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief. The Underground State recognised them as its supreme authority. Contact ran through radio communications and through couriers, "hundreds, if not thousands" of them, including Jan Karski. The Delegate represented the exile government inside occupied Poland.
Fourteen departments existed in the Delegate's Office toward the end of the war. Most mirrored pre-war ministries, such as the Treasury, Justice, or Post Offices and Telegraphs. Three dealt with war-related issues: the Department for Elimination of the Consequences of War, the Department for Public Works and Reconstruction, and the Department for Information and the Press. Below them, Polish territory was divided into 16 voivodeships, each under an underground voivode. These were split further into powiats headed by starostas, alongside separate municipal bodies. In early 1944 the Delegation employed some 15,000 people. They were mostly older, because younger Poles were recruited into the military.
Underground education was already receiving support from the civilian arm in 1940. The arm then built networks for social security, information, which the source calls propaganda, and justice. By the final years of the war it included an underground parliament, an administration, courts and police, and secondary and higher-level education. It also supported newspapers and books, underground theatres, lectures, exhibitions and concerts, and it safeguarded works of art. Żegota, the council to Aid Jews, provided social services to the destitute Jewish population.
From 1941 to 1943 the Directorate of Civil Resistance carried out lesser acts of resistance, such as minor sabotage. In 1943 it merged with the Directorate of Covert Resistance to form the Directorate of Underground Resistance. The new body answered to the AK, the Home Army.
In December 1939 the exile government formed the National Council, Rada Narodowa, with representatives of different Polish political factions. Sikorski's government chose a far more democratic procedure than the pre-war Sanacja regime had used. At home, the ZWZ set up its own version in late February 1940, the Political Consultative Committee, or PKP. Four major parties stood behind it, later known as the Big Four: the Socialist Party, the People's Party, the National Party and the Labor Party. The Labor Party took its seat in June 1940, four months after the committee began. The Socialist Party withdrew for a time, between October 1941 and March 1943.
By 1942 most differences between politicians at home and in exile had been settled. In 1943 the PKP was renamed the Home Political Representation. That body served as the basis for the Council of National Unity, Rada Jedności Narodowej, created on the 9th of January 1944 and headed by Kazimierz Pużak. It was seen as the Underground State's parliament. It was far more representative than its predecessors and included several smaller political groupings.
The nationalists of the National Radical Camp Falanga formed the Confederation of the Nation, which included most members of the pre-war far right. It partly merged with the ZWZ around 1941 and joined the Home Army around the fall of 1943. Ukrainians and Belarusians were not represented in the Underground State. Jews were.
Two groups refused to join at all. One was the communist Polish Workers Party, the PPR, with its military arm, the People's Guard, later the People's Army. The other was the far-right National Radical Camp ABC, whose Group Szaniec had a military arm called the Military Organization Lizard Union. Both extremes declined to recognise the Underground State and in some cases persecuted people connected with it. Only the PPR was seen as wholly outside the framework of the state. It opposed Polish independence and supported full inclusion of Poland in the Soviet Union. The other groups were viewed as a justifiable opposition.
In August 1943 and March 1944 the Underground State announced its long-term plan, partly to undercut the appeal of communist proposals. The communists had issued increasingly radical declarations titled What We Fight For, in March and November 1943. They called for a heavily socialist or even communist state and denounced capitalism, which they equated to slavery. They demanded nationalization of most or all of the economy and central planning.
The Underground State answered with What the Polish Nation is Fighting For. It promised a democratic parliamentary state, full equality for minorities, and freedom of speech, religion and political activity. It also proposed a Central European federal union that no single state would dominate. Its economic ideas drew on socialist and Christian Democrat principles, including a planned economy, income redistribution, land reform and nationalization of the industrial base. On borders, it would keep the eastern frontier set by the 1921 Treaty of Riga. In the north and west it would seek compensation from German territories. The two sides thus differed less over economic and social reform, which both advocated, than over national sovereignty, borders and Polish-Soviet relations. Nationalist factions attacked the plan from the other direction, calling it too socialist and not "Christian" enough.
One-eighth of all German transports to the Eastern Front were destroyed or significantly delayed by Home Army sabotage, according to one estimate. The army had taken that name in 1942, when the Union of Armed Struggle was transformed into Armia Krajowa. Its commanders included Stefan Rowecki, Tadeusz Komorowski and Leopold Okulicki. At its height it numbered over 400,000 members. It was counted among the three largest resistance movements of the war, and perhaps the largest.
The military arm was designed to prepare Polish society for a future fight for liberation. Its duties included armed resistance, sabotage, intelligence, training and propaganda. It also maintained communication with the government in London and protected the civilian arm of the state. Its main operations were aimed at German activities, especially rail and road transports to the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union.
In 1943 and 1944 the Home Army fought several full-scale battles against the Germans, particularly during Operation Tempest. These actions tied down German forces worth at least several divisions, with upper estimates reaching about 930,000 troops. They also diverted scarce supplies, while the Poles tried to support the Soviet military. Polish intelligence operatives supplied valuable information to the Allies. In 1939-1945-43% of all reports reaching British secret services from continental Europe came from Polish sources.
The occupiers inadvertently fed the movement's growth. Their attempts to destroy the Polish state, nation and culture included genocidal policies against Polish citizens, and these fuelled popular support for the resistance. Axis fatalities caused by the Polish underground, of which the Home Army formed the bulk, are estimated at up to 150,000.
The 13th of April 1943 brought the revelation of the Katyn massacre, and on the 21st of April the Soviets broke off diplomatic relations with Poland. A rift opened between Poland and the Soviet Union, an increasingly important ally for the West. On the 4th of July 1943 the charismatic Sikorski died. Stanisław Mikołajczyk succeeded him as Prime Minister, and General Sosnkowski became Commander-in-Chief. Both men carried less influence.
No representative of the Polish government was invited to the Tehran Conference, held from the 28th of November to the 1st of December 1943. None was invited to Yalta either, held from the 4th to the 11th of February 1945. These meetings discussed the post-war world and assigned Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence. At Tehran, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt objected to Stalin's suggestion that the London government did not represent Polish interests. Historian Anita Prażmowska noted that "this spelled the end of that government's tenuous influence and raison d'être."
After Tehran, Stalin decided to create his own puppet government for Poland. The Polish Committee of National Liberation, the PKWN, was proclaimed in 1944, and the PPR became part of it. The Soviet government recognised the PKWN as the only legitimate authority in Poland. It called Mikołajczyk's London government an "illegal and self-styled authority."
The Underground State reached its zenith in early 1944. In April the government in exile recognised the Delegate's Office as the Temporary Governmental Administration. The Delegate officially became Deputy Prime Minister, and the Council of Ministers at Home, Krajowa Rada Ministrów, was created. Then came Operation Tempest, the nationwide uprising begun in the spring of 1944, which included the costly and ultimately unsuccessful Warsaw Uprising. The Underground State had assumed that the resistance would aid the advancing Soviet forces, with Home Army commanders and civilian representatives acting as legitimate hosts. Instead, the Soviets commonly surrounded, disarmed and arrested them and set up their own administrative structures. In early July 1944, while the Home Army still fought the Germans, the Underground State ordered it and its administration to stay in hiding. Those who revealed themselves faced arrests and reprisals.
Mikołajczyk served as Prime Minister until the 24th of November 1944. Realising the exile government's growing powerlessness, he resigned, and Tomasz Arciszewski succeeded him. Historian Mieczysław B. Biskupski wrote that Arciszewski's obscurity "signaled the arrival of the government in exile at total inconsequentiality."
The Home Army officially disbanded on the 19th of January 1945, to avoid armed conflict with the Soviets and a civil war. The communists refused to deal with the Underground State, just as they refused to deal with the exile government. Its leaders and soldiers in "liberated" Polish territories were persecuted. Government Delegate Jan Stanisław Jankowski and General Leopold Okulicki, the last Home Army Commander-in-Chief, chose to reveal themselves. On a Soviet invitation they began open negotiations with the communist authorities. Arrests were carried out in March 1945, and in June the Soviets sentenced them in Moscow at the infamous Trial of the Sixteen.
On the 27th of June 1945 the Council of National Unity held its last session. It issued a 12-point declaration demanding that the Soviet army leave Poland and that repression of non-communist parties cease. The next day, the 28th of June, the Provisional Government of National Unity, the TRJN, was created in Moscow. It was composed primarily of communist representatives from the PKWN, with token representation for the opposition as a gesture toward the Western Allies. On the 1st of July the Government Delegate's Office, now headed by the last Delegate, Stefan Korboński, disbanded. Those dissolutions marked the end of the Underground State. Abandoned by the Western Allies and unable to negotiate with the Soviets, its leaders wanted to avoid civil war.
France withdrew its recognition of the exile government on the 29th of June 1945, and the United Kingdom and the United States followed on the 5th of July. They chose to support the Soviet-backed TRJN. The exile government protested what it saw as a "Western betrayal." It continued to operate until the fall of communism in 1989, when it recognised the post-communist Polish government. Many Underground State members were prosecuted as alleged traitors and died in captivity.
The rigged Polish legislative election of 1947 sealed the new order. The few independent politicians who tried to form an opposition, such as Mikołajczyk, were threatened with arrest. They retired or emigrated. Meanwhile, remnants of the armed resistance, including NIE, the Armed Forces Delegation for Poland, and Freedom and Independence, refused to surrender. Known as the cursed soldiers, they fought the Soviet-backed communist forces for several years until they were eradicated.
Under the People's Republic of Poland, research on the Underground State was restricted for decades. During the first Stalinist years after the war, exploring the topic was regarded as dangerous, bordering on illegal. Studying the Soviet-annexed territories in 1939-1941 was particularly difficult. Communist officials emphasised the role of communist partisans, the Armia Ludowa, although the opposite was true. The limited research that did take place was done mainly by Polish émigré historians living in the West.
Western scholars, blocked from source material in communist Poland, said almost nothing about one of Europe's largest resistance movements. The bulk of Western research centred instead on the much smaller French Resistance, la Résistance.
With the fall of communism, Polish scholars could investigate every aspect of their history. Those who chose the Underground State faced a problem of definition, because no country or nation has ever created a similar institution. Polish historian Stanisław Salmonowicz defined it as a "collection of state-legal, organisational and citizenship structures, which were to ensure the constitutional continuation of Polish statehood on its own territory." He concluded that "This constitutional continuity, real performance of the state's functions on its past territory and the loyalty of a great majority of Polish society were the most significant elements of its existence."
On the 11th of September 1998 the Sejm, Poland's parliament, declared the 27th of September the Day of the Polish Underground State. Most major Polish cities have since erected memorials to the Underground State-affiliated resistance. In Poznań, a dedicated Polish Underground State Monument was erected in 2007.
Updated
Common questions
What was the Polish Underground State?
The Polish Underground State was a single political and military entity formed by the union of resistance organisations in occupied Poland loyal to the Polish government in exile in London. It was also called the Polish Secret State, and its first elements appeared in late September 1939.
When was the Polish Underground State founded?
Its origins lie in the Service for Poland's Victory, founded on the 27th of September 1939 by General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski. The office of Government Delegate for Poland, with Cyryl Ratajski nominated on the 3rd of December 1940, marked its official beginning.
How large was the Home Army of the Polish Underground State?
At its height the Home Army, Armia Krajowa, numbered over 400,000 members. It was recognised as one of the three largest, or even the largest, resistance movements of the war.
What did the Polish Underground State do besides fight the occupiers?
Its civilian arm ran an underground parliament, administration, courts, police, and secondary and higher-level education. It also supported newspapers, theatres, lectures and concerts, and provided social services, including aid to the Jewish population through Żegota.
Why did the Polish Underground State dissolve in 1945?
Abandoned by the Western Allies and unable to negotiate with the Soviets, its leaders wished to avoid civil war. The Home Army disbanded on the 19th of January 1945, and the Government Delegate's Office disbanded on the 1st of July 1945.
When is the Day of the Polish Underground State?
The Day of the Polish Underground State is the 27th of September. The Sejm of Poland declared it on the 11th of September 1998.
All sources
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