Six Years Under Hitler: The Story Of The Polish Resistance | Europe's Secret Armies | Timeline

On the 1st of September 1939, at 4.45am, nine German columns rolled across Poland's western border in an act of undeclared war. By launching the invasion, Hitler breached the solemn undertaking he had given the western powers at Munich a year before. He had sworn to make no further territorial demands after Czechoslovakia. It was a promise he never intended to keep. Now, one year on, the great lie was exposed. The invasion of Poland followed months of mounting aggression. Hitler had demanded the return of Danzig, the Baltic port ceded to Poland after World War I, together with the right to construct rail and motorway links from Germany through the Polish corridor to East Prussia. Poland refused. On the 22nd of August 1939, Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Three days later, Poland and Britain signed a mutual protection pact. On the 29th, Germany delivered an ultimatum to Poland. Negotiations between the two countries broke down on the final day of August. In the small hours of the following morning, the invasion began. Two days later, the French and British governments declared war on Germany, triggering a cataclysm that engulfed the whole of Europe before spreading across the globe. Poland was the first country to experience German blitzkrieg, lightning war. It had been made possible by the development of mechanised troop transport, highly mobile firepower in the form of the panzer tank, Stuka dive bombers to destroy enemy defences and Messerschmitt fighters to win command of the air. It was a war of continuous movement, no front formed for more than a few hours. The Polish army at the time numbered 1.7 million troops, double the size of the invading forces. But it had far less modern equipment, while Germany could command 2,600 tanks and over 2,000 aircraft. The defending forces were deployed in frontier zones to protect vital industrial resources and in the Polish corridor. In the event, General von Bock's 3rd and 4th armies spearheaded in from both sides and cut the Polish forces to shreds before turning south. The 8th, 10th and 14th armies struck north-east from Slovakia and Silesia. In a move that prefigured his panzer sickle cut across France eight months later, Heinz Guderian's tanks raced south from Prussia, covering 200 miles in 10 days, always risking attack from the east and finally making contact with the southern army group on 17th September. The Polish army was caught inside a double pincer. On the same day, two Soviet army groups invaded from White Russia in the north and the Ukraine in the south. In a secret annex to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler had agreed with the Soviet Union to split Poland down the middle. The Poles were completely wrong-footed. They had very few forces left to stem the Soviet advance. These included cadets who had been sent east for training when war broke out. We came to Tantów on 17th September and on 17th September, instead of being in a calm area where we were supposed to be prepared, we found out that the Soviets had attacked Poland from the other side and we were on the front line. We were fighting against the Soviet troops. The Soviets bombed us from the plane. We had to retreat back to the west. The Russian forces met little resistance and over 200,000 Poles surrendered to the Red Army. For another week, the Poles held out against the Wehrmacht. In Warsaw, 100,000 troops and 800,000 civilians kept the Germans at bay. The bombers of the Luftwaffe and the combined firepower of four German armies, some 2,500 artillery pieces, pounded the city. On 27th September, the city surrendered. Poland's allies looked on helplessly and asked themselves whether it was the end. Actually, in many ways, it was the beginning. Not only resistance to occupation, but also exile forces fighting abroad. But in particular, even as Warsaw was in its dying embers of resistance in 1939, efforts were being made to organize a resistance movement. With 100 plus years of foreign occupation from the final partitions in the 18th century, the Poles developed some considerable skills in conspiratorial work. And these skills were once again going to be brought to play during the German and Soviet occupations. For the fourth time in its history, Poland had been divided up between Germany and Russia. Germany now possessed 72,500 square miles of the country, an area containing most of the mines and factories and 23 million citizens. Western territories, including Danzig, Poznan, Lodz and Katowice, were incorporated directly into Germany. The central part, including Warsaw, Lublin, Krakow and Lvov, became what was known as the General Government. Russia seized the remainder of the country, an area that contained 12 million Poles and most of Poland's oil resources. But it had not been a cheap victory. The Poles had resisted with far greater courage and vigour than the German high command had anticipated. A quarter of German tanks had been lost, while the Luftwaffe had written off over 500 aircraft. 16,000 German troops had been killed, with a further 32,000 wounded. Most important of all, the spirit of the Poles was unbroken. Just a week before the invasion of Poland, Hitler had secretly advised his senior commanders of his intention to kill, without pity or mercy, all men, women and children of Polish race or language. In the wake of the regular army units came the SS and the Einsatzgruppen, the special force, tasked with systematically murdering doctors, university lecturers, officers, landowners, churchmen, local government officials, Jews and aristocrats. Within a week, SS commanders were boasting of 200 shootings a day. At the beginning it was quite clear that German occupation policies were going to have a genocidal flavour. Poland, of course, was one of the places where the Holocaust would take place, largely because of the numbers of resident Jewish people in Poland. But for Poles themselves, they were also a significant target of Nazi racial policies. And the aim was, in essence, to decapitate the society, take away the intelligentsia, the leadership element of society. A complex of concentration camps was constructed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, an hour's journey from Krakow. Polish political prisoners were its first inmates. As well as non-Jewish Poles, it's been estimated that in the course of the war well over a million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. The camp records were destroyed by the Nazis, but for Poles and Jews, and many who would regard themselves as both, Auschwitz remains a harrowing memorial to the most appalling human suffering. Two million of Poland's 3.3 million Jews had been trapped in the western areas of the country that had been reincorporated into Germany. 600,000 of these, as well as Jews from Austria and Czechoslovakia, were shipped back into the central general government area in cattle trucks. They were concentrated in ghettos in the larger towns and cities, surrounded by brick walls and barbed wire. There they were to await a final solution. Starting in February 1940, well over a million Poles were deported to the Soviet Union. The fate of many of these is still unknown. Others were deported to Germany to provide labor to fuel the Nazi war economy. Behind the systematic killings and the forced migrations was a plan to create a slave state. The Poles showed remarkable resilience in the face of the rape of their country and the brutal and systematic assault on their culture and identity. Resistance began immediately, and it involved the whole population at every level. Collaboration with the occupying power was extremely rare. I have lived for 50 years. But in the 1940s, when the occupation began to conspire against us, during a period of war lawlessness introduced by the occupiers, resistance was a natural thing. It was in the blood of every young person, every young girl at that time. And it was not a reason for glory. It was as natural as learning, studying, reading. It was as natural as living in Poland in unnatural circumstances. With no legitimate Polish government in the country to rally and organize them, Poles organized themselves. Their passion to defend their freedom was boundless. With little or no outside help, they set up a network of groups that were later to unite under the banner of the Armia Krajowa, or a.k.a. the Home Army. The Home Army's organizational structure covered the whole of Poland, but there were a few groups that remained independent. In Lublin province, units of the Communist People's Guard and the right-wing National Armed Forces were reluctant to recognize the Home Army's authority, as were some Jewish detachments and some partisan groups in Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine. And in the border region, there were Russian partisan units who owed their allegiance to Moscow. Nevertheless, the extent of the unification achieved was remarkable and far-reaching. The diversity of resistance included partisan activity, it included sabotage, assassination, intelligence collection. It's safe to say that the Polish resistance organization, which eventually was known by the broad umbrella name of the Home Army, the Armia Krajowa, was in fact probably Europe's most organized and sophisticated resistance movement in the Second World War. A Polish government in exile had set itself up in Paris, and after the invasion of France in May 1940, it shifted to London, taking with it around 20,000 escaped Polish soldiers and airmen. After some bitter political infighting, Władysław Rakiewicz emerged as president, with Władysław Sikorski as prime minister and leader of the Polish Free Forces. Sikorski was a charismatic leader, who was also free of the taint of the unpopular right-wing pre-war government. He immediately began planning for the moment when Poles would take back their country. Discover the past with exclusive military history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians, all on History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Download the app now to watch everything, from the gripping story of the Band of Brothers to Operation Barbarossa and D-Day. Immerse yourself in the dramatic stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description. At the end of the day, decisions taken in Poland were ultimately going to have to be taken by the leadership of the underground. As they were on the scene, they were more directly connected to the situation on the ground. And because of this, there were sometimes tensions between the exile government and the underground. But by and large, they followed, it seems to me, a central purpose. And that central purpose was for the underground to contribute to the Allied war effort and in particular to the liberation of Poland. When the uprising began, it was to be sudden, explosive and totally committed. Above all, it had to be victorious. Soldiers were recruited and trained against the day when they would be needed to wrest Poland back from the invader. At that time, I was in a regiment called BASZTA. We had under-service schools for the youth who were not yet in the army. We had secret under-service schools in which everyone was still completing their knowledge. Part of the training, or how to call it, we did in the guerrilla, in the forests surrounding Warsaw. There were field exercises. Before the end of 1939, the Polish resistance had an efficient Bureau of Information and Propaganda in place. One of its tasks was to print underground newspapers. There were dozens of other Home Army titles, achieving a total daily circulation of 200,000 copies. But it was not all serious. Song sheets and light reading matter were also produced. I had beautiful literature under my care. Indeed, it was very beautiful, because it was rubbish, brochures, terrible crimes. And people were sometimes surprised that I did not like to read crimes. I said, slowly, I can't, I can't stand it, because it just reminds me of that rubbish. The process of creating and issuing false identity papers was known as legalization. Underground activity often called for a complete change of identity, requiring a large number of different documents. Between September 1943 and March 1944, the legalization department issued thousands of fake IDs, employment certificates, birth certificates, and other documents relating to transport, residence and travel. The Nazis had set out to utterly obliterate Poland, and the resistance reacted by assuming responsibility for all spheres of civilian life, including the courts, publishing, protection of cultural relics, theatre and education. Education, of course, went further. There were well-known sets of children who gathered at home in groups of a few or a dozen people. And from the first year of high school, they could easily get into high school. As well as functioning as teachers, nurses, editors, publishers, secretaries, liaison officers, and in a host of other capacities, women were recruited into the Home Army in large numbers to act as couriers, operating between the different groups throughout Poland. Women were subject to arrest and torture by the Gestapo no less than their male colleagues in the resistance. Nobody was safe. In Gestapo headquarters at Alea Szucha, people were tortured indiscriminately on the basis that they might possibly blurt out information. Those who survived often found themselves incarcerated in the infamous Pawiak prison. After a botched attempt to lay their hands on German weapons, Jan Gojembiowski and two of his colleagues were thrown into cell 222 at the Pawiak. Gojembiowski survived the day, but later witnessed the horrifying reprisals taken by the SS and the Gestapo in the wake of an attempted jailbreak by prisoners in another cell block. The plan had been betrayed, and the escaping prisoners were moaned down by SS troops who had been waiting for them. On the following day, further measures were taken. Prisoners from the 3rd Division and the Germans, together with a civilian who was pointing his finger at the prisoners, were selected and executed. At first, there were about a hundred of them, Informers and collaborators were ruthlessly eliminated by Home Army hit squads carrying out the sentences of underground courts. But their principal targets were Nazi functionaries, in particular SS and Gestapo personnel. Poland's intelligence capabilities were rated extremely highly by London, not least because substantial numbers of her citizens had been conscripted into the German army, or to work in factories inside Germany. Together with the home population, they were a rich source of information. Perhaps the most famous was collecting pieces of a V-2 rocket which landed in eastern Poland, having bits eventually flown back to Britain for examination and other parts of it producing detailed drawings for Allied scientists. On June 22, 1941, Hitler turned on his ally Stalin and launched his forces across the Soviet border. Over 3 million German soldiers and 3,300 tanks were involved in the eastward thrust. Operation Barbarossa, as the invasion was called, fatally committed Hitler to a war on two fronts. Ultimately, the decision would bring about the fall of the Reich. But in the early stages, the German army swept all before it. In Poland, the Russian occupation forces were rolled back across the border, leaving Germany in control of the whole country. This actually had a significant impact on the effectiveness of the underground and particularly eastern areas because the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, was actually rather effective in dealing with Polish resistance as compared to the German counterparts. I think that's one major effect. But it also politically created circumstances now where the Polish exile government and, in theory, the resistance were fighting alongside the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. And politically, this was quite a momentous event, leading, in fact, to a rapprochement between the Polish exile government and also the Soviet Union. Russia released some Polish prisoners of war as a token of good faith. Others were recruited into a Polish army under Russian control. But the Polish government harboured no illusions about Soviet ambitions and the rapprochement did not last. Radio Berlin was quick to seize on the discovery by German troops of a mass grave in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in January 1943. It contained the bodies of 4,143 Polish officers who had been interned by the Russians in a prison camp at Kozelsk in 1939. Nazi propaganda blamed the Russian secret police, the NKVD, for the massacre. The Russians denied the charge and blamed the Nazis. The gruesome discovery was enough to drive a wedge between the Poles and the Russians and cut short diplomatic relations between the two countries. 1943 was also marked by tragedy for the resistance, which lost two of its leaders, and for the country as a whole when Hitler embarked on the so-called final solution to the Jewish problem. It was an era of monstrous evil and extraordinary heroism. The 350,000 Jewish residents of Warsaw constituted nearly a third of the city's pre-war population. It was the largest Jewish community in Europe and second only to that of New York. In October 1940, Berlin had ordered that all Jews should be concentrated into ghettos. Warsaw's was enclosed by a ten-foot wall topped with barbed wire and sealed off from the rest of the city. The Nazis saw the ghettos as temporary holding pens until a final solution to the Jewish problem could be resolved. Consequently, they took no account of the problems of massive overcrowding, poor sanitation, hunger and disease. Tens of thousands of Jewish people in the ghettos in Poland died in the very cruel winter of 1940-1941. And Jewish resistance in this period of the history of the ghettos includes such things as smuggling. Young kids would smuggle food into the ghetto. They would burrow under the walls, they would go over the walls. People who went out of the ghettos on work details, working for Germans in factories and forced labour outside the ghettos, would engage in illicit trade and bring black market food back into the ghetto to help people survive. In January 1942, the Nazis adopted a policy of systematic extermination of the Jews. Camps were established at Berzek, Sobibór, Madonek and Treblinka that had a combined capacity for killing over 80,000 Jews a day. Between the end of July and the beginning of October 1942, 310,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to these extermination camps. Many were rounded up here at Umschlagplatz. Appalled by the stories filtering back from the death camps, young Jewish socialists and Zionists vowed that they would not go like lambs to the slaughter. They built a network of bunkers and tunnels from which to fight when the Nazis returned. Only a small number of Jews were smuggled out of the ghetto. I think it is safe to say on balance that it's inevitably going to be one of the more controversial areas in Polish-Jewish relations. One in which I think perhaps the Poles could have been their brother's keeper more. But bearing in mind the risks of harbouring a Jew in Poland during occupation conditions were very severe sanctions. And I think it's a credit to those people who did take the risk to be their brother's keeper under those circumstances. In January 1943, Himmler gave instructions for Warsaw to be Jew-free by Hitler's birthday on the 20th of April. 3,000 SS troops under General Jürgen Strupp were sent into the ghetto with orders to exterminate all Jews within three days. The streets were empty, but the Jews were waiting for them. They suddenly encountered a fusillade of pistol fire, rifle shots, grenades being thrown down from balconies, rooftops, windows. They suffered casualties and they were stunned. Retreated with dead and wounded out of the ghetto. Of course they came back in greater force. But the fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto went on until the middle of May before the Nazi commander Jürgen Strupp proudly announced that the Warsaw Ghetto is no more. German troops had to use artillery, flamethrowers, explosive demolition charges to destroy the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. The fighting went on for a month. The Germans couldn't believe the strength of the resistance. 56,000 Jews died in the fighting. But the Jewish will to resist was not broken. And survivors of the ghetto battles later fought alongside the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising. From an international perspective, the ghetto uprising forced many who were ignorant or indifferent to the Nazi treatment of Jews to face reality. There was a determined effort by the Council for the Rescue of Jews to hide and spirit away Jewish children. In the course of the war, over 100,000 Polish Jews were rescued. Among the Polish forces who had escaped the invasion in 1939 were those who volunteered for service with the Special Operations Executive, SOE. As Britain's first ally in the war, the Polish section of SOE was especially favoured, operating its own radio stations in Britain and planning its own operations. The agents were known as Cichoczemny, the silent and unseen. The arrival of the Cichoczemny was always a huge boost to the morale of the Polish underground. On a practical level, they brought weapons and kits for making more, along with plans, orders and huge quantities of money to finance resistance activities. I would like to emphasise that during all the Cichoczemny operations there was not a single time when any money was lost. This also shows a certain level of discipline and honesty. In July 1943, Stefan Ravecki, leader of the resistance forces in Warsaw, was captured and incarcerated. He was later killed on Himmler's orders. It was the second major blow to the Polish resistance in the course of a few days. On the 4th of the month, General Sikorski had also been killed. He was en route from a conference in the Middle East to London when the plane in which he was travelling crashed inexplicably on the airfield at Gibraltar. Conspiracy theorists, who included Stalin, pointed the finger at Churchill for Sikorski's death. Sikorski had given credibility to the government in exile, both in Poland and in the councils of her powerful allies. And he had held together, by sheer force of personality, a political coalition that began to fray after his death. The core problem was the question of the Soviet Union and Stalin's intentions. The fear was that he aimed to turn Poland into a Soviet state. By 1943, there are strong indications that this is in fact what Stalin's intentions were. He was beginning to groom an alternative set of Polish political leadership, communist leadership, that on the Red Army entering Poland would establish a government in the provincial town of Lublin. Similarly, a communist army was also being developed. These were Poles who had been often deported into the Soviet Union, who formed the rank and file of Stalin's Polish army. The Polish plan, codenamed Operation Tempest, was for Home Army units to launch local insurrections in support of the advancing Red Army. The hope was these units would establish equality with the Russians and retain control of liberated areas in the East. Meanwhile, the bulk of the Home Army would be holding itself in readiness for the uprising against the Germans. In fact, it didn't work. The Soviet Union, the frontline forces would take advantage of the assistance, but then very quickly afterwards, these Home Army units would be arrested. Sometimes the leaders of these units would be shot, and the rank and file would be incorporated into Stalin's Polish army that by 1943 had been developing on the Eastern Front. So for the Polish underground, Tempest operations were a bitter experience. The failure of Operation Tempest was to reach its tragic culmination in the Warsaw Uprising in the late summer of 1944. Of all the tasks undertaken by the Home Army, one was paramount, to rise up against the German invader and wrest back control of the country. The decisive lunge for independence had to be made in a very narrow window when Nazi Germany verged on collapse and before the Red Army arrived in Warsaw. At the end of the third week of July 1944, with the Russians on the banks of the Vistula, the German military command packed its bags and ran. It appeared to be the decisive moment. But then, on July 26th, the German high command ordered the Wehrmacht to stand firm and build fortifications. Reinforcements in the form of the SS Viking Panzer Division and the Hermann Göring SS Panzer and Paratroop Division rolled into Warsaw. With Russian infantry 100km south of Warsaw and Russian tanks only 16km away near Wołomin, the Home Army could wait no longer. London agreed. The start of the uprising was set for 5pm on August 1st. At this point, the Home Army comprised 38,000 troops. The mood on the street was completely unique. Something was rising in the air. And for the second time in my life, when I sensed the same atmosphere in the air, it happened when for the first time the Polish pope came to Poland during the period of the deep rule of the Polish People's Republic. It was the same mood of anticipation, the awareness that something great was going to happen. Less than 10% of Poles involved in the uprising were armed and there was ammunition for only 7 days' fighting. Earlier in the war, Jan Gąbiowski had been thrown into the Pawiak prison for trying to buy 4 Schmeisser machine pistols. He was released in time to fight during the uprising. However, my company, Kośta, a company of the Warsaw Area Command Headquarters, was well-armed for the conditions of the uprising. My platoon had two RKMs, six machine pistols, 15 rifles. During the first days of the uprising, we didn't have pistols, only grenades. The Poles fought ferociously and at first the Home Army carried all before it, forcing the Germans back street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, district by district. On building after building, the hated swastika was torn down to be replaced by the Polish flag. Tadeusz Dywirian's platoon occupied the Evangelical Cemetery at Wola. There used to be a serious artillery bombardment there. Those who could, hid in the graves. When they managed to open the graves, they would go down the stairs and stay safe between the coffins, because the bullets couldn't reach them. As for the tanks, they not only drove far, but also passed by the cemetery wall. And then, and then, I wanted to use the term, like fun, they threw bottles of petrol into the tanks, which were supposed to set fire to the tanks and thus lead to their destruction. The battle dragged on for 63 days. It would not have lasted that long had the insurgents not scored remarkable successes in capturing German equipment, vehicles and weapons. And all the while around them, Varsovians were witnessing the destruction of their beautiful city. Himmler gave the order, all inhabitants of Warsaw to be shot, no prisoners to be taken, the city is to be razed to the ground. Systematically, Warsaw was reduced to rubble. Long before the end, food and water ran out. We were divided into two groups. The children were the most vulnerable. I didn't even have time to think about it, because I had to be at their disposal, to look after the wounded, to deliver reports. We did a lot of things at night. We didn't even have time to rest. We spent most of our time in the basements, because the Germans were constantly shelling us. We didn't have any electricity during the entire occupation. We didn't have a power plant. We had to boil water on two bricks. We still had water then. Civilians were flushed from their homes and shot. The bodies were doused in petrol and burned. Streets of houses were set ablaze. The sewers became a hidden network for insurgents to move about the city. The Germans responded by blocking manholes, tossing in grenades, and occasionally fighting the survivors in hand-to-hand combat amidst the filth. Between 200,000 and 250,000 civilians perished in the course of the uprising. The brutality that the Germans displayed, particularly between 5th and 7th August, massacring so many civilians, essentially drove them into areas held by the Home Army, because they felt this was the only place they could have any safety. It's best epitomized, if one goes to Warsaw and the Old Town, there's a monument to the children of the Warsaw Uprising, and it's in fact one of the most moving monuments to the uprising, and I think it captures the pathos of what happened to the civilian population during those terrible two months. To this day, it's still a cause of great bitterness that the Soviet Union stood by while Warsaw went up in flames. Some units of the Red Army reached the suburbs while battle raged, but Stalin had ordered them to halt. He had made a cynical calculation that once the two sides had killed each other off, the Red Army could move in. In the end, the Poles simply ran out of the arms and equipment they needed to continue the fight. The Home Army capitulated and was allowed to march out in formation into the hands of the waiting Germans. Large-scale Polish resistance effectively ended. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, the Germans went about the systematic destruction of virtually everything left standing, while the Russians, who were preparing for their next offensive, watched impassively. Civilians were driven out of the city. Well over 100,000 were sent as slave labor to the factories of the Reich. Tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps. In the areas occupied by the Soviet Army, the center of political power shifted to the small city of Lublin, 160 kilometers southeast of Warsaw, where the ruling political committee consisted of communists who took their orders from Moscow. They ruthlessly set about dismantling any remnants of the old Polish Republic and suppressing opposition to the regime. The Home Army was depicted as being full of fascist reactionaries who were acting against civil law. After the capitulation of Warsaw, 200,000 members of the Home Army remained under arms in Poland, commanded by General Leopold Okulecki, codenamed Bear Cub. They continued to harass the German forces wherever they could. Largely abandoned by their allies in the West, denounced as bandits and fascists by Moscow and its stooges within Poland, they became increasingly isolated and vulnerable to the Red Army as it began its advance westwards to Berlin. On the 19th of January 1945, the formal order was given to dissolve the Home Army. The fate of the Poles was already sealed. The Western Allies had already tacitly accepted Moscow's insistence on a post-war carve-up of the country, along the Nazi-Soviet peace boundary of 1939, known as the Curzon Line. Territories east of the Bug River were to be ceded to the Soviet Union. And the west of the country was effectively under the control of Zhukov's forces that finally crossed the border into Germany at the end of January 1945. On the right and on the left you could see the deportation of everyone from the country that could be deported. And the Soviet army acted as if it were under occupation. It was clear to us that a new occupation was coming. Not only for us, but for the entire population that I met. Everyone was convinced that, unfortunately, freedom had not yet come to us. The parties of the left that had formed part of the government in exile realigned their allegiance as the authority of the London Poles disintegrated. In the month that followed, native Polish communists and Moscow manoeuvred for power. But in the eyes of many Poles, the argument was academic. The flower of the nation's youth had been destroyed, and any who might have carried the banner of liberal democracy had been ruthlessly eliminated. For all their courage and sacrifice, they had simply exchanged one occupying power for another. All the paraphernalia of a Stalinist dictatorship – secret police, informers, show trials, torture, intimidation and the Gulag – were in place. Debate and dissent were crushed. Elections were rigged. History was rewritten to criminalise the Home Army. It was not quite the end of the story. Small units of patriots continued to resist the new regime for a further two years before they were suppressed. But the spirit of the Poles had never been extinguished. It survived to emerge again in the Gdansk shipyards in 1980, heralding a return to democracy a few years later.