The Attitude of Soviet Security Organs to the Home Army (July 1944 – January 1945)

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of relations between the Soviet State Security Organs and the Home Army, an underground Polish military organization, in the final period of the Second World War. The author concludes that the main tools for establishing the Communist dictatorship and suppressing Polish society were the NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH. Repression was aimed at broad groups of Polish society (landlords, teachers, doctors, clergy, etc.) and at certain individuals who were considered by the Soviet leadership as dangerous, hostile, and threatening the new Communist authorities. According to some estimates, from January 1944 to the end of the 1940s, 80–100 thousand Poles were arrested in the territory of the Second Polish Republic, of whom several thousand were convicted (not counting Polish citizens of other nationalities). They were held in screening and filtration camps, camps for prisoners of war and internees, correctional labour camps and labour battalions of the NKVD-MVD. The arrests, internment, mass deportations and trials of this period contradicted the norms of international law and marked the beginning of the new, Soviet, period of occupation.

Keywords

• world war ii
• poland
• the home army
• soviet repression
• nkvd
• nkgb