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Post by Bonobo on Jun 6, 2010 23:44:39 GMT 1
Protest over US Stalin memorial
04.06.2010 11:31
Polish MEP Krzysztof Lisek has described as ‘highly controversial’ the placing of Josef Stalin’s bust at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia.
“The dictator responsible for the death of millions of people”, as the Polish politician says, is honoured in the memorial alongside the remaining leaders of the anti-Nazi coalition.
The memorial has been erected in time for Sunday's 66th anniversary of the World War II invasion of Normandy. The dictator is seen sitting with presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Krzysztof Lisek, who is a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the European Parliament, has said that he will address a letter of protest to William McIntosh, the director of the Bradford museum. “I will ask members of the European Parliament and of the national Parliament in Poland to join me in the protest,” he added.
McIntosh told the local press that “the intent of installing the bust is not to honour Stalin as a hero but acknowledge his role in distracting German forces, which played a part in the timing and unfolding of D-Day”.
Comments:
Hurricane KatyNa
04/06/2010 13:32:58
As much as you want, dear Poles, you can't change history - Stalin, as USSR's commander in chief, presided the great victory over Nazism.
Yes, he was a bloodthirsty SOB, but you can't take away his few achievements. Fair is fair.
Hurricane KatyNa
04/06/2010 13:36:01
"...acknowledge his role in distracting German forces, which played a part in the timing and unfolding of D-Day..."
D-Day was a storm in a teacup, compared to much-much bigger battles of Moscow, Kursk, Stalingrad etc.
9 out of 10 Nazi soldiers were killed by Stalins' troops.
Fair is fair!
H K
04/06/2010 14:00:56
On the other hand, I'd prefer if they put a bust of Marshal Zhukov, the greatest commander of WW2. It was people like Zhukov, not Stalin, who made Victory possible.
Zhukov also did nothing wrong towards the Poles or anyone else.
D-Day was a storm in a teacup, compared to much-much bigger battles of Moscow, Kursk, Stalingrad etc.
9 out of 10 Nazi soldiers were killed by Stalins' troops.
Fair is fair!
Blazejczyk, USA
04/06/2010 15:04:46
This is rediculous! The day World War II ended we learned Stalin was not truly our ally, and we spent the next 45 years paying for that mistake. As did Poland. My thanks to the Russian soldiers who fought the Nazis, but Stalin deserves no such honor in my country.
R
04/06/2010 15:40:17
Stalin was a German ally until the USSR was attacked by Germany.
Nick
04/06/2010 16:50:55
Stalin is a SOB, who killed millions, mainly soviet citizens, mainly ethnic russians. Build a monument to a soviet soldier if you wish, but not Stalin.
Arthur
04/06/2010 20:31:37
If a Russian history book ever actually were to tell the truth, Stalin doesn’t need a statue but rather a letter of reprimand for being incompetent during WW2.
For nearly ten days after the day Germany invaded the USSR, Stalin was completely incapacitated by a mental break down. Molotov and one of the Soviet Generals found him lying in a pool of vomit, faeces and urine totally intoxicated with a pistol beside him indicating a failed suicide attempt.
The mathematics of 9 in ten German soldiers being killed by the Soviets on the eastern front is without historical justification, even considering the 600,000 German Pows who were killed in captivity such a ratio cannot be met.
The failure of the Soviet Unions i
Arthur
04/06/2010 20:32:35
industrial base had to be remedied by western assistance in the measure of 15 to 20% of total Soviet war supplies were being sent from western countries principally the US and Great Britain.
Josef Stalin was a failure by any measure, so to my Russian friends I need remind you of the futility of sprinkling perfume on shit…it’s still shit no matter what you do.
Hotsy Trotsky
04/06/2010 20:38:14
Let's think for a second how Joe presided over that victory. He started out by allying with the Nazis -- dividing up and raping Poland and killing off as much of the Polish intelligensia as he could. That helped a lot in fighting the Nazis. Then he killed off a lot of his own peasants which led to hunger and more deaths of his own soldiers. Then he started killing off many of his best generals. Then he ordered his troops to stay put outside Warsaw while the patriotic Warsaw insurgents were slaughtered by the Nazis so his Polish Quislings could step in and take power. Great guy. Let's erect a statue -- but then blow it up with 4th of July fireworks.
Mikhail G.
05/06/2010 00:24:55
Putin's grandfather was Stalin's cook. Since Stalin never died of anything he ate, presumably he was a loyalist cook. In any case, Putin honors Stalin. Obama, throwing Poland from the train, allows a Stalin bust to go up in a US museum rather than mere historical photos. Stalin invited the Nazis into the USSR by making deals with a maniac named Adolf then pretending to liberate the USSR from him. If not for Normandy, Moscow would have a Swastika overhead.
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Post by valpomike on Jun 7, 2010 16:29:55 GMT 1
Joseph Stalin is a roll model for our president now. He wants the USA to become another Russia of the past. We can't let this happen. We don't need or want any statue of Stalin anywhere here in the USA. Remember that the Russians killed, along with the Germany's, many great Polish people, and we can never forget or forgive.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 24, 2011 18:15:10 GMT 1
Since 1945 to 1989, Poland was controled by a communist government who received direct orders from the Kremlin. The worst time was from 1948-1956. Communist special services imprisoned thousands of patriotic Poles. A few thousand were murdered in prisons or executed after phony trials. Julia Brystiger, born November 25, 1902, in Stryj – died November 9, 1975, in Warsaw) was a Jewish Communist activist and member of the security apparatus in Stalinist Poland. She was also known as Julia Brystygier, Bristiger, Brustiger, Briestiger, Brystygierowa, Bristigierowa, and by her nicknames – given by the victims of torture: Luna, Bloody Luna, Daria, Ksenia, and Maria. The nickname Bloody Luna was a direct reference of her Gestapo-like methods during interrogations. Her pen name was Julia Preiss.[1]
Brystiger was the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist from Stryj (now Ukraine). In 1920 she graduated from high school in Lwów (new Second Polish Republic) and married a Zionist activist Natan (Nathan) Brystiger. She studied history at the Lwów University while pregnant and a year later gave birth to a son, Michał Bristiger.[2]
After graduating from University, Brystiger went to Paris where she continued her education, receiving a PhD in philosophy. Upon their return, in 1928–1929, she got a job at a high school in Wilno and in a Jewish Teacher's College Tarbuch. Since 1927, she was an active participant in the communist movement, and in 1929 was fired because of her communist agitation. Working for the Communist Party of Poland, she was arrested several times, and in 1937 was sentenced to 2 years in prison.[1]
[edit] Stalinist agent
After the Nazi and Soviet attack on Poland, Brystiger escaped to Samarkand, accepted Soviet citizenship and became an active member of the Soviet political administration. She created the so-called Committee of Political Prisoners, which helped the NKVD to imprison several members of the prewar Polish opposition movements.[3] She was "denouncing people on such scale, that she antagonized even Communist party members".[2] Ironically, at one point Brystiger oversaw the interrogation and persecution of Bela and Józef Goldberg – her future colleague, the UB interrogator known as Józef Różański. Różańskis had committed "a crime" of accepting Western food-aid in the form of two kilograms of rice and a bag of flour from the Polish Government in Exile's embassy, in order to save their daughter from starvation. A few years later, Józef Różański joined the NKVD and eventually, became a high ranking functionary in the Polish secret police. He ended up working alongside Brystiger – his former torturer – in the Ministry of Public Security of Poland.[4]
Following German Operation Barbarossa she fled to Kharkov, then to Samarkand deep in the USSR. In 1943-44, she worked for the Union of Polish Patriots, and in October 1944, joined the new Polish Workers' Party. In December 1944, returning behind the Soviet front, Brystygier began working for the infamous Ministry of Public Security of Poland, where she gradually got promoted to the rank of Director of the Fifth Department.[5] Her career is believed to have been so quick also because she was intimate with such high functionaries as Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc.[3] In the Polish official archives, there's an instruction written by Brystygier to her subordinates, about the purpose of torture:
In fact, the Polish intelligentsia as such is against the Communist system and basically, it is impossible to re-educate it. All that remains is to liquidate it. However, since we must not repeat the mistake of the Russians after the 1917 revolution, when all intelligentsia members were exterminated, and the country did not develop correctly afterwards, we have to create such a system of terror and pressure that the members of the intelligentsia would not dare to be politically active.[6]
Brystiger personally oversaw the first stages of each UB investigation at her place of employment. She would torture the captured persons using her own methods such as whipping male victims' genitals. One of her victims was a man named Szafarzynski – from the Olsztyn office of the Polish People's Party – who died as a result of interrogation carried out by Brystygier. One of the victims of her interrogation methods testified later: "She is a murderous monster, worse than German female guards of the concentration camps". Anna Roszkiewicz–Litwiniwiczowa, a former soldier of the Home Army, said of Brystygier: "She was famous for her sadistic tortures; she seemed to have been obsessed with sadistic treatment of genitalia and was fulfilling her libido in that way."[7].
Brystiger became the head of the 5th Department sometime in the late 1940s. It specialized in the persecution of Polish religious leaders. Brystygier – a dogmatic Marxist – yearned to destroy all religion as an "opiate of the masses".[1] She directed the operation to arrest and detain the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. The decision to arrest him had been made earlier in Moscow. Brystygier took an active part in the "war against religion" in the 1950s, in which (only in the 1950s) 123 Roman Catholic priests were imprisoned. She also persecuted other congregations, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses. Julia Brystygier left the Ministry of Public Security in 1956 and tried to become a writer, authoring a novel "Crooked Letters". She worked in a publishing house under Jewish communist Jerzy Borejsza (Różański's brother), and was a frequent visitor in a boarding school for vision impaired, in a village near Warsaw. In 1975, at the age of 73, she asked for baptism and converted to Catholicism. She died the same year.
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Anatol Fejgin (Warsaw, September 25, 1909 – July 28, 2002 also in Warsaw) was a Polish-Jewish communist before World War II, and after 1949, commander of the Stalinist political police at the Ministry of Public Security of Poland,[1] in charge of its notorious Special Bureau (the 10th Department).[2] During the Polish October revolution of 1956, his name – along with a number of others including his colleague Col. Józef Różański (Josek Goldberg), and Minister Jakub Berman – came to symbolize communist terror in postwar Poland.[3]
Fejgin was born into a middle-class Jewish family,[4] and in 1927 began medical studies in Warsaw, which he never finished. In 1928, he joined the Communist Party of Poland and in 1929 was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for communist agitation. Released, Fejgin was arrested again in 1932 and incarcerated for four years. After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Fejgin escaped to Lwow in the Soviet military zone, got in touch with the NKVD and began working for the Soviet authorities. In May 1943 he joined the Soviet sponsored Polish 1st Tadeusz Kosciuszko Infantry Division, where he became a propaganda officer, a rank commonly feared. In January 1945, Fejgin took post of the director of personal department of the political bureau of the pro-Soviet Ludowe Wojsko Polskie.
[edit] The interrogator
In October 1949, Fejgin was moved to the Ministry of Public Security of Poland (MBP), where he was appointed director of the Special Bureau (renamed in 1951 as the 10th Department), which was formed for protecting the Party from provocateurs (in reality, the murderous persecution of political opponents and army officers from Polish Underground State).[4] Suspended after the 1953 defection of deputy director Józef Światło (Izak Fleischfarb) who incriminated him and other Stalinists, Fejgin was fired from MBP during the Polish political thaw and arrested on April 23, 1956 along with his own boss, vice-minister Roman Romkowski.[2] He was brought to trial at the end of the Stalinist period, and on November 11, 1957, sentenced to 12 years in prison for violations of human rights law and abuse of power. Charged along with co-defendants, Romkowski and Józef Różański, Fejgin was found guilty of torturing 28 named victims during interrogations, including innocent women and PZPR members. His sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1958. Fejgin was kept in Racibórz. He was released from prison after the 1964 amnesty, serving seven years.[2]
In 1985 Fejgin became a member of the state-controlled veterans association, the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, and acquired privileges of a war veteran. In 1990, however, following the collapse of the Soviet empire, he was verified and stripped of the privileges due to his Stalinist past. Fejgin appealed this decision to the Supreme Administrative Court of the Republic of Poland, but his claim was rejected. The court emphasized that Fejgin’s post-World-War-Two activities were harmful to Polish nation and the Polish legal system, and as such ought to be condemned.
At the time of his death in 2002, Fejgin was still the subject of investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance for the crimes he committed as an interrogator. |
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Post by Bonobo on Jul 21, 2011 22:09:09 GMT 1
the torturer Jacek Rozanski, head of the Secret Police; the Politboro commander Jacob Berman (pictured at right)
Józef Ró¿añski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈjuzɛf ruˈʐaɲskʲi]; b. Josek Goldberg;[1] Warsaw, 13 July 1907 – 21 August 1981, Warsaw) was a communist in prewar Second Polish Republic, member of the Soviet NKVD and later, colonel of the Stalinist Ministry of Public Security of Poland. Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw,[1] Ró¿añski became active in the Communist Party of Poland before World War II. He joined NKVD following the Soviet invasion of Poland and after the war, adopting the name Ró¿añski, served as interrogator with the Polish communist security apparatus (Urz±d Bezpieczeñstwa).
Ró¿añski was personally involved in torturing and maiming dozens of opponents of the Polish puppet government; including anti-communist activists, as well as other, more liberal communists,[1][2] and Cursed soldiers. He gained notoriety as one of the most brutal secret police interrogators in Warsaw.[1] Ró¿añski personally administered torture to Witold Pilecki, one of the Righteous Among Nations. Pilecki revealed no sensitive information and was executed on May 25, 1948 at Mokotów Prison by Sergeant Smietanski, the "Butcher".[1][3][4]
Józef Ró¿añski was arrested in 1953 – at the end of the Stalinist period in Poland – and charged with torturing innocent prisoners including PZPR members. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison on 23 December 1955.[2] In July 1956 the Supreme Court reopened his case due to improprieties discovered in the original investigation. On 11 November 1957 (charged along with co-defendant Anatol Fejgin) he was again sentenced by the lower court this time to 15 years in prison.[2] He was released in 1964, having served seven years. Ró¿añski died of cancer on 21 August 1981, and was buried at the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
General Roman Romkowski born Natan Grünspau [Grinszpan]-Kikiel,[1] (Moscow, May 22, 1907 – July 1, 1965, Warsaw) was a Jewish communist in Stalinist Poland, second in command (the deputy minister)[1] in Berman's Ministry of Public Security (MBP) during the late 1940s and early 1950's.[1] Along with several other high functionaries including Dir. Anatol Fejgin, Col. Józef Ró¿añski, Dir. Julia Brystiger and the chief supervisor of Polish State Security Services, Minister Jakub Berman from the Politburo, Romkowski came to symbolize communist terror in postwar Poland.[2] He was responsible for the work of departments: Counter-espionage (1st), Espionage (7th), Security in the PPR–PZPR (10th Dept. run by Fejgin), and others.[3][4]
Romkowski was arrested on April 23, 1956, during the socialist Polish October revolution,[4] and brought to trial along with functionaries responsible for gross violations of human rights law and their abuse of power.[5] Historian Heather Laskey alleges that it was probably not a coincidence that the high ranking Stalinist security officers put on trial by Gomu³ka were Jews.[5] W³adys³aw Gomu³ka was captured by ¦wiat³o and imprisoned by Romkowski in 1951 on Soviet orders, and interrogated by both, him and Fejgin. Gomu³ka escaped physical torture only as a close associate of Joseph Stalin,[6] and was released three years later.[7]
[edit] The court proceedings
At trial, Col. Ró¿añski didn't deny that he routinely tortured prisoners including PZPR members, and he didn't apologize for his actions. Instead, he pointed a finger at Romkowski and continuously repeated the Leninist argument of justification of any means to an end. For him, torturing people was a daily double-shift job, nothing more, nothing less. He admitted that all charges against his victims were falsified on site by his department.[5]
Roman Romkowski had been put on trial along with Józef Ró¿añski and a second Jewish defendant from his department, Anatol Fejgin. Romkowski insisted that Ró¿añski should have been removed already in 1949 for his destructive activities, even though, Romkowski himself taught Ró¿añski everything about torture.[5] Both, Romkowski and Ró¿añski, were sentenced to 15 years in prison on 11 November 1957,[4][8] for unlawful imprisonment and mistreatment of innocent detainees. Feign was sentenced to 12 years, on similar charges.[4][5][8]
A well-known writer Kazimierz Moczarski from AK, interrogated by Romkowski's subordinates from January 9, 1949 till June 6, 1951, described 49 different types of torture he endured. Beatings included truncheon blows to bridge of nose, salivary glands, chin, shoulder blades, bare feet and toes (particularly painful), heels (ten blows each foot, several times a day), cigarette burns on lips and eyelids and burning of fingers. Sleep deprivation, resulting in near-madness – meant standing upright in a narrow cell for seven to nine days with frequent blows to the face – a halucinatory method called by the interrogators "Zakopane". General Romkowski told him on November 30, 1948, that he personally requested this "sheer hell".[9]
The court announced that the actions of Roman Romkowski and his Ministry demoralised the Party as much as its own functionaries. Jakub Berman, the chief supervisor of State Security Services incriminated by Józef ¦wiat³o who defected to the West, resigned from his Politburo post in May and was evaluated by the 20th Congress, which launched a process of partial democratisation of Polish political as well as economic life. The number of security agents at the ministry was cut by 22%, and 9,000 socialist and populist politicians were released from prison on top of some 34,644 detainees across the country.[10] "The routing of the Polish Stalinists was indeed complete."
Salomon Morel (November 15, 1919 – February 14, 2007) was a Polish Communist official and an accused war criminal. After the end of World War II, he became the commander of the infamous Zgoda labour camp.[1] During the rule of the Polish United Workers' Party, Morel rose to the rank of colonel in the political police, or MBP and commanded a prison in Katowice.
In 1994, soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Morel was indicted by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the "revenge killings" of 1,500 ethnic German prisoners.[2] After his case was publicized by the Polish, German, British, and American media, Morel fled to Israel and was granted citizenship under the Law of Return. Poland twice requested his extradition, but Israel refused to comply, citing a lack of evidence.
Youth
Salomon Morel was born on November 15, 1919 in the village of Garbów near Lublin, Poland, the son of a Jewish baker.[3] During the Great Depression, the family business began to falter. Therefore, Morel moved to £ód¼ where he worked as a sales clerk, but returned to Garbów following the outbreak of war in September 1939.[3]
World War II
During World War II and the ensuing Holocaust, Morel and his family were hidden by Józef Tkaczyk, a Polish Catholic. In 1983, Tkaczyk was designated as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for saving the Morel family.
There are somewhat divergent accounts of Morel's wartime activities. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, at the beginning of 1942 Salomon Morel and his brother Izaak organised a criminal band to commit robberies in the surrounding villages.[3] Their criminal activity ended when during one of their robberies they were captured by members of the Polish People's Army.[3] To avoid punishment Morel placed the blame on his brother, and then joined the Soviet partisans in the Parczew area (see also Parczew partisans), where he worked as a janitor and a guide through the forests.[3] His two brothers died during the war, one in 1943, another in 1945.[3]
The Israeli mass media and government presented a different version of his life.[4] The Israeli letter rejecting extradition states that Morel joined the partisans of the Red Army in 1942, and was in the forests when his parents, sister-in-law, and one brother were allegedly killed by Polish Blue Police.[4][5] According to a number of media sources,[6] Morel claimed that he was at one point an inmate in Auschwitz and over thirty of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust.[4]
As the Eastern Front advanced, Morel and other communist partisans came out of hiding. In the summer of 1944, Morel organized the Citizen Militia in Lublin.[3] Later, he became a prison commander at the Lublin Castle, where many soldiers of the anti-communist Armia Krajowa (Home Army) were imprisoned and tortured.[3]
Zgoda labour camp
On March 15, 1945, Morel became the commander of the infamous Zgoda camp in ¦wiêtoch³owice.[3] The Zgoda camp was set up by the Soviet political police, or NKVD, after the Soviet Army entered southern Poland. In February 1945 the camp was handed over to the Communist Polish secret service, the notorious Urz±d Bezpieczeñstwa. Most of prisoners in the camp were Silesians and German citizens, while a small part were also people from "central Poland", and about 38 foreigners.
Sometimes children were sent to the camp along with parents. Prisoners were not accused of any crime, but were sent by decision of Security Authorities. Authorities tried to convince society that prisoners were only ethnic Germans and former Nazi war criminals and collaborators.[7] It is estimated that close to 2,000 inmates died in the camp where torture and abuse of prisoners were chronic and rampant.[5] The camp was closed in November 1945.[5]
Post-1945 career
Morel would continue his career in the prison services, reaching the rank of a colonel as the head of prison in Katowice in 1968.[3] In 1964 he defended his Master's Degree on "The prisoners' labor and its value" at Wroc³aw University's Law School.[3] Over the course of his career, the communist government awarded him the Cavalry Cross of the Polonia Restituta and the Golden Cross of Merit.[3] In 1990, after the fall of communism, the General Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation, precursor to the Institute of National Remembrance, started investigating the abuses carried out at the Zgoda camp.[3] In 1992, Morel immigrated to Israel.[3]
Extradition controversy
In 1998, Poland requested that Morel be extradited for trial, but Israel refused.[4] A reply sent to the Polish Justice Ministry from the Israeli government said that Israel would not extradite Mr. Morel as the statute of limitations had expired on war crimes.[4]
In April 2004, Poland filed another extradition request against Morel, this time with fresh evidence, upgrading the case to "communist crimes against the population."[4] The main charge against Salomon Morel was that, as commandant of the Zgoda camp at ¦wiêtoch³owice, he created for the prisoners in this camp, out of ethnic and political considerations, conditions that jeopardised their lives, including starvation and torture.[4] The charges against Morel were based primarily on the evidence of over 100 witnesses, including 58 former inmates of the Zgoda camp.[4] In July 2005 this request was again formally refused by the Israeli government. The response rejected the more serious charges as being false, potentially part of an antisemitic conspiracy, and again rejected extradition on the grounds that the statute of limitations against Morel had run out, and that Morel was in poor health.[4] Ewa Koj, a prosecutor with the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, criticized the decision, but the Polish Foreign Ministry decided not to press the matter further.[6] Morel died in Tel Aviv on February 14, 2007.[4] |
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Post by Bonobo on Aug 8, 2012 21:34:56 GMT 1
DNA samples needed to identify Stalinist victims
06.08.2012 13:49
Relatives of Stalinist victims have been invited to submit DNA samples as attempts are made to identify the remains of some of Poland's most prominent resistance fighters.
Prelimary
www.thenews.pl/74026e91-ab70-42cd-a091-9552e153d9f5.file
Prelimary radar work carried out at Warsaw's Powazki Military Cemetery: photo - IPN
Historian Dr. Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, who is leading the state-backed project, has appealed to relatives to come directly to the site of the excavation itself at the Powazki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.
About 184 people are thought to have been buried in unmarked graves in a portion of the cemetery, between 1948 and 1956.
Historians believe that among those interred at the site are such legendary figures as General Emil Fieldorf (codename Nil), former head of a crack division of Poland's wartime underground Home Army (AK), and Witold Pilecki, who volunteered to be incarcerated at the Auschwitz death camp so as to garner an intelligence report.
Also thought to be buried at Powazki is Hieronim Dekutowski, one of the commanders of WiN , the guerrilla force that refused to lay down arms after the official close of the Second World War.
All three men were executed following show trials under the auspices of the communist authorities.
The excavation is being carried out with the cooperation of two state-backed bodies, the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), and the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (ROPWiM).
Dr Szwagrzyk of IPN has called on relatives who do not live in Warsaw to get in touch with the institute, so that alternative arrangements might be made.
IPN stresses that a DNA sample – which can be obtained painlessly – can provide almost 100 percent certainty in identification.
The work is being carried out as part of a nationwide programme entitled “The search for unknown burial places of victims of communist terror in the years 1944-1956
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Post by Bonobo on Feb 23, 2013 22:16:02 GMT 1
Four communist-era murder victims identified
20.02.2013 16:53
The remains of four more victims of post-WWII communist repression have been identified following excavations at a Warsaw military cemetery last summer.
The names were revealed at a press conference held on Monday at the educational centre of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the state-backed body charged with investigating crimes against Polish citizens.
All four men were resistance fighters who refused to lay down their arms following the close of the Second World War, continuing their struggle against Poland's Moscow-backed communist regime.
Among the newly identified victims is Stanislaw Kasznica, the last commander of the National Armed Forces (NSZ) resistance movement. He was executed in May 1948 following a trial at a Warsaw district court.
Also identified were Boleslaw Budelewski, who fought in the post-war Freedom and Independence movement (WiN), Stanislaw Abramowski (WiN and NSZ), and Tadeusz Pelak (WiN).
Some 117 skeletons were excavated from unmarked graves in Warsaw's Powazki military cemetery in the summer of 2012.
The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) cooperated in the project with another state-backed institution, the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (ROPWiM).
DNA samples were collected from relatives of prominent victims in a bid to identify the remains.
So far, seven victims have been positively identified.
IPN plans to launch a second dig at Powazki this April.
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Post by Bonobo on Jun 1, 2013 19:44:57 GMT 1
More graves have been identified recently. Capitalism isn`t paradise, democracy has serious shortcomings, but stalinist Communism seems like devil`s invention in comparison.
Communist terror victims unearthed
21.05.2013 13:45
The remains of twenty victims of communist repression have been unearthed at unmarked graves in Warsaw's Powazki military cemetery.
The excavations over the last week continue work carried out in the summer of 2012, and are aimed at locating the remains of former WWII Polish resistance leaders and anti-communist activists who were executed between 1948 and 1956.
Historians and archaeologists are cooperating as part of a team put together by the state-backed Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
Professor Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, who is leading the project, told Polish Radio that on Monday alone, six skeletons were located in a mass grave.
The victims had been thrown haphazardly together.
Most of those found over the last week were discovered beneath a tarmacked path in the cemetery.
Last year, some 117 victims were unearthed.
Thanks to tests carried out using the DNA of the victims' relatives, it has been possible to identify some of the executed prisoners.
Historians are holding out hope that the current phase will locate a number of Poland's most hallowed wartime and post-war resistance figures.
These include Witold Pilecki, who volunteered to be incarcerated at the Auschwitz death camp so as to garner an intelligence report, as well as General Emil Fieldorf, former head of a crack division of Poland's underground Home Army (AK) |
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Post by Bonobo on Jul 18, 2018 17:22:26 GMT 1
Piotr Śmietański
Staff Sergeant Piotr Śmietański (born 27 June 1899 in Zawady village son of Anna and Władysław– died probably on 23 February 1950),[2][3] was a non-commissioned officer of the communist secret police Urząd Bezpieczeństwa and one of the main executioners in Stalinist Poland.[4]
Śmietański was stationed at the Mokotów Prison in the Warsaw borough of Mokotów (Polish: Więzienie mokotowskie) known also as Rakowiecka Prison located at 37 Rakowiecka Street. From World War II until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Mokotów Prison – where Śmietański conducted his deeds – was a place of detention, torture and execution of the Polish anti-communist opposition.[4]
Biography
Śmietański joined the Communist Party of Poland in 1923, using the pseudoname Mojżesz (Moses).[5]
Śmietański – nicknamed by the inmates as the "Butcher of the Mokotow Prison" – executed personally and supervised the executions of hundreds of opponents of the Stalinist regime in PRL. Among them were prominent politicians, social activists and Polish underground fighters, including Lieutenants Jerzy Miatkowski, Tadeusz Pelak, Edmund Tudruj, Arkadiusz Wasilewski, Roman Gronski, Capt. Stanislaw Lukasik, Comdt. Hieronim Dekutowski (killed by Śmietański in one day, on March 7, 1949),[6] Adam Doboszyński (August 29), Major Zygmunt Szendzielarz, Lieutenants Henryk Borowski, Antoni Olechnowicz, Lucjan Minkiewicz (February 8, 1951), Capt. Stanisław Sojczyński, Lt. Antoni Wodyński from AK, and countless others,[7] including victims of the notorious March 1, 1951 Mokotów Prison execution, who were given five consecutive death sentences each.[8] Brig. General Emil August Fieldorf was hanged rather than shot as a humiliation.[6][9][10]
Certificate of Pilecki's execution signed by Śmietański (bottom, illegible), May 25, 1948 at the Mokotów Prison
The head of the Mokotów Prison, Alojzy Grabicki, was sometimes present at the executions.[10] The victims' dead bodies – often undressed and placed in empty cement bags – were wheeled out at night and buried in unmarked graves, leveled out afterwards in the vicinity of different Warsaw cemeteries: in Służew (till mid 1948), the Mokotów and the Powązki cemeteries, or in open fields, in around Pola Mokotowskie, Kabacki forest and Okęcie.[9]
On May 25, 1948,[4][11] Śmietański personally executed Witold Pilecki,[12] the founder of the Secret Polish Army and prominent member of the Armia Krajowa, famous for his daring mission to the Auschwitz concentration camp.[13][14] Śmietański is believed to have been paid 1,000 Polish złoty for each execution he carried out, a substantial amount of money under Stalinism.
According to historians Szymon Hermański and Tomasz Wróblewski some pieces in Nasz Dziennik and Najwyższy Czas! falsely claimed he had emigrated to Israel in 1968, that he was born in the 1920s, was purposefully not listed in the population registry, and was possibly still alive in Israel. However he died from tuberculosis in the Korczak sanatorium on 23 February 1950 and was buried in Bródno Cemetery 4 days later.[15]
In 2003 the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) launched an investigation in order to establish the whereabouts of Piotr Śmietański, with the intention of interviewing him about the remains of Pilecki. They found out that all personal data pertaining to Śmietański was earlier removed from official government records, including from archives of the Ministry of Defence, and the Prison Services. The investigation was halted in 2004.[16] Historian Jacek Pawłowicz from IPN in his 2008 book about Pilecki claimed that Śmietański died of tuberculosis at the age of 50 in the year of his last known Mokotów executions.[3]
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