Life and Death in Captivity by Wallace Geoffrey P. R

Author:Wallace, Geoffrey P. R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

The General Treatment of Polish Prisoners

From their first advances across the border into a besieged Poland, Soviet forces did not exhibit much kindness or sympathy in their treatment of captured enemy combatants. The high levels of prisoner abuse that resulted are largely consistent with what would be expected given the Soviet Union’s territorial motives in eastern Poland. Polish armed forces were viewed as a general threat, and abuses like torture or execution of prisoners, whether or not they had put up any initial resistance, were a common phenomenon throughout the combat phase of the conflict.33 During the few brief weeks of the war, between 1,000 and 2,500 Polish prisoners were summarily executed on the battlefield.34 In one of the more gruesome episodes, General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyn’ski, Polish commander of the Grodno military district, ordered his men to stand down in the face of advancing Red Army columns to avoid needless bloodshed. Foreshadowing the fate to befall other military elites, during his retreat Olszyna-Wilczyn’ski was stopped by Soviet forces, roughly pulled from his car, thrown against a barn door, and shot on the spot.35

As callous as those early deaths were, most prisoners were not immediate executed and instead entered into some form of Soviet custody. While the precise number of captives is difficult to determine given the chaotic conditions prevailing in the country at the time, most estimates suggest around 250,000 Polish soldiers became prisoners of war to the Soviet Union.36 Since the bulk of the Polish forces had been deployed to meet the earlier German offensive in the west, it follows that a far greater number of the close to seven hundred thousand troops found themselves under German control.37 Not all Polish combatants fell into the hands of German or Soviet invaders, however, and many were successful in escaping to various neighboring countries. Around forty thousand soldiers were able to cross over to Hungary, while another thirty thousand went to Romania. About fifteen thousand more troops escaped to Latvia and Lithuania, though their relief would be short-lived as most were captured less than a year later when the Soviet Union eventually annexed the Baltic states in June 1940. Finally, 47,000 Polish soldiers, which included 9,200 officers, took various routes in secret to reach Allied-controlled territories like France and those in the Middle East.38 Many of these officers and soldiers formed the core of Polish units who later fought under the command of the Western Allies throughout the rest of the war. Somewhat ironically, the contributions of these escapees to the Western powers would indirectly help the Soviet Union once it had partnered with the United States and Britain against a common Axis foe. However, in the autumn of 1939 the Soviet leadership was more concerned with the capability of Polish troops to undermine their country’s control over eastern Poland than they were with Germany’s invasion that would come several years later.

For the quarter million or so Polish soldiers who were unable to escape, the war was over, but their deprivations had just begun.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.