The Augustów roundup

On 10 July 1945, two months after Germany’s capitulation, Soviet units launched an operation in the Suwałki region of north-eastern Poland that historians call the Augustów roundup and local people the July roundup. Until 25 July soldiers of the Red Army, NKVD troops and officers of the military counter-intelligence service SMERSH combed the Augustów Forest and the surrounding villages in the counties of Augustów, Suwałki and Sokółka. They were helped by officers of the Polish Security Office (UB) and the Citizens’ Militia (MO), and by a sub-unit of the communist-led Polish People’s Army. The aim was to destroy the post-Home Army independence underground. More than 7,000 people were detained. Most were released after interrogation, but some 600 were taken away to an unknown destination. According to the findings of an investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), they were murdered. Their burial place has never been found.

IPN historians call it the greatest crime committed against Poles after the end of the war in Europe. The IPN’s investigative branch treats the case as a communist crime and a crime against humanity. Because of its scale and the unknown fate of the victims, it is sometimes called the “little Katyn”.

The underground in the Suwałki region in the summer of 1945

The Red Army occupied the north-eastern corners of the pre-war Białystok Voivodeship in the summer of 1944. From the experience of Wilno (Vilnius) and Lwów (Lviv), the underground knew what to expect. After Operation Ostra Brama the NKVD had disarmed Home Army units, arrested their officers, and either deported the soldiers deep into the USSR or conscripted them into the army. In the Suwałki region and the Augustów Forest, however, the underground came through the passage of the front almost intact. Dense forests, lakes and the nearby border with Lithuania favoured concealment, and most of the rural population supported the underground.

After the Home Army was dissolved on 19 January 1945, much of the organisation of its Białystok District did not lay down its arms. It carried on as the Citizens’ Home Army (AKO). People who belonged to no organisation were also hiding in the forests. Among them were men evading conscription, people threatened with arrest by the NKVD and the UB, or simply those afraid of deportation. Underground units attacked militia posts, freed prisoners and killed security officers and informers. To the new authorities and their Soviet protectors the region was a “bandit” area that needed “cleansing”.

The political background was unambiguous. In March 1945 the NKVD had treacherously arrested the leaders of the Polish Underground State. In June they were tried in Moscow in the Trial of the Sixteen. On 28 June the Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in Warsaw. On 5 July, five days before the roundup, it was recognised by the United States and Britain, which withdrew recognition from the government in London. Large Soviet forces nevertheless remained stationed in eastern Poland, and the NKVD and SMERSH operated on Polish territory without any control by the Polish authorities.

The course of the roundup

The forces used in the operation were incomparably larger than those of the underground. According to the findings of IPN historians, most of them came from the 50th Army of the 3rd Belorussian Front. Some older studies named the 1st Belorussian Front. The 62nd NKVD Internal Troops Division also took part, and SMERSH counter-intelligence operational groups dealt with the detainees. The operation was probably directed from Augustów, where the local SMERSH leadership was based. The Polish side supplied guides, informers and lists of suspects. Officers of the county public security offices in Augustów and Suwałki, together with militiamen, pointed out houses and people. According to the IPN’s findings, two companies of the 1st Praga Infantry Regiment of the Polish People’s Army, some 110–160 soldiers, also took part. Among the staff of the county security office in Augustów was the then seventeen-year-old Mirosław Milewski, who in 1980–1981 was minister of internal affairs of the Polish People’s Republic.

According to many accounts, the main arrests in the Suwałki region began on 12 July – the date the Sejm later chose as the day of remembrance for the victims. The troops surrounded one forest complex and village after another, combed the woods in extended line, and in the settlements checked papers and detained men, but also women. They seized members of the underground, their relatives, people suspected of helping the partisans and chance inhabitants. The operation covered the Augustów Forest, the areas around Augustów, Sejny and Suwałki, and in the south part of Sokółka county around Dąbrowa Białostocka and Suchowola. There were few clashes with larger underground units. The partisans mostly avoided fighting the overwhelming forces, and the burden of the roundup fell on the village population.

The detainees were held in more than fifty places: in barns, cellars, school buildings and filtration camps set up in the forests and beside villages. Witnesses described a pit filled with water in which prisoners stood in the open air, beatings and torture during interrogation, and people being held for days without food. The interrogators divided the detainees into groups: those to be released, those to be passed on, and those judged to be “bandits”. Lithuanians were also among the detainees. According to Soviet sources, 252 people deemed members of the Lithuanian underground were handed over to the NKVD and NKGB of the Lithuanian SSR.

Abakumov’s cable

For decades nothing certain was known about what had happened to the missing. The breakthrough came with Soviet documents. The most important of them is a coded telegram from the head of SMERSH, General Viktor Abakumov, to the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, dated 21 July 1945. Abakumov reported that 7,049 people had been detained during the combing of the forests. After screening, 5,115 had been released and 828 were still being checked. A further 592 people, described as members of “bands”, he proposed to liquidate. The execution was to be carried out by a special operational group supported by a SMERSH battalion. Any other “bandits” discovered among those still being screened were to share the same fate.

The document was found in the KGB archives in 1990, and in 2011 it was published by the Russian historian Nikita Petrov, vice-chairman of the Memorial society. It shows that on 20 July a special SMERSH team under General Ivan Gorgonov (PL) arrived in Olecko from Moscow. The “liquidation” was to be directed by Gorgonov and the head of SMERSH of the 3rd Belorussian Front, General Pavel Zelenin (PL). The figure of 592 corresponds almost exactly to the number of local inhabitants who disappeared during the roundup. It also matches the figure given by the Russian Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office. Its letter to the Polish embassy in Moscow of 7 January 1995 confirmed that SMERSH of the 3rd Belorussian Front had arrested 592 people “supporting” the Home Army. Their fate was said to be “unknown”.

Petrov believes that approving so large an execution without trial required a decision by Joseph Stalin himself. He also links the haste of the operation to Stalin’s train journey across Poland to the Potsdam Conference, which opened on 17 July. Some Polish historians, including Andrzej Nowak, take a similar view. This remains an interpretation, however: no order from Stalin on the matter has been found, and neither has any document confirming that the execution was carried out or indicating the burial place.

Where are the graves?

The missing were most probably taken by lorry out of the area of the roundup. Several possible execution sites have been suggested. The first is the area around Grodno, including its forts, where the NKVD had already carried out executions, and the village of Naumowicze in present-day Belarus. The historian Krzysztof Jasiewicz put forward the hypothesis that the killing took place around Lake Gołdap or in the Romincka Forest (Rominten Heath), near Hermann Göring’s former hunting lodge. That area now belongs to Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast. In Poland the search focused above all on the forest at Wielki Bór near Giby. Exhumations in 1987 and 1989 showed, however, that German soldiers were buried there. Analysis of aerial photographs and the IPN’s search work have identified potential burial sites, but the remains of the victims of the roundup have not been found. They most probably lie on the other side of the border, in Belarus or Russia, where Polish investigators have access neither to the archives nor to the ground.

The silence of communist Poland and the investigation

The families of the missing began searching for them in the very first weeks. In November 1945 a delegation of inhabitants of the Giby commune went to Bolesław Bierut, Chairman of the State National Council, to ask about the fate of their loved ones. They received no answer. In 1958–1959 Jan Kłoczko and Adam Palczak, a member of the Sejm of the Polish People’s Republic, compiled a list of the missing and intervened with the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. They were subjected to reprisals. The communist authorities never officially admitted that the roundup had taken place, and the subject was censored. As late as the 1980s the government spokesman Jerzy Urban denied that any Polish citizens had gone missing. In 1987 the Citizens’ Committee for the Search for Inhabitants of the Suwałki Region Missing in July 1945 was founded.

An investigation was opened by the prosecutor’s office in Suwałki in 1992. It was suspended, and at the turn of 2000 and 2001 it was taken up by the IPN’s Białystok Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. The prosecutors classified the act as a communist crime and, from 2009, also as a crime against humanity. Poland repeatedly sent requests for legal assistance to Russia. Russia replied in general terms or not at all. In 2003 it claimed to have no documents on the shooting of civilians in the Suwałki region. In 2006 it refused to cooperate, citing the statute of limitations. In 2011 it did not hand over the document that Petrov published. Some Soviet material was obtained by other routes. In 2012 the President of the IPN, Łukasz Kamiński, received decoded reports addressed to Beria from Memorial. In 2016 IPN historians found several thousand pages of documents on the course of the operation in the online archive collections of the Russian Ministry of Defence. The IPN holds that at least 592 people were murdered. The lists of the missing compiled by the families, the search committee and the IPN contain about 600 names. No one has been punished for the crime.

Remembrance

The oldest and best-known memorial is the cross-monument at Giby, or more precisely on the land of neighbouring Dziemianówka. According to the IPN’s Białystok branch, it was unveiled in 1992. Around a large granite cross lie stones bearing the names of the villages the missing came from, and plaques with the names of the known victims. Some studies also mention earlier memorials: a monument designed by Andrzej Strumiłło (PL) in 1987, and a cross on a symbolic grave with the names of 530 people, erected in 1991 after the exhumations. Anniversary ceremonies are held there every July. In 2010 an exhibition on the roundup prepared by the IPN’s Białystok branch was shown in the Sejm building. On 25 July 2014 the Sejm adopted a resolution honouring the memory of the victims. On 9 July 2015 it passed an act establishing 12 July as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Augustów Roundup of July 1945. A memorial site for the roundup is planned in the former UB headquarters in Augustów, the so-called Turk’s House. During renovation work in 2023, prisoners’ inscriptions from the summer of 1945 were discovered there on the walls of the former cells; their connection with the roundup is being studied.

Significance

The Augustów roundup was the largest single act of Soviet terror in post-war Poland, carried out at a time when the Western allies had just recognised the government in Warsaw and the Big Three were gathering at Potsdam. It showed that the disarming and destruction of the underground, begun in Wilno and Lwów in the summer of 1944, would continue after the war and after the formation of a “government of unity”. It was carried out by NKVD methods: without trials, sentences or traces. In August 1945 Soviet troops conducted a similar operation on the Lithuanian side of the border, in the Marijampolė district, against the Lithuanian partisans.

For the Polish underground the roundup was a heavy blow. It broke up the AKO network in the Suwałki region and deprived it of support in many villages. It also hastened the decision to disband the forest units and move to political conspiracy. In September 1945 the Freedom and Independence Association (WiN) was founded. Some partisans nevertheless stayed in the forest, and armed struggle in the Białystok region went on for several more years. For families in dozens of villages, July 1945 meant something that no investigation has brought to a close: the disappearance of loved ones whose fate they were forbidden to ask about for forty years, and whose graves have still not been found.