Dissolution of the Home Army

On 19 January 1945, two days after the Red Army and the 1st Polish Army entered the ruins of Warsaw, the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army, Brig. Gen. Leopold Okulicki, “Niedźwiadek”, issued his last order. In it he released the soldiers from their oath and disbanded the ranks of the largest underground army in occupied Europe. The order, however, was not a capitulation. The same day Okulicki instructed the district commanders not to reveal themselves, to keep small, well-concealed staffs and the entire radio network, and told the soldiers to go on working “in the spirit of regaining full independence”. The formal end of the Home Army was at the same time the beginning of a new conspiracy, this time against the authorities that had come from the east.

The army after “Tempest”

At the turn of 1944 and 1945 the Home Army was a shadow of the organisation of a year earlier. In 1944, according to the most commonly cited estimates, it had 300,000-350,000 sworn soldiers. About 100,000 of them took part in Operation Tempest, and its course looked much the same everywhere: in Wilno, in Lwów and in the Lublin region Home Army units fought the Germans alongside the Red Army, after which the NKVD disarmed them, arrested the officers and either drafted the soldiers into Berling’s army or deported them deep into the USSR. In the Warsaw Uprising the Home Army lost its best units and a large part of its cadre, and after the capitulation Gen. Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski went into captivity with most of the High Command.

Okulicki, whom he had designated as his successor, left Warsaw together with the civilian population, escaped from a transport and from October operated in and around Częstochowa. As early as 8 October he proposed to London that conclusions be drawn from the experience so far and that “Tempest” be halted, and on 26 October he issued an order to end it. The authorities in London delayed for a long time in confirming the new commander: President Władysław Raczkiewicz recognised Okulicki on 3 November only as acting commander, and appointed him Commander-in-Chief only on 21 December 1944, with narrower powers than Bór.

The government of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, in its November guidelines (according to Okulicki’s biographers, in an instruction of 16 November which the commander received a few days later), already envisaged the dissolution of the Home Army once the country came under Soviet rule. Soon afterwards Mikołajczyk resigned, and the new prime minister became the socialist Tomasz Arciszewski, an opponent of concessions to Moscow. On the other side a rival authority was taking shape: the Polish Committee of National Liberation, created in Moscow in the summer, was transformed in the last days of 1944 into the Provisional Government, which at the beginning of January recognised the Soviet Union.

At the same time Okulicki was preparing what was to replace the Home Army. Since the summer of 1944 he had been the designated commander of the secret organisation NIE (“No”); the name was explained either as an abbreviation of the word “Niepodległość” (independence) or as an expression of opposition to the USSR. It was to be a small, deeply concealed cadre organisation, severed from the existing Home Army structures, geared to long work under Soviet occupation: to intelligence, propaganda and self-defence, not to guerrilla warfare and sabotage. The Warsaw Uprising and “Tempest” had broken up its first embryos, because most of the officers designated for it had revealed themselves in the fighting. Okulicki entrusted its rebuilding to Gen. August Emil Fieldorf, “Nil”. In the first days of January 1945 “Niedźwiadek” sent the statute of “NIE” to politicians in the know, and on 16 January in Kraków there took place what was probably the first meeting of its military and political leadership: Okulicki, Fieldorf, the Government Delegate for Poland Jan Stanisław Jankowski and Stanisław Jasiukowicz.

The January offensive

On 12 January 1945 the Vistula-Oder Offensive began from the Sandomierz bridgehead and in the following days spread to the whole front on the Vistula. Within a week the Red Army passed through most of the General Government. In those days Home Army units still carried out local operations against the retreating Germans, but they had neither the strength nor the political sense to appear as hosts. Behind the front came NKVD and “Smersh” counter-intelligence units, as well as officials of the security apparatus being created by the Provisional Government, who hunted down people of the underground. For the Home Army to continue as an army would have meant exposing tens of thousands of its soldiers to arrest.

Three orders of 19 January

Okulicki, who was then in the Częstochowa area, issued three documents on 19 January. The first was an assessment of the situation. The advancing Soviet offensive, he wrote, might in a short time lead to the occupation of all Poland by the Red Army, but “this is not, however, a victory of our just cause”. The entry of the Russians and the takeover of power by the Lublin government meant for him the exchange of one occupation for another, a more dangerous one. “We do not want to fight the Soviets,” he declared, but the Poles would accept nothing other than life in a fully sovereign and independent state. “The present Soviet victory does not end the war.”

The second order, secret, went to the commanders of areas, districts and sub-districts. It was short and matter-of-fact: “The Home Army is dissolved. Commanders do not reveal themselves.” The soldiers were to be released from their oath, paid two months’ pay and “zamelinowani”, that is, hidden. “Keep small, well-concealed staffs and the entire radio network,” Okulicki instructed, and maintain contact with him and cooperate with the apparatus of the Government Delegate. On 22 January he supplemented this with a confidential instruction to hide weapons and equipment and for the most trusted people to go into strict conspiracy.

The third, the most famous, was addressed to all soldiers: in the version published by the IPN to “Soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the Homeland”, in other accounts to “Soldiers of the Home Army”. Signed as “Commander of the Armed Forces in the Homeland”, it said: “I give you my last order. Continue your work and activity in the spirit of regaining full independence for the State and of protecting the Polish population from destruction.” Okulicki called on the soldiers to try to be “guides of the Nation”, and added: “In this activity each of you must be your own commander.” Then, “by authority of the President of the Republic of Poland”, he released them from their oath and dissolved the ranks of the Home Army. He ended with the words: “Long live a Free, Independent, Happy Poland!”

Historians read the text in different ways. It is often presented simply as an order to end the fight. Piotr Niwiński, however, points out that the whole order contains not a word about the necessity of ceasing it: Okulicki dissolved the army as a structure, and left the form of further activity, whether armed, political or civilian, to the conscience of each soldier. Krzysztof Komorowski judges that the official dissolution of the Home Army did not mean the end of its activity, but probably prevented losses that were hard to foresee. The act of dissolution was confirmed on 8 February in a radio address by President Raczkiewicz.

After the dissolution

The order was meant to deprive the NKVD of a pretext for repression, but it did not stop it. Some Home Army soldiers revealed themselves to the new authorities, some returned to ordinary life without revealing themselves, and some remained in the forest or in conspiracy; some commands, such as the Białystok district, did not obey the order. According to Gen. Bór-Komorowski’s estimate, about 50,000 Home Army soldiers were deported to the east. Those arrested were interrogated in so-called filtrations and sent to gulags in the Urals and Siberia, from which many did not return.

“NIE” had no time to develop. On 7 March 1945 the NKVD detained Fieldorf by chance; unrecognised, he ended up in a gulag deep in the USSR. At the end of March, lured to supposed talks, Okulicki, Jankowski and other leaders of the Polish Underground State were arrested in Pruszków, and in June they were tried in Moscow. Okulicki died in a Soviet prison on 24 December 1946. His successors dissolved “NIE” on 7 May 1945, and its place was taken by the Armed Forces Delegation for Poland of Col. Jan Rzepecki (PL), established the same day by order of Gen. Władysław Anders, and after it, from September 1945, the Freedom and Independence association (“Wolność i Niezawisłość”).

Out of Okulicki’s last order grew the so-called second conspiracy, the independence underground whose soldiers are today called the Cursed Soldiers (PL). Some units, such as the 5th Wilno Brigade of Maj. Zygmunt Szendzielarz, “Łupaszka”, went on fighting the NKVD and the Polish security apparatus for years. The fate awaiting the soldiers of the dissolved army (prisons, sentences and deportations) was described already in February 1945, in exile, by Kazimierz Wierzyński (PL) in his poem “On the Dissolution of the Home Army”. For the generation that came of age in the conspiracy, 19 January 1945 marked the end not so much of participation in the war as of one chapter of it.