Establishment of the Service for Poland's Victory

On the night of 26-27 September 1939, in a Warsaw that had been encircled by the Wehrmacht for nearly two weeks and one day before the signing of the capitulation, a group of officers led by Brig. Gen. Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski founded a secret military organisation. It was named the Service for Poland’s Victory (SZP). Its authority rested on the plenipotentiary powers of the commander of the “Warsaw” Army, Gen. Juliusz Rómmel, who passed on to Tokarzewski the authority he had received from the Commander-in-Chief for “continuing the struggle to preserve independence and the integrity of the borders”. The city was capitulating, but some of its defenders did not intend to go into captivity or to accept defeat as final. The SZP survived under that name for less than two months, but it was from it that the Union of Armed Struggle and then the Home Army descended. That is why 27 September is regarded today as the birthday of the Polish Underground State.

A city with no way out

The last days of September were the hardest for the capital since the beginning of the war. From the middle of the month Warsaw was encircled, bombed and shelled, and on 25 September it endured the heaviest air raid. There was a shortage of water, electricity and ammunition, and tens of thousands of wounded lay in hospitals and cellars. The Battle of the Bzura had been lost, and on 17 September the Red Army had entered Poland. The President, the government and the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, had crossed the Romanian border and been interned there. Against this background of disintegration, Warsaw was one of the last places where a Polish command was still operating, together with the civil authorities, headed by the city’s president, Stefan Starzyński, and the Citizens’ Committee of party representatives.

On 26 September Gen. Rómmel, after consultations with military men and civilians, decided to begin capitulation talks. It was then too that a decision was taken that was to prolong the fight by years. In the evening Maj. Edmund Galinat, an envoy of the Commander-in-Chief, flew into the city, bringing authorisation to create a secret military organisation. The initiative of the command of the capital’s defence coincided with this mandate.

The general from the Bzura

The choice of commander was no accident. Michał Tokarzewski, born in 1893 in Lwów, had been active in his youth in the Union of Active Struggle and the PPS – Revolutionary Faction, had fought in the Legions and the Polish Military Organisation, and in November 1918 had led the relief of fighting Lwów. In the army of the Second Republic he rose to the rank of brigadier general and to command of corps districts in Grodno, Lwów and Toruń. He thus had behind him experience of conspiracy from the time of the partitions, which most younger officers lacked.

In September 1939 he commanded the operational group named after him in Army “Pomorze”, with which he fought on the Bzura. After the defeat he broke through the Kampinos Forest to Warsaw and became Gen. Rómmel’s deputy. It was there that the decision to create a conspiracy found him.

Rómmel’s plenipotentiary powers

The order that Tokarzewski received from Rómmel was short and of enormous reach. In it Rómmel passed on “the plenipotentiary power to command in the war against the invasion throughout the territory of the whole State, given to me by the Commander-in-Chief in agreement with the government”, with the task of “continuing the struggle to preserve independence and the integrity of the borders”. It was therefore not a matter of a local resistance group in one city, but of an organisation that was to cover the whole country, both zones of occupation, and act in the name of the state.

That same night, a few hours after receiving the order, Tokarzewski swore in the first officers, who were to form the organisation’s command. Among the founders the Institute of National Remembrance names, among others, Tadeusz Kruk-Strzelecki and Franciszek Niepokólczycki (PL); Galinat became deputy commander. The chosen officers were released from the obligation to go into captivity so that they could become the cadre of the conspiracy. In the following days others took the oath – among them, on 28 September, Col. Leopold Okulicki, later the last commander-in-chief of the Home Army.

Tokarzewski operated under pseudonyms, among them “Stolarski”. The command took on a layout known from the army: alongside the commander and his deputies there were divisions – organisation, intelligence, operations, quartermaster, communications, propaganda and finance. At the beginning of October Col. Stefan Rowecki, a General Staff graduate and commander of the Warsaw Armoured-Motorised Brigade, who had avoided captivity and returned to the capital, joined the SZP. He became Tokarzewski’s deputy and chief of staff. In the field, voivodeship commands were created: Warsaw, Lublin, Łódź, Kielce and Kraków.

The army and the state in conspiracy

The SZP was not meant to be solely a combat organisation. Its creators wanted to concentrate in it the effort of the whole nation in the struggle to regain independence within the pre-war borders, and according to the first documents it was to rebuild and reorganise the army and also to create centres of provisional authority in the country. The historian Waldemar Grabowski points out that its structure was an extension of the defence of Warsaw: the counterpart of the Commander of the Defence of Warsaw was the SZP Commander, of the civilian commissioner for the city’s defence the SZP civilian commissioner (initially still Starzyński), and of the Citizens’ Committee the SZP Main Political Council. From the start there were thus two branches: military and civilian.

Tokarzewski knew that society blamed the Sanation camp for the September defeat and that the new émigré authorities would be wary of it. Although he himself came from the circle of Józef Piłsudski, he therefore sought support in the pre-war opposition. The Main Political Council, established on 10 October, included representatives of the Polish Socialist Party, the National Party and the People’s Party (sources differ as to the fourth grouping: some name the Democratic Party, others the Labour Party); the Sanation Camp of National Unity was absent from it. The SZP subordinated itself to the new government of the Republic of Poland, appointed on 30 September in Paris.

The SZP was, moreover, not the only conspiratorial organisation. In the autumn of 1939 dozens of organisations sprang up spontaneously across the country: formed by officers, veterans, scouts, political parties or local circles, often poorly concealed. Professional cadres were also lacking, and among the officers who had avoided captivity some – as Tokarzewski put it – “feared conspiracy like the devil fears holy water”. It was not a fear of danger, but a conviction that fighting without a uniform did not befit a soldier, and that the only honourable course was captivity or making one’s way to the army being rebuilt in the West. Building an underground army required overcoming both these inhibitions and the lack of money, weapons and experience in the struggle against the German and Soviet political police.

Paris’s mistrust

The new Polish authorities in exile, headed by the prime minister and soon Commander-in-Chief, Gen. Władysław Sikorski, were formed by politicians of the former anti-Sanation opposition. From their perspective an organisation led by a general associated with the Piłsudskiite camp and appointed with the authorisation of Rydz-Śmigły aroused suspicion. Sikorski’s circle, above all Stanisław Kot, accused the SZP of possibly serving to rebuild the Sanation’s influence. The mistrust was deepened by a report on the founding of the organisation that Tokarzewski sent abroad and that reached the interned Rydz-Śmigły first. Sikorski took this as a lack of loyalty towards himself. Emissaries of some other conspiratorial organisations who reached France also judged Tokarzewski critically.

The government therefore decided to subordinate the military conspiracy directly to itself and to separate it from the political branch. In November 1939 the SZP was transformed into the Union of Armed Struggle, directed from France by Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski. The structures set up by Tokarzewski and his officers were taken over by the new organisation.

What grew out of the SZP

For the moment, however, in the last hours of the defence of Warsaw, no one knew the later fate of the conspiracy. The next day, 28 September, the capitulation was signed, and from 29 September columns of its defenders marched out of the city. Some of them did not go into captivity but went underground; some of the weapons hidden in September later reached the hands of conspiracy soldiers.

The occupation quickly showed the conditions in which the conspiracy would have to operate. Behind the Wehrmacht the Einsatzgruppen entered Poland, which in Operation “Tannenberg”, with ready lists of names, rounded up the Polish leadership class. From the first days of October these groups operated in Warsaw, arresting hostages and representatives of the intelligentsia. On 27 October the Gestapo detained Starzyński, who died in a German prison or camp. The young organisation therefore had to operate from the outset under false names and with false documents, in a world in which every arrest could bring further ones.

Tokarzewski led the SZP until the end of 1939. After the creation of the ZWZ he was designated commander of the Soviet-occupied area, based in Lwów, but in March 1940, on his way there, he was arrested by the NKVD while crossing the demarcation line. Leadership of the underground army under the German occupation was taken over by Rowecki, from June 1940 commander-in-chief of the ZWZ, and from February 1942 of the Home Army. According to IPN estimates, around 450,000 people passed through the ZWZ–AK during the war.

From the organisation formed in besieged Warsaw grew the whole edifice of the Polish Underground State: an army subordinate to the legal government, a separate civil administration and a representation of the political parties. It had no equivalent in any other occupied country of Europe. That is why the day of the SZP’s founding is observed in Poland today as Polish Underground State Day.