First Government Delegate for Poland

On 3 December 1940 the Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, Gen. Władysław Sikorski, by telegram from London appointed Cyryl Ratajski, former president of Poznań and minister of the interior, Chief Government Delegate to the General Government. Some studies give a date one day earlier, 2 December. Ratajski took up the office in occupied Warsaw on 14 December, under the name of Celestyn Radwański, a supposed retired professor. In time his authority was extended to all Polish lands under occupation. This was the beginning of the history of the Government Delegation for Poland – the secret apparatus of civil administration which, alongside the clandestine army, formed the Polish Underground State.

Ratajski is usually called the first Government Delegate, although more strictly he was the first permanent Delegate. From May to December 1940 a temporary delegate, Col. Jan Skorobohaty-Jakubowski (PL), was in the country, who was to prepare the ground and find a candidate for the post. A separate delegate also operated in the lands incorporated into the Reich. Only Ratajski’s appointment, however, gave the underground an office that survived until the end of the war and became the seed of the administration of a future, free Poland.

A state without territory

After the defeat in September 1939 the country found itself under two occupations. The Germans incorporated the western voivodeships into the Reich, created the General Government from the central ones, and the eastern lands were occupied by the Soviet Union. The Polish state, however, did not cease to exist. President Władysław Raczkiewicz and Sikorski’s government operated in France – in Paris, and from November 1939 in Angers – and were recognised by the Allies. In the country, on the night of 26-27 September 1939, in besieged Warsaw, Gen. Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski had founded the Service for Poland’s Victory. Attached to it was the Main Political Council, with representatives of the parties opposed to the Sanation.

The government in Angers did not want the leadership of the underground to rest in the hands of one military organisation and its commanders, who came from the pre-war ruling camp. The Union of Armed Struggle, which in November 1939 replaced the SZP, was to be solely an army. The Ministerial Committee for Home Affairs, chaired by Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski, by resolutions of 16 and 17 April 1940 separated the military branch from the political one. The ZWZ was forbidden to engage in politics. The agreement of the four main parties – the Polish Socialist Party-WRN, the People’s Party, the National Party and the Labour Party – concluded on 26 February 1940 as the Political Consultative Committee (PL), was recognised as the political representation of the country. The government in the country was henceforth to be represented by the Delegate: a link between London and the country in political matters, also authorised to supervise the ZWZ budget, give opinions on candidates for the highest posts in the clandestine army, and issue political directives to its commander.

The first attempt did not prove convincing. In the summer of 1940 a Collective Government Delegation operated in Warsaw, made up of representatives of the parties and the ZWZ commander-in-chief Stefan Rowecki, chaired by Skorobohaty-Jakubowski. It dissolved in September. By then the government, evacuated to London after the fall of France, was already looking for one person with authority who could head the civil conspiracy.

The president of Poznań in Warsaw

The choice fell on a man from Greater Poland. Cyryl Ratajski was born in 1875 in Zalesie Wielkie near Krotoszyn, into a peasant family. He studied law in Berlin, was a lawyer, and in independent Poland – in 1922–1934, with a break of a few months in Władysław Grabski’s government as minister of the interior – president of Poznań (PL). Under his administration the city built a power station, the Bolesław Chrobry Bridge and Poland’s first trolleybus line, and in 1929 hosted the General National Exhibition. In 1934, despite the victory of the National list in the elections, the Sanation authorities did not confirm his re-election. He became associated with the opposition Morges Front, and in 1937 joined the Labour Party.

When in September 1939 the voivodeship authorities left Poznań, Ratajski, at the age of 64, again took up the office of city president and held it until the Germans entered. He refused to hand them the keys to the city in a ceremony. He spent several days as a hostage in Fort VII, and in May 1940 he was expelled to the General Government, like many Poles from the lands incorporated into the Reich. In the autumn he moved to Warsaw.

His appointment did not please everyone. Ratajski was a man of great administrative experience and unblemished reputation, but he represented the smallest of the four parties. The PPS-WRN and the People’s Party protested the government’s decision; for the post of Delegate they proposed a People’s Party man, the statistician Jan Piekałkiewicz (PL). This dispute over who, and with what backing, should represent the government in the country accompanied the Delegation until the end of its existence.

Ministries in conspiracy

From the start Ratajski built the Delegation as a clandestine counterpart of the pre-war administration. Its task was to maintain the continuity of state institutions, document the occupiers’ actions and crimes, protect cultural property and, above all, prepare the cadres who at the moment of liberation would take over power in the name of the legal government. In time the Delegation encompassed over a dozen departments corresponding to ministries: internal affairs, information and the press, education and culture, justice, the treasury, labour and social welfare, agriculture, industry and trade, communications, posts and telegraphs, public works and reconstruction. In the field there were district and county delegations, and the Department of Internal Affairs had its own clandestine police – the State Security Corps (PL). According to some estimates, at its peak around 30,000 people worked in the Delegation’s structures.

The clandestine departments did not merely plan the future. The Department of Labour and Social Welfare, headed from 1941 by Jan Stanisław Jankowski, distributed aid and allowances, supporting among others the families of victims of terror and people of learning and culture deprived of the means to live; its expenditure made up nearly one third of the Delegation’s budget.

The judiciary was also part of the underground state. As early as the resolution of the Ministerial Committee for Home Affairs of 16 April 1940, the passing of death sentences on traitors, spies, provocateurs and persecutors of the Polish population was reserved exclusively for special courts: military ones attached to the ZWZ and civilian ones attached to the Delegate. A sentence required confirmation, and the courts ruled on the basis of the pre-war criminal code. Military special courts operated from 1940; the civilian special courts (PL) attached to the Delegation were organised in 1942, and their first death sentences were carried out at the beginning of March 1943. For lesser offences – social contacts with Germans, zeal in carrying out their orders – the civil struggle judicial commissions punished with a reprimand or with infamy, announced in the underground press.

These commissions operated under the Directorate of Civil Resistance (PL), which at the turn of 1940 and 1941 was organised at the ZWZ Chief Command. It was headed from beginning to end by the People’s Party man Stefan Korboński. Ratajski made him his plenipotentiary for civil resistance – in 1941 or, as the IPN biographical entry says, in April 1942 – and the KWC became a joint unit of the Delegation and the army. It called for a boycott of German cinemas, theatres and press, directed sabotage without the use of arms, stigmatised informing and recorded the occupier’s crimes.

Disputes with the army and the parties

The separation of the branches, devised in Angers, proved in the country to be a source of constant friction. Rowecki, the ZWZ commander-in-chief, was building an extensive clandestine apparatus, with its own propaganda office and plans to take over the administration at the moment of the uprising. Ratajski took the position that military authority should be subordinate to civilian authority, and created Delegation departments alongside structures the ZWZ already had. Jurisdictional disputes between the Delegation and the Chief Command dragged on throughout his term of office.

Relations with the parties were no better. The Consultative Committee had an advisory role alongside the Delegate, which did not suit the socialists. On 10 September 1941 the PPS-WRN representative Kazimierz Pużak left the committee in protest against its being reduced to such a role, against the post of Delegate being filled by a politician associated with the right, and against the growth of the Delegation’s bureaucratic apparatus, staffed with pre-war officials. He returned to the committee only in 1943.

During this time the map of the Delegation also changed. The Delegate to the lands incorporated into the Reich, Adolf Bniński (PL), fell into the hands of the Gestapo in July 1941, and his successor was later arrested too. In the eastern lands, under Soviet occupation, similar tasks without a formal appointment were performed until August 1941 in Lwów by Władysław Zych. From 1942 the whole network of district delegations was directed by a single Delegate from Warsaw.

Successors

Ratajski suffered from heart disease and jaundice. In 1942 he submitted his resignation, which Sikorski accepted on 5 August. He died on 19 October 1942 in a flat on Filtrowa Street in Warsaw. Despite the old disputes, Rowecki, by then commander-in-chief of the Home Army, came there to pay him honours. He was buried at Powązki under an assumed name; in 1962–1963 his ashes were moved to the cemetery of Distinguished Citizens of Greater Poland in Poznań.

He was succeeded by Jan Piekałkiewicz, whom the parties had pushed for from the start, and who had been deputy Delegate since 1941. Appointed on 5 August 1942, he took up the post in September. On 15 November 1942 the Consultative Committee adopted the statute of the Delegation that he had drawn up, and on 3 December, in the “Information Bulletin”, Piekałkiewicz called on the public to submit unconditionally to the orders of the Directorate of Civil Resistance. In December the Council to Aid Jews “Żegota” (Rada Pomocy Żydom) was set up alongside the Delegation. On 19 February 1943, at a tram stop in Warsaw, Piekałkiewicz – who had refused AK protection – was arrested by the Gestapo. He was imprisoned in Pawiak and interrogated at the security police headquarters on Aleja Szucha, where in June 1943 he was murdered (most often 19 June is given, some sources say 15 June).

Leadership was taken over by Piekałkiewicz’s deputy, Jan Stanisław Jankowski of the Labour Party – in fact from the day of his predecessor’s arrest, formally from April 1943. It was in his time that the Delegation reached its full shape. In 1943 the Consultative Committee was transformed into the National Political Representation, and on 9 January 1944 this became the Council of National Unity, the underground parliament. By a presidential decree of 26 April 1944 the Delegate received the rank of deputy prime minister and, with his three deputies – Stanisław Jasiukowicz, Adam Bień and Antoni Pajdak – formed the National Council of Ministers (PL); various studies date its constitution to May or July 1944. In the summer of 1944 Jankowski approved the decision to begin the fight in Warsaw.

What the appointment brought

The Delegation that Ratajski began to build was something exceptional in occupied Europe: not only a resistance movement but a clandestine state, with an administration, treasury, courts, police, education and social welfare, subordinate to the legal government recognised by the Allies. Thanks to it, Poles under occupation had an authority whose sentences were carried out and whose orders were announced in the underground press, and which spoke in the name of the Republic even when its future was being decided.

It did not, however, manage to fulfil its main task – taking over power after liberation. When the Red Army entered Polish lands in 1944, Delegation representatives who revealed themselves were arrested by the NKVD together with AK commanders. On 27 and 28 March 1945 in Pruszków the NKVD treacherously arrested Jankowski, his ministers and other underground leaders; in June they were tried in Moscow. The duties of Delegate were then performed by Stefan Korboński, and at the end of June 1945 Jerzy Braun (PL) became the last Delegate. On 1 July 1945 the Council of National Unity announced its dissolution, and with it the Delegation ended its activity. Two of Ratajski’s successors, Piekałkiewicz and Jankowski, died in prisons – the first in a German one, the second in a Soviet one. The people whom the Delegation had been preparing to rebuild an independent state did not receive that chance in a Poland ruled by the communists, and many of them ended up in prison.