August Emil Fieldorf

August Emil Fieldorf, “Nil”, was a Kraków boy from a railwayman’s family who followed the path of a soldier of his generation: from Piłsudski’s Legions, through the war with the Bolsheviks and the September campaign, to the underground. In the Home Army he created and ran the Kedyw – the Directorate of Diversion, which commanded the units carrying out the underground’s boldest operations, including the assassination of the SS and Police Leader in Warsaw, Franz Kutschera. At the end of 1944 he became deputy commander of the AK. He survived the German occupation, a Soviet camp in the Urals and his return to Poland under a false name – and on 24 February 1953 he was hanged in the Mokotów prison on the strength of a sentence of a court of the Polish People’s Republic. His body has not been found to this day.

From Kraków to the Legions

He was born on 20 March 1895 in Kraków, to Andrzej Fieldorf, a locksmith and railway worker, and Agnieszka née Szwanda. At the baptism the priest did not agree to the name Emil, so he was registered as August – but he used the second name all his life. He attended gymnasia in Kraków and then a teachers’ seminary. In 1910 he joined the rifle society “Strzelec”, where he went through recruit training and an NCO course.

On 6 August 1914 he reported at the Oleandry grounds in Kraków to the Polish Legions. He served in Józef Piłsudski’s I Brigade, in the 1st Infantry Regiment, where he commanded a platoon and from 1915 a machine-gun company; he later fought in the 7th and 5th Regiments. During the oath crisis of 1917 he refused to swear loyalty to Germany and Austria-Hungary. As “politically suspect” he was sent to the Austro-Hungarian army on the Italian front. In 1918 he did not return from leave, joined the Polish Military Organisation and at the turn of October and November 1918 helped disarm the Austrians in Kraków.

An officer of the Second Polish Republic

He fought in the Polish Army from the first months of independence. In 1919 he commanded a machine-gun company of the 1st Legions Infantry Regiment near Wilno, and in the Polish-Soviet War he followed a path from Dünaburg through the Kiev expedition to the Battle of Warsaw and the Battle of Białystok. In October 1919 he married Janina Kobylińska in Wilno; they had two daughters, Krystyna and Maria.

He spent the interwar period largely in the Wilno region. He was quartermaster of the 1st Legions Infantry Regiment, worked in the State Office for Physical Education and Military Training and in France among Polish emigrants in the Riflemen’s Association, and then commanded a battalion of the Border Protection Corps “Troki”. From 1938, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he commanded the 51st Borderland Rifles Infantry Regiment (PL) in Brzeżany.

September 1939 and the road through France

He went to the war in September 1939 with this regiment. On the night of 8 to 9 September the 51st Regiment was shattered in the Battle of Iłża. Fieldorf tried to reach his division’s reserve centre, but after the Red Army’s entry on 17 September he returned to Kraków in civilian clothes. In October he crossed the border into Slovakia, was interned in Hungary, escaped, and in February 1940 reported in Paris to the reconstituted Polish army. In May he was promoted to colonel, and after the defeat of France he was evacuated to Britain.

On 17 July 1940 he set out from London for the occupied country as an emissary of the Commander-in-Chief and the government. Via Cape Town, Cairo, Turkey, the Balkans and Budapest, under the name Emil Wielowiejski, he reached Warsaw in September 1940.

“Nil”

In the Union of Armed Struggle its commander Gen. Stefan Rowecki “Grot” assigned him in October 1940 to the Inspection Bureau of the High Command, where Fieldorf toured the Kraków and Silesian districts as an inspector. He then used the name Walenty Gdanicki. In autumn 1941 he worked in Wilno, and from February to August 1942, already in the Home Army, he was commander of the Białystok area.

In August 1942 Rowecki entrusted him with organising a new structure that combined the existing sabotage and diversion units: the Directorate of Diversion, or Kedyw. At the end of 1942 Fieldorf became its head, while the High Command’s Kedyw was formally created in January 1943. As “Nil” he led it for over a year. Kedyw then commanded special units in Warsaw, including the Assault Groups of the Grey Ranks, which in March 1943 carried out the action at the Arsenal, and the “Agat” unit, later “Pegaz” and “Parasol”. On Kedyw’s orders the sentences of underground courts were carried out on German officials, among others on the Gestapo man Franz Bürkl. In December 1943 Fieldorf ordered the liquidation of the SS and Police Leader for the Warsaw district; the assassination of Franz Kutschera on 1 February 1944 became Kedyw’s most famous operation.

Organiser of “NIE”

While still heading Kedyw he received from Gen. Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski a task that was to decide his fate: building the deeply concealed organisation “NIE” (“Niepodległość” – “Independence”), prepared to act in case the Red Army occupied Poland. Sources differ on the date – the Polish Wikipedia writes of autumn 1943, the IPN of February, and dzieje.pl of April 1944. Fieldorf handed over Kedyw in spring 1944.

He did not fight in the Warsaw Uprising. According to the Polish Wikipedia, in August 1944 he was seriously ill with dysentery; the IPN states that he was detained by the Germans but not recognised and managed to get out of the city. On 28 September 1944 Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski promoted him to brigadier general; he also received the Cross of the Virtuti Militari. After the fall of the Uprising he declined the post of chief of staff of the High Command, but in November 1944 the new commander, Gen. Leopold Okulicki, appointed him his deputy. He held this post until the dissolution of the Home Army on 19 January 1945, continuing to prepare “NIE”.

Under a false name

On 7 March 1945, after a meeting with Okulicki in Łódź and with Jan Mazurkiewicz “Radosław” in Milanówek, Fieldorf was detained there by the NKVD – by chance, under the wartime name Walenty Gdanicki. The Soviets did not realise whom they had in their hands. Through the camp in Rembertów he was taken at the end of March to a camp in the Urals, in the Sverdlovsk oblast. There he spent over two years of hard labour. Ill, he was released in autumn 1947; on 26 October he returned to Poland and settled, still under an assumed name, with relatives in Łódź. In February 1948, after the announcement of an amnesty, he revealed himself at the military recruitment office.

He remained at liberty until autumn 1950. On 9 November 1950 officers of the Ministry of Public Security detained him in Łódź and took him to Warsaw, and in December to the prison on Rakowiecka Street. The arrest was approved by Lt. Col. Helena Wolińska of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office. Despite torture Fieldorf refused to cooperate with the interrogators.

Sentence and execution

He was charged under the decrees on punishing “fascist-Hitlerite criminals” and “traitors of the Polish Nation”. The indictment accused him, among other things, of issuing orders as head of Kedyw to fight Soviet partisans and the leftist underground. On 16 April 1952 the Voivodeship Court for the Capital City of Warsaw, presided over by Maria Gurowska, sentenced him to death by hanging. On 20 October 1952 the Supreme Court, composed of Emil Merz, Gustaw Auscaler and Igor Andrejew, upheld the sentence at a closed session, without the accused present. His family petitioned for clemency; Fieldorf himself, during a visit with his wife, forbade such petitions. Bolesław Bierut did not use the right of clemency.

On 24 February 1953 at 3 p.m. Gen. August Emil Fieldorf was hanged in the Mokotów prison. His body was buried secretly in an unknown place. The Institute of National Remembrance has been searching for his remains for years; they probably lie in the “Łączka” plot (PL) of the Military Cemetery at Powązki, where exhumations have uncovered the remains of many victims of communist terror, but as of 2026 they have not been identified. There is a symbolic grave of the general at Powązki.

Remembrance

Rehabilitation proceedings were first initiated in 1957, but were discontinued; only on 7 March 1989 did the Prosecutor General find that Fieldorf had not committed the crime of which he was accused. After 1989 an investigation was conducted into his judicial murder; charges covered Helena Wolińska and Maria Gurowska, but no one was punished – most of those involved in the case were no longer alive or were beyond the reach of the Polish justice system. In July 2006 President Lech Kaczyński posthumously awarded him the Order of the White Eagle. His story is told in the film “General Nil” (2009).

For historians, Fieldorf’s fate is among the most poignant examples of how the post-war authorities treated Home Army commanders: the man who led the fight against German terror in Warsaw was sentenced as a “fascist criminal” by a court of the state for whose independence he had fought since 1914.