The surrender at Kock

On the morning of 6 October 1939, in the fields and woods between Kock and Wola Gułowska in the north of the Lublin region, Brigadier General Franciszek Kleeberg’s Independent Operational Group Polesie laid down its arms. Nearly 17,000 soldiers went into German captivity, among them more than 1,200 officers and four generals. It was the last grouping of the regular Polish Army to fight in the 1939 campaign. It had not been beaten in the field: the day before, it had repulsed two German motorised divisions and forced one of them to retreat. It surrendered because it had run out of ammunition, food and dressings, and was surrounded by troops who lacked nothing.

Popular chronologies describe this day as the end of Polish resistance in the September Campaign. That is largely true, though it needs qualifying. The surrender at Kock ended the operations of organised tactical formations. Resistance by small units and scattered groups went on for weeks, and one of them, the detachment of Major “Hubal”, held out until the spring of 1940.

The last grouping

Independent Operational Group Polesie was created out of nothing in the first days of the war. Kleeberg commanded Corps District No. IX (PL) in Brest, whose divisions had left for the western front in August. When, after the German invasion, German armour broke through the front in the north and headed for Brest, he was ordered on 9 September to organise the defence of Polesie from reserve centres, reservists and auxiliary units. His groups defended the Brest fortress and Kobryn against the corps of General Heinz Guderian. After the Red Army marched in on 17 September, Kleeberg first tried to carry out the Commander-in-Chief’s order to withdraw south to Romania and Hungary, and when the Soviets blocked the way, he decided to go to the aid of besieged Warsaw.

On the way he gathered up stragglers from shattered armies and units. On 27 September his troops crossed the Bug near Włodawa, and on 28 September they joined up with the cavalry of Brigadier General Zygmunt Podhorski. From then on the grouping, 17,000–18,000 strong, bore the name Independent Operational Group Polesie. It consisted of two improvised infantry divisions – the 50th under Colonel Ottokar Brzoza-Brzezina and the 60th under Colonel Adam Epler – the Zaza Cavalry Division and the Podlasie Cavalry Brigade of Brigadier General Ludwik Kmicic-Skrzyński. In the last days of September the group beat off Soviet attacks at Jabłoń (PL) and Milanów.

Meanwhile Warsaw had surrendered, and on 29 September so did Modlin. Kleeberg did not turn back. He decided to march on Dęblin, seize ammunition from the large military depots at Stawy and move into the Świętokrzyskie Mountains to fight on in the forests. His path was blocked by the German XIV Motorised Corps under General of Infantry Gustav von Wietersheim. From 2 to 5 October the last battle of the campaign was fought around Kock, Serokomla, Wola Gułowska, Adamów and Krzywda. The Poles repulsed the attacks of Generalleutnant Paul Otto’s 13th Motorised Infantry Division and, from 4 October, also of Generalleutnant Joachim Lemelsen’s 29th Motorised Division. On 2 October Hel surrendered as well. Independent Operational Group Polesie was now the last Polish formation in the field.

The decision at Hordzieżka

5 October was the grouping’s day of greatest success. On the same day that Adolf Hitler took the salute at a victory parade in Warsaw’s Ujazdowskie Avenue, the infantry of the 60th Division recaptured the village and cemetery of Wola Gułowska from the Germans, a battalion of the 183rd Infantry Regiment made a bayonet charge in the woods near Gułów, and the Edward Cavalry Brigade got behind the 13th Motorised Division and took the village of Poznań together with a German battery. The division’s commander, General Otto, ordered a retreat.

The success was undone by a report from the quartermaster, Lieutenant Colonel Kazimierz Stawiarski. According to him, the whole grouping had about 20 artillery shells left, and rifle ammunition and dressings had run out. The depots at Stawy lay on the other side of the German lines, and the grouping was surrounded by two motorised divisions which could be reinforced by others at any moment. In the afternoon, in a peasant cottage in the village of Hordzieżka, Kleeberg, in the presence of Brigadier General Czesław Młot-Fijałkowski and Colonel Epler, took the decision to surrender. The commanders of the units still fighting were not present. As he wrote a few hours later, he took the responsibility upon himself alone.

He wrote the last order to the soldiers of Independent Operational Group Polesie himself, dating it 5 October 1939 and giving the place as “Horodzieżka”. Sources differ on the time it was issued: some studies give 4.30 p.m., while the surviving copy bears a note giving the time as 7.30 p.m. The order was to be read out before all the units on parade. In it Kleeberg recalled the grouping’s journey “from distant Polesie, from the Narew”, the failed march south and to the aid of Warsaw, and the fighting “first with the Bolsheviks, then in the five-day battle at Serokomla with the Germans”. He went on:

Today we are surrounded, and our ammunition and food are running out. Further fighting holds out no hope and will only shed soldiers’ blood that may yet be needed. It is a commander’s privilege to take responsibility upon himself. Today I take it, in this gravest of moments – ordering an end to further pointless fighting, so as not to shed soldiers’ blood in vain.

The order ended with the words: “Poland is not yet lost. Nor shall it be.” In communist Poland it was printed with the passages about the fighting against the Red Army left out. The full text could not appear in Poland until censorship was abolished in 1990.

Laying down arms on 6 October

On the evening of 5 October, at around 8.40 p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Kazimierz Gorzkowski and Lieutenant Colonel Tadeusz Śmigielski set out as envoys to the headquarters of the German 13th Division. Contact was made near Adamów. A ceasefire was agreed until 6 a.m. on 6 October, by which time the act of surrender was to be concluded. In some places, however, firing continued until 1 a.m. General Podhorski at first refused to surrender and intended to break through to the south with his cavalry, but changed his mind in the morning. All night the soldiers destroyed and buried their weapons and equipment so that they would not fall into enemy hands.

At around 2 a.m. the Polish envoys handed the Germans the agreed text of the surrender. According to some studies their powers were too limited, and the act had to be signed by Kleeberg in person at General Otto’s headquarters. According to other accounts the formal surrender took place before noon at the Jabłonowski Palace in Kock, where a German guard of honour was drawn up in the courtyard and Kleeberg surrendered to General von Wietersheim. According to Polish accounts, the Germans recognised the honourable character of the surrender, and the officers were allowed to keep their swords.

In the morning Kleeberg took his soldiers’ last march-past. At around 10 a.m., in the village of Czarna and at other assembly points, his order was read out and the laying down of arms began. In the afternoon the disarmed columns set off for the German collection points. According to figures cited in Polish literature, 16,860 soldiers went into captivity, including 1,255 officers, as well as four generals: Kleeberg, Podhorski, Kmicic-Skrzyński and Młot-Fijałkowski. The Germans collected some 10,000 rifles, more than 200 heavy machine guns, 20 guns and about 5,000 horses. According to Polish findings, some 300 soldiers of the Polesie group were killed in the fighting of 2–5 October and several hundred wounded. Polish authors estimate German losses at several hundred men.

Captivity and escapes

Not everyone went into captivity. Some soldiers changed into civilian clothes and dispersed to their homes or into the forests. Those who had refused to lay down their arms were rounded up by the Germans over the following days. The prisoners were marched to transit camps at Dęblin and Radom, from which many escaped with the help of the local population. Among those who escaped from Radom was Colonel Epler, who made his way through Slovakia and Hungary to the Middle East and in 1942 published in Tel Aviv his memoir Ostatni żołnierz polski kampanii 1939 roku (“The Last Polish Soldier of the 1939 Campaign”). Colonel Brzoza-Brzezina, of Czech descent, was soon released and from November was active in the underground. The officers were sent to Oflags. Over the following months the Germans released some of the privates and NCOs, and turned many of them into forced labourers in the Reich.

Kleeberg himself was held in Oflag IV B in Königstein Fortress in Saxony. He never regained his freedom. Gravely ill with heart disease, he died on 5 April 1941 in a military hospital in Dresden.

What ended on 10 October?

English-language chronologies include, under 10 October 1939, the statement that on that day the last units of the Polish Army surrendered to the Germans. Polish and German sources, however, know of no surrender on that date. The last organised unit to lay down its arms was Independent Operational Group Polesie, on 6 October. After that the Germans were still combing the forests of the Lublin region and Podlasie, disarming scattered groups and rounding up soldiers who had not surrendered at Kock, but none of these actions can be identified as the “last surrender”. The date of 10 October therefore does not mark a specific event. It is rather a conventional end to the period in which the last clashes with the remnants of the Polish forces were dying away. In the east, too, there was no longer any regular fighting by then: the last sizeable clash with the Red Army had taken place on 1 October at Wytyczno, and in the first half of October Soviet troops were withdrawing from the Lublin region behind the Bug, to the line fixed in the Boundary and Friendship Treaty.

Resistance nevertheless continued. Major Henryk Dobrzański, known as “Hubal”, who had crossed the Vistula near Dęblin with a few dozen cavalrymen on 1 October, did not lay down his arms. His Detached Unit of the Polish Army operated in the Kielce region and on the borders of the Łódź region, in Polish uniform, until 30 April 1940, when Hubal was killed in action near Anielin. As early as 27 September, in the last hours of the defence of Warsaw, the Service for Poland’s Victory had been founded, the first organisation of the armed underground.

Place in the war

On 6 October, the day of the surrender at Kock, Hitler made a speech in the Reichstag in which he declared that Poland as created at Versailles would never rise again, and offered Britain and France a peace conference on condition that they accept the accomplished facts. The campaign had lasted more than five weeks, and the last regular Polish unit laid down its arms three weeks after the Commander-in-Chief and the government crossed the Romanian border. The Polish state did not capitulate. From 30 September the government of General Władysław Sikorski was at work in Paris, rebuilding the army in France. Kleeberg, Sikorski’s friend from the interwar years, was posthumously promoted by the authorities in exile to Major General, with seniority from 1 January 1943.

In Polish memory Kock became a symbol: the last battle of September, won in the field and lost only for want of ammunition. The inscription “KOCK 2–5 X 1939” was placed on the plaques of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw. In 1969, on the 30th anniversary of the surrender, Kleeberg’s remains were moved from Dresden to the war cemetery at Kock, where on 6 October they were laid to rest among the fallen soldiers of the Polesie group. For the Wehrmacht, by contrast, the Polish campaign was a preparation for the next one. As early as 9 October Hitler signed the directive for the preparation of an offensive in the west, and the divisions that had fought at Kock took part in the French campaign in the spring of 1940.