“Truly Polish in Spirit and Form”: The Communist Poles and their Battle against Nazi Germany, 1941-1945
Date
2020-07-06
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Abstract
The armed resistance of communist Poles and the forces they organized against Nazi Germany during the Second World War—both clandestine and regular—is poorly understood in the West. Rarely examined in any depth in English, the people and events involved are instead typically folded into a historiography focused on other subjects, dominated by Cold War-era prejudices, and defined in large part by a lack of usage of or access to accurate Polish sources. The resulting oversights, simplifications, and inaccuracies have served to mask the significant military contributions of the communist Poles to the armed struggle against Nazi Germany in the period 1941 to 1945, as well as to conceal the ways in which the communists made their armed forces Polish (as opposed to Soviet and/or communist) in appearance and character. In turn, this obscures one of the foundations of communist postwar rule: the communists, who would eventually come to power in Poland and rule that country for over four decades, made a great effort to shore up their legitimacy by constantly referencing and sometimes inflating their role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Whether or not this military contribution was at times inflated, it was a significant one, made by armed forces that were to a meaningful extent “truly Polish”.
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Poland, LWP, ZPP, GL, AL, PPR, communist, communism, military history, military culture, Second World War, WWII
Citation
Hann, K. (2020). “Truly Polish in Spirit and Form”: The Communist Poles and their Battle against Nazi Germany, 1941-1945 (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.