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Katyń
1940: The Forgotten Genocide of World War II
Dr Waldemar Niemotko (Excerpts
from the transcript of the lecture delivered at University of Western
Sydney on
25 June 2010) Thousands
and thousands of Polish people
were deported to the Soviet “Gulag”. Over
a million of them
lost their lives when in exile.
No
precise statistics exists.
Many of
their graves are unknown.
The
ageing
Polish
generation witnessed
atrocities imposed by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Under
communist rule the
issue of what
happened in Katyń was largely perceived as a taboo.
Even
in Australia the word
“Katyń” has been
allowed only gradually to be included into the list of key occurrences
of the
atrocities, along with the rape of Nanjing, Nazi Germany’s
death camp Auschwitz
and the Japanese brutality in the treatment of the Australian
POW’s in
Burma.
The
Czech
Republic was a frontrunner, as a new member
of the European Union, to voice concern over the betrayal of the
allies,
referring to the infamous 1938 Munich conference. The
complacency of the realpolitik towards
the Kremlin rulers, unduly prevailed for several decades until the
“Solidarity”
trade union in Poland initiated a chain reaction that culminated in the
collapse
of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Only
in 2005 in a speech
in Latvia, the US
president George W. Bush admitted that the Tehran and Yalta
arrangements were
an attempt to sacrifice freedom of small nations of Central and Eastern
Europe
for the sake of global stability. Eventually,
the Latvian film director Edvins
Snore, worked for ten years
until 2008, on a powerful documentary “The
Soviet
Story”. It
fully supports the sequence of events that
was presented by Andrzej Wajda’s in the heart sickening
Polish screenplay “Katyń”. The masterminds of the modern genocide, in industrial proportions, conceived their ideas in German. The barbaric Nibelungenlied and Valhalla beefed up the chauvinism of German lands as united in 1871. Prior to Friedrich Nietzsche formulating in 1885 his racist theory of supermen (Űbermenschen) in the book ”So spoke Zarathustra” (Also sprach Zarathustra), Karl Marx uttered as early as in 1850 that “The classes and the races that are too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. (…) They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust.” To his kinsman and close friend, the industrialist Friedrich Engels, was attributed composing the principles of the so called historical materialism that expanded the ominous vision of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto” (Das Kommunistische Manifest): “The spectre of communism is hovering over Europe. (…) The history of the hitherto society is the history of a struggle between the classes” (Die Geschichte der bisherigen Gesellschaft ist die Geschichte des Klassenkampfes).
An
entry
appeared on the website of the Defense
Department of the Russian Federation, earlier in 2010, blaming Poland
for
contribution to the start of 2WW by refusal to accept
Hitler’s “legitimate”
claim to link the East Prussia enclave to Germany proper. |
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German
internment
camps
Waldemar Niemotko (compiled from the resources of The Home Army Museum. Kraków, Poland) The occupation made worse everyday living conditions of people in Poland. Executions, deportations, physical and psychological violence were at common. The self-proclaimed "culture bearers" (Kulturträger), seeking the people’s extermination, forced the people to perform exhausting labour and issued ratio cards for the city dwellers. These cards covered only a small part of real people’s needs. High mortality was the result of those shortages, and diseases spread widely, especially tuberculosis and typhus. The help was found in food smuggled from the countryside to the city, and illegal barter came to being, such as meat from illegal slaughter houses exchanged for pre-war clothing, furniture and jewellery. Theft, fraud, embezzlement were common. The situation was also worsened by the required deliveries – quotas, which both farmers (in the form of cattle, pigs, dairy and agricultural products) and people living in the cities (eg. non-ferrous metals, recyclable materials, furs and skis) had to provide. Popular forms of escape from the grim reality were: gambling (casinos, horse racing, number lotteries and fortune telling, let it be according to Wernyhora) or alcoholism, being a result of a deliberate policy aimed at depravation of the Polish community. Wooden shoes and iron stoves (the so-called “kozy”) where symbols of occupation reality, along with the rickshaws (in some suburbs of Warsaw). Fashion was an example of war resourcefulness. Coats, dresses and jackets were sewn from curtains and blankets. Blouses made from parachute material were popular among women and high boots and breeches among men. People also tried to avoid the occupant regulations, for example, the proscription law on marriages for women under 25 and men under 28 years of age was universally broke.   The legal status of war prisoners was defined by the Hague Protocol of Customs or Land Combat (1907) and the Geneva conventions (1929), but German authorities often have violated their own regulations. Physical and mental violence, executions and forced labour were the most common cases of breaking the prisoners rights, and often were aimed at Polish officers and soldiers, less in prisoners from Western Europe. Between 1940-1942, nearly 140,000 Polish privates were released from camps or forced to renounce their war prisoners rights and later designated to slave labour in industry of agriculture. There were cases of passing the Polish prisoners to the Gestapo, moving the insubordinate ones to strict security camps or even to concentration camps. The camp life consisted of long assemblies, crowded shelters, insufficient food ratios, constantly increasing list of orders and prohibitions, countless harassment, censorship of letters and even of sermons, holding back food packages, revisions, forcing to hard physical labour of privates and cadets. Not only escapes (over 520), daily manifestations of patriotism or organising of a secret education were a reply to these circumstances. Notably, there were in the oflags various courses, teaching studies and camp universities (at the so called Woldenberg University 80 lecturers undertook teaching around 1500 officers). There was also a complex structure of a camp life, by German acknowledgement: publishing local press and magazines, own payment units, establishing libraries, literary groups, singing groups, theatres, choirs, organising sporting events (even camp “Olympic games”).  Courtesy of The Home Army Museum, Kraków, Poland |
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| The
Tobruk Siege
1941 Waldemar Niemotko
Photos courtesy of Zbigniew Wawer and "Bellona", Warsaw (Poland)  |
 Karpatczycy Tassie 1947 |
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Tobruk
(Libya),
October 1941
of the Tobruk Fortress until the departure of the Australian troops, with General Stanisław Kopański, Commander of the Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade of Riflemen
Photos courtesy of Australian War Memorial |
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Cairo (Egypt), 21 November 1941
Photos courtesy of Australian War Memorial |
Rafa
(Palestine), 30
October 1942
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Polish
military
presence in the
West
        Photos courtesy of The Home Army Museum, Kraków, Poland |
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Clive "Killer"
Caldwell - Stuka Party
More...
written by George Dragicevic
Photos courtesy of RAAF Museum and Skrzydlata Polska Clive
Robertson Caldwell was born in
Lewisham, Sydney on the 28th of July, 1911. Pre war he trained for his
civil pilot's licence whilst a member of the Royal Aero Club. He joined
the RAAF at the beginning of the war in 1939 and was commissioned as a
Pilot Officer in 1940. As he was destined to become an instructor after
completing his training, he resigned and re-applied as an air-crew
trainee. His commission was reinstated in January 1941, and he was sent
to the Middle East where he took up flying duties in Tomahawks with 250
Squadron RAF. Following a short period of operations in Syria and
Cyprus, Caldwell and the squadron were relocated to the Western Desert.
It was in this theatre that he achieved great success during intensive
operations. By
mid-1941, Caldwell had flown about 40 operational sorties, but had only
one confirmed kill - a Bf 109. He was perplexed by the fact that he had
trouble scoring hits on enemy aircraft. Whilst returning to base one
day, he noted his squadron's aircraft casting shadows on the desert
below. He fired a burst of his guns and noted the fall of shot relative
to his shadow. He realised this method allowed for the assessment of
required deflection to hit moving targets. Further experimentation lead
him to acquire the knowledge to assess deflection needed for a range of
speeds. Within a couple of weeks he had attained four further kills and
a half share. Caldwell's method of "shadow shooting" became a standard
method of gunnery practice in the Middle East. On 29 August 1941 Clive
Caldwell was attacked by two Bf 109s North-West of Sidi Barrani. One of
his attackers was the Bf 109 E-7 "black 8" of 2./JG 27 piloted by one
of Germany's top aces, Lieutenant Werner Schroer who was
credited
with 114 Allied planes in only 197 combat missions. Caldwell's P-40
"Tomahawk" of 250 Squadron was riddled with more than 100 rounds of 7.9
mm slugs, plus five 20 mm cannon strikes which punctured a tyre and
rendered the flaps inoperative. In the first attack Caldwell suffered
bullet wounds to the back, left shoulder, and leg. In the next pass one
shot slammed through the canopy, causing splinters which wounded him
with perspex in the face and shrapnel in the neck. Two cannon shells
also punched their way through the rear fuselage just behind him and
the starboard wing was badly damaged. Despite damage to both himself
and the aircraft, Caldwell, feeling, as he remembers, "quite hostile"
turned on his attackers and sent down one of the Bf 109s in flames. The
pilot of the second Messerschmitt, the renowned Lieutenant Schroer,
shocked by this turn of events, evidently made off in some haste.
Caldwell's engine had caught fire, however he managed to extinguish the
flames with a violent slip. He then nursed his flying wreck back to
base at Sidi Haneish. Caldwell's
most successful day was the 5th of December 1941 when he shot down five
Ju 87s in a single engagement during operation "Crusader". Here is the
combat report of that action:
"I received radio warning that a large enemy formation was approaching ... |
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 Courtesy of
Australian
War Memorial
Click
on a picture to enlarge
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Allied Air
Force
Waldemar Niemotko Both Australian and Polish soldiers fought in foreign lands, sometimes against all odds. Warsaw, the capital of Poland, played a pivotal role when German troops retreated from the Soviet onslaught in 1944 and the powerful Red Army was about to show Stalin’s iron fist in forcing his imperial power on freedom-loving nations of central and eastern Europe. In these desperate circumstances, the Warsaw Uprising started in August 1944. Some Allied pilots, realising the overwhelming odds against which the Polish Home Army were fighting, were eager to participate in a daring mission to bring air supplies to the insurgents. As a gesture of gratitude from the present generation, a Polish project is underway, to erect a magnificent monument in Kraków on the banks of the Vistula (Wisła) river, honouring the fallen Allied pilots. There were brave Australians among them. Those lucky ones who survived after parachuting out of damaged planes, managed to find refuge among local guerrillas and the caring hands of Polish nurses. A well documented story tells about one of them who came back from Australia after the war, in order to get married to his war-time nurse and bring her to live under the Southern Cross. This looks like an unending story of a good-will chain reaction.  "Consolidated
B-24 Liberator" on delivering military supplies to Polish insurgents in
1944
 "Consolidated
B-24 Liberator" under German anti-aircraft fire, over Southern Poland
in 1944
   Commemorative
candles in Kraków, Poland
 On the 42nd anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising to honour brave Allied airmen who brought relief to the fighting Warsaw. On 17 August 1944 in Zabłocie the aircraft “Liberator” of the 205 South African Bomber Group was shot down. Those killed of the 178th Bomber Division of the Royal Air Force, were: F/Ldr John P. Liversidge RAAF F/Lt Pilot William D. Wright RAF F/Sgt A/G John D. Clarke RAF Lest we forget The Kraków Club of the Aviation Seniors Union of (former) Battlers for Liberty and Democracy, Podgórze Branch Kraków 1986 |
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Polish
Intelligence:
Input into the Victory in WWII
Author: dr Jan Stanisław Ciechanowski, Editor: dr Waldemar Niemotko The
research about the input
of Polish intelligence into the victory over Nazi Germany in
WWII
was prompted after 2005, as a result
of an Anglo-Polish Historical Committee having been formed, following
the talks
between the Prime Ministers: Tony Blair and Jerzy Buzek. It
was
supplemented by documents which were
found, in greater
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Community Awareness of Polish History  |
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Australian
International Research Institute Incorporated
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