Aleksander Zawadzki

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Aleksander Zawadzki

Aleksander Zawadzki (born December 16, 1899 in Ksawera near Będzin , † August 7, 1964 in Warsaw ) was a Polish communist general and politician . From 1952 to 1964 he was Chairman of the State Council of the People's Republic of Poland .

Life

Zawadzki has been in a working class neighborhood called Ksawera (now within the city Będzin) in the time for Russian Poland belonging Dombrowaer coal basin , near the border triangle Russia / Empire / Austria-Hungary born. During the First World War he was deported to Thuringia as a field worker by the German occupiers . Then he worked in Upper Silesia in the Hohenzollern mine in Beuthen and Laura-Stahlhütte in Siemianowitz . After returning to his hometown, he joined the newly formed Polish Army and fought against the Red Army in the Polish-Soviet War , most recently as a non-commissioned officer .

After the war, Zawadzki was unemployed. Since 1922 he was a member of the Communist Youth Association in Poland and since 1923 of the Communist Workers' Party of Poland . He was subsequently arrested several times for these activities, as the Communist Party was criminalized in interwar Poland and activity in its ranks was illegal. In between prison sentences he made several trips to the Soviet Union . In 1939 he served a prison sentence in Brest and was released after the Soviets took the city. First he worked in the Pinsk district administration until 1941 , after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he was first evacuated to the vicinity of Stalingrad, where he worked in a construction battalion of the Red Army. In 1942, at Georgi Dimitrov's intervention, he was released from this job due to heart problems and was employed as a mining worker near Novosibirsk .

Since 1943 he belonged to the Union of Polish Patriots and the Polish Army in the Soviet Union and, thanks to his military experience, his acquaintance with Karol Świerczewski and, last but not least, his contacts with the NKVD , he was quickly promoted to officer and was appointed head of the army's political department. In 1944 Zawadzki joined the Polish Workers' Party and was accepted into the party's central committee and as a member of the National Council . In 1945 he was promoted to division general and appointed voivode (district president) of the newly formed Silesia-Dombrowa Voivodeship , which united the two neighboring mining areas in Upper Silesia and the Dombrowa coal basin.

General Aleksander Zawadzki, in his capacity as voivode, issued the order on June 18, 1945 in the occupied or de facto annexed to Poland and at that time still largely German-populated areas to expel the German civilian population from their homes and to transfer them to internment camps . This order issued by him then led to the establishment of the camp in Lamsdorf , which was a prisoner of war camp of the German Air Force as early as the Second World War . The German civilian population, which was supposed to be removed through expulsion or had not managed to escape to the west , was then held in this camp . Between 1,000 and 1,500 men, women and children in the Lamsdorf camp were either killed by Polish camp guards or died of hunger or disease. The camp was operated until autumn 1946.

It is sometimes claimed that Zawadzki, as a voivode, was ultimately unable to act independently and, after observing the growing displeasure of the population, campaigned for Konstantin Rokossowski to have the Upper Silesians who dominated the Polish dialect released.

Zawadzki had been a member of the Sejm since 1947 . After the unification of the Polish Workers' Party with the Polish Socialist Party to form the PVAP in 1948, he was a secretary of the Central Committee. From January 20 to June 10, 1949 and again between April 28, 1950 to November 21, 1952 he was Deputy Prime Minister in the first Cyrankiewicz cabinet and from 1949 to 1950 chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions. On November 10, 1952 he was elected Chairman of the Council of State and thus head of state. Until his death in 1964, he remained a member of the Sejm and chairman of the State Council.

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  1. ↑ According to Munzinger's biography, he should have been involved in the Russian civil war on the Bolshevik side. This contradicts all Polish sources.
  2. ^ Tomasz Szymczyk: Aleksander Zawadzki ...


personal data
SURNAME Zawadzki, Aleksander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish communist politician
DATE OF BIRTH December 16, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Ksawera near Będzin
DATE OF DEATH 7th August 1964
Place of death Warsaw