Czesław Kiszczak

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Czesław Kiszczak

Czesław Jan Kiszczak (born October 19, 1925 in Roczyny near Bielsko-Biała , † November 5, 2015 in Warsaw ) was a Polish general and politician. From 1981 to 1990 he was Minister of the Interior of the People's Republic of Poland , briefly Prime Minister in 1989 and Deputy Prime Minister in the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki from 1989 to 1990 .

He was one of those responsible for the preparation and implementation of martial law in the People's Republic of Poland in 1981 .

Life

Young years

Kiszczak was the son of a steelworker who was active in communist groups. During the German occupation in World War II , Kiszczak was deported to the German Reich as a youth for forced labor . After the war ended in 1945, he became a member of the Polish People's Army and the Polish Workers' Party (PPR).

In the People's Republic of Poland

In 1946 Kiszczak was seconded to the Polish military mission in London for a year . His duties included spying on officers of the Anders Army , which had remained in British exile . He contacted several of them and persuaded them to return to Poland. Several of the returnees were tried there. Most of the files on Kiszczak's secret service activities in London were destroyed after the political changes of 1989/90; The order to destroy the files was given by Kiszczak, who was then Minister of the Interior. According to Polish historians, Kiszczak was a “staunch Chekist ” during his time in London . In 1948 he joined the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), in which the PPR was absorbed. In the following years he also worked for the secret service and counter-espionage , most recently as head of the military secret service .

As a close associate of Wojciech Jaruzelski , he was instrumental in drawing up plans for the imposition of martial law in 1980 and 1981 . In 1981 he appointed him Minister of the Interior. According to the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN), which is dedicated to coming to terms with communist and Nazi crimes on behalf of the state, Kiszczak was one of the main people responsible for the repression of the democracy movement around the Solidarność union . In order to split the opposition, he a. 1983 propose to the imprisoned dissident Adam Michnik to leave for France ("to the Côte d'Azur "), but Michnik declined this offer.

In 1985, Kiszczak ordered the "Hiacynt" (Hyacinth) operation, during which the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) secret police, under his control, arrested and registered several hundred homosexuals . According to Polish historians, the aim of the campaign was to gain knowledge, especially from the cultural scene , through blackmailing informal employees (in Polish abbreviated to TW). The action was a violation of the law, since in the People's Republic of Poland, in contrast to the Soviet Union , for example , homosexual practices and lifestyles were not a criminal offense .

Kiszczak (l.), Honecker (r.) And Mielke (2nd from right) at a meeting in Berlin (1988)

In 1986 Kiszczak was appointed to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the PVAP. As a party leader, he was one of the co-organizers of the round table talks from February to April 1989 and was scheduled to be the new Prime Minister of Poland in July 1989. Jaruzelski, who had recently been elected president by parliament with a narrow majority, nominated him for this office, but the previous bloc parties refused to support it. After Rakowski's resignation, Kiszczak was only interim Prime Minister of Poland for a few weeks in August. After the formation of the new, mostly non-communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki , Kiszczak was again deputy prime minister and interior minister.

In this function, Kiszczak ordered an extensive destruction of SB files without Mazowiecki's knowledge and allowed former SB officers to clean their personnel files of incriminating material. When this practice became known, he was forced to resign from the government. He was succeeded on July 6, 1990 by the philosopher Krzysztof Kozłowski , editor of the Catholic weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny and a confidante of Mazowiecki.

After the political change of 1989/90

In 2001 Adam Michnik, meanwhile editor-in-chief of the left-liberal Gazeta Wyborcza , named Kiszczak a man of honor (“człowiek honoru”); he kept all the promises made at the round table. With this defense of Kiszczak, Michnik sparked a great controversy. In 2013 Michnik revoked his declaration of honor.

For his order to crack down on the strike at the Wujek colliery in Katowice on December 16, 1981, in which several people were killed, Kiszczak was sentenced in 2004 to four years imprisonment, which was suspended for two years. On January 12, 2012, Czesław Kiszczak was found guilty of violating the constitution in imposing martial law in 1981 . The sentence of four years in prison was halved due to an amnesty from 1989 and suspended for five years.

Ten weeks after his death, the Polish media reported in February 2016 that his widow Maria had gone to the head of the IPN in Warsaw to sell him intelligence files that her deceased husband had hoarded at home for 90,000 zloty. However, the latter did not respond to the offer, rather the public prosecutor's department at the IPN had the collection of documents confiscated immediately. Among them was a bundle of files on the secret service informant "Bolek" from the years 1970 to 1976. According to reports, the real name for "Bolek" is in several documents: Lech Wałęsa . After the publication of some of the documents from the "Bolek" file, Polish historians pointed out that in the early 1980s Kiszczak had instructed the SB counterfeiting workshop to produce documents that were supposed to compromise Wałęsa as SB informers. Some of the documents were leaked to the Nobel Prize Committee in Oslo on Kiszczak's orders after it became known that Wałęsa was one of the candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. The fact that he actually received the award in 1983 was viewed as a serious defeat for Kiszczak.

literature

  • Czeslaw Kiszczak , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 25/1995 of June 12, 1995, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely available)
  • Lech Kowalski: Cze.Kiszczak. Biografia called broni Czesława Kiszczaka. Zysk i S-ka, Warsaw 2015 ISBN 978-83-7785-836-3
  • Jan Widacki: Czego never powiedział generał Kiszczak. Z Janem Widackim rozmawia Wojciech Wróblewski. Polska Oficyna Wydawnicza BGW, Warsaw 1992 ISBN 83-7066-324-9 .

Web links

Commons : Czesław Kiszczak  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ Zmarł generał Czesław Kiszczak. radiozet.pl , November 5, 2015.
  2. ↑ Agata Kondzińska: Kiszczak śledził Żołnierzy Andersa , polskatimes.pl , July 16 of 2008.
  3. ↑ Sławomir Centkiewicz, Londyńskie raporty Kiszczaka , in: Do rzeczy , November 7, 2016, pp. 84–87.
  4. ↑ Sławomir Cenckiewicz: Długie ramię Moskvy. Wywiad wojskowy Polski Ludowej 1943–1991 . Poznań 2011, pp. 187–191.
  5. ↑ Czesław Kiszczak never żyje. Były szef MSW, współodpowiedzialny za stan wojenny, miał 90 lat , gazeta.pl , November 5, 2015.
  6. ↑ Czesław Kiszczak never żyje. Komunista, który likwidował komunizm , wyborcza.pl , November 5, 2015.
  7. ↑ Kazimierz Sikorski, Generał Kiszczak poluje na gejów, in: Nasza Historia / The Polska Times , 1/2015, pp. 60–62.
  8. ↑ Czesław Kiszczak, Wyborcza.pl , September 8, 2009.
  9. ↑ 25 lat walki z agenturą. Z Piotrem Woyciechowskim rozmawia Piotr Zychowicz, in: Do Rzeczy - Historia , 2.2016, p. 13.
  10. ↑ Kozłowski Krzysztof, minister spraw wewnętrznych , Gazeta Wyborcza , May 29, 1992, p. 3.
  11. ^ Adam Michnik: Kiszczak jest człowiekiem honoru , wiadomosci.wp.pl , January 29, 2015.
  12. ↑ Kania niewinny, Kiszczak winny, Słomka do więzienia. Dziennik , January 12, 2012.
  13. ↑ IPN: Żona Kiszczaka chciała sprzedać teczki za 90 tys. złotych ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , newsweek.pl , February 17, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / polska.newsweek.pl
  14. ↑ Wałęsa, an informant? , sz.de , February 18, 2016.
  15. ↑ Bolek and the General's files , faz.net , February 26, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Kiszczak, Czeslaw
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kiszczak, Czesław Jan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish politician, member of the Sejm and military, Minister of the Interior of Poland (1983–1990)
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Roczyny near Bielsko-Biała , Poland
DATE OF DEATH 5th November 2015
Place of death Warsaw