Jan Ludyga-Laskowski

Jan Gabriel Ludyga-Laskowski (born March 15, 1894 in Rosenberg , Upper Silesia , † 1956 ) was a Polish officer and political activist.

Life

Ludyga-Laskowski, a native of Upper Silesia , had been a member of the Sokol since 1909, and he headed its section in Bytom from 1909 to 1914. During the First World War he initially belonged to the Prussian army, but deserted from it in 1915 and joined the Haller Army - an association of people of Polish origin who fought on the side of the Entente powers against the Central Powers - in France.

In 1919 Ludyga-Laskowski returned to Poland. There he was one of the leading organizers of the Polish armed movement in Upper Silesia. He was u. a. Chief of Staff of the Polish Military Organization of Upper Silesia, which prepared the uprisings in Upper Silesia . In the third uprising (1921) he was u. a. Battalion commander, then commander of the I. Insurgent Division and finally deputy to the commander-in-chief of the insurgent groups.

From 1921 to 1926 Ludyga-Laskowski was a member of the Polish army. From 1926 he was chairman of various veterans' associations and made a name for himself through various publications. In 1925 he published a book on the first and second Silesian uprisings (from 1919 and 1920). He then began work on a work on the third uprising. But this work no longer appeared. Instead, he began work on a new book that would give an overall picture of the fighting in Upper Silesia from 1919 to 1921. The materials for the work ended up in the Opole Voivodeship Library after the war and were published in the 1970s.

In 1939 Ludyga-Laskowski published an essay in a British veterans' magazine on the foundation and history of the Polish army in France. In this, in view of the increasingly obvious aggression efforts of National Socialist Germany against Poland at that time, he recalled the achievements of the Polish associations within the allied armies of the First World War and thus the historical ties of the threatened Poland with Great Britain and France. In particular, the common hostility of the three countries to the German Reich, whose disrespectful acts between 1919 and 1939 he had signed, as well as to Bolshevik Russia was evoked in order to appeal to Poland to stand by in the event of a German attack motivate.

After the outbreak of World War II with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 , Ludyga-Laskowski fought first in Poland and then on the side of the western Polish armed forces within the British army against the Axis powers. After the end of the war he stayed in the west.

The National Socialist police officers classified Ludyga-Laskowski as an enemy of the state: in the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office - which mistakenly suspected him to be in Great Britain - placed him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles The Wehrmacht should move into the country from the special SS commandos following the occupation troops, should be located and arrested with special priority.

Fonts

• Materjały do ​​historji powstań g./śląskich , 1925.
• The Polish Army in France , in: FIDAC Review June 1939, pp. 3-6.
• Zarys historii trzech powstań śla̜skich: 1919–1920–1921 , 1973.

literature

• Julia Eichenberg: Fighting for Peace and Welfare: Polish Veterans of the First World War and their international contacts 1919–1939 , 2011.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ entry to Ludyga-Laskowski at the special wanted list GB (play on the site of the Imperial War Museum in London) .