Tomasz Arciszewski

Tomasz Stefan Arciszewski (born November 4, 1877 in Sierzchowy near Rawa Mazowiecka , † November 20, 1955 in London ) was a Polish politician and Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile from 1944 to 1947 .

Life

Professional and first political activities

The son of a veteran of the January uprising of 1863/1864 began working as a worker in a steel factory in Sosnowiec , a center of the heavy industry region of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie , after attending the commercial schools in Lubań and Radom in 1894 .

In 1896 he became a member of the Polish Socialist Party ( Polska Partia Socjalistyczna - PPS ) founded in Paris in 1892 . After participating in a strike in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, he was released and had to flee Poland because of his political activities. Between 1898 and 1900 he lived first in London and then in Bremen , where he was one of the leaders of the “Society of Polish Socialists in Exile” (Związku Zagranicznego Socjalistów Polskich) .

Despite the danger of arrest by the Tsarist police, Arciszewski returned to Poland in August 1900, where he was actually arrested a short time later. After his release he resumed his work in the PPS, where he was responsible for the development of organizations and structures in the underdeveloped regions of the country. In this role he spent some time in Częstochowa , Piotrków Trybunalski and Podlachia .

In 1904 he became a member of the Organizacja Bojowa , a PPS fighting organization for the liberation of Poland. As a close ally of Józef Piłsudski during this time, he also became the leader of the organization in Warsaw and the organizer of a number of assassinations and attacks on high-ranking Russian officials . In addition, on September 26, 1908, he took part in the attack on a Russian passenger and mail train near the Lithuanian city ​​of Bezdany , the so-called "Bezdany Raid" (Akcja pod Bezdanami) , in which the combat organization looted around 200,000 rubles . After the attack he had to flee to Weichselland and later settled in Lviv , where he joined the secret paramilitary organization "Union for Armed Struggle" (Związek Walki Czynnej) .

In 1906 he was one of the founders of the revolutionary faction of the PPS (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna - Frakcja Rewolucyjna), along with Piłsudski , which, unlike other workers' movements, called for Poland's rapid independence from Russia. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War , he left the PPS-FR and became a member of the opposition within the socialist movement .

First World War and independence of Poland

Congress Poland

In August 1914, after the beginning of World War I , he joined the Polish Legions (Legiony Polskie), where he fought with distinction in the 1st  Infantry Regiment of the 1st  Brigade and was promoted to lieutenant . In 1915 he became a political delegate in the Congress Poland occupied by the Central Powers German Reich and Austria-Hungary and at the same time one of the main organizers of the secret Polish Military Organization ( POW , Polish Polska Organizacja Wojskowa ).

After the declaration of Emperor Wilhelm II and Emperor Franz Joseph on November 5, 1916 and the subsequent establishment of the reign of Poland , he was elected a member of the Warsaw City Council, of which he was a member until 1934 and then again from 1938 to 1939. In Warsaw he was also the founder of the trade union , co-founder in 1926 and, until the beginning of the war in 1939, chairman of the workers' association of children's friends (Robotnicze Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieci) and editor of the socialist daily newspapers "Związkowiec" and "Jedność Robotnicza" .

After the collapse of the Central Powers towards the end of the First World War, he became Minister for Labor and Social Affairs on November 7, 1918 in the Provisional Government of the Polish Republic formed by Ignacy Daszyński . After the independence of Poland on November 22nd and the handover of government responsibility from Daszyński to Jędrzej Moraczewski , he was appointed Minister for Post and Telegraphy in the latter's cabinet . He held this office until the end of Moraczewski's tenure on January 16, 1919.

He was then elected member of parliament, the Sejm , and was also a member of the main council of the PPS from 1919 to 1939. Nevertheless he was the organizer of some voluntary units of the labor movement and a supporter of sabotage actions behind the Russian lines during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. After the end of the war he was re-elected as a member of the Sejm in 1922, where he represented the interests of the socialists until 1935 . As one of the most prominent leaders of the PPS, he gradually broke off cooperation with his former ally Piłsudski, who rejected the socialist ideas after independence. This ultimately made him one of the leaders of the coalition of center-left parties - Centrolev .

Second world war and exile

After the attack on Poland and the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, he took part in the defense of Warsaw as one of the commanders of the voluntary workers' battalions.

After the conquest of Poland by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army , he went into the underground movement , where on October 16, 1939, together with Kazimierz Pużak, he founded the Polish Socialist Party - Freedom, Equality, Independence ( PPS - Wolność, Równość, Niepodległość ) as a secret successor the pre-war PPS founded. Arciszewski was also its chairman until July 1944. He then became a member of the Council of National Unity ( Rada Jedności Narodowej ), the parliament of the Polish underground state chaired by Jan Stanisław Jankowski .

Shortly before the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising on August 1, 1944, however, he was evacuated from Poland on July 26, 1944 as part of an airlift as part of "Operation Most III" . He then went into exile via Cairo to London , where he was a candidate for the office of exiled president . The then-elected President Władysław Raczkiewicz named the defeated Arciszewski on August 7, 1944 in accordance with the constitution of April 1935 as his potential successor.

Prime Minister of the government-in-exile and loss of power after the Yalta Conference

In contrast to the Prime Minister of the government-in-exile , Stanisław Mikołajczyk , he was critical of the emerging pressure from the Soviet Union and Mikołajczyk's efforts to find a compromise with Josef Stalin , because he saw the danger of a Soviet-oriented independent Republic of Poland. His own efforts to get the Allied leaders, especially Winston Churchill, to intervene in the Warsaw Uprising, however, were also unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, after Mikołajczyk's resignation due to a government crisis on November 29, 1944, he succeeded him as Prime Minister of the government-in-exile . As such, he advocated the annexation of the entire area of Upper Silesia and East Prussia . But he feared a permanent conflict with the German neighbors, which would make Poland dependent on the Soviet Union if the Polish territory were to be extended to the Oder and Görlitzer Neisse . In an interview with the London Times , he said before the Yalta conference , to which the government-in-exile was not invited: “We want the connection of East Prussia, Upper Silesia and part of Pomerania. (...) We don't want either Wroclaw or Szczecin. We demand our ethnically and historically Polish territories. ” His 1938 demand for the restoration of Poland's eastern border led on the one hand to a break with the British government and on the other to an unsuccessful vote of no confidence in his cabinet for alleged betrayal of Polish war aims in the west.

During the Yalta Conference , he tried to improve relations with Great Britain through US President Franklin D. Roosevelt . Ultimately, however, these efforts by the Polish government-in-exile were unsuccessful, as the Western Allied states accepted the division of territories and the Soviet claims to power over the Eastern European states after the Yalta Declaration . This ultimately led to an increasing and soon very large loss of influence on the part of the Polish government-in-exile and the withdrawal of support from Great Britain and the USA on July 6, 1945.

After the end of the war, according to the memoirs of General Władysław Anders , he tried to prevent his predecessor Stanisław Mikołajczyk from returning to Warsaw. Arciszewski argued that the Polish communists would cite his entry into the new government on the Vistula abroad as evidence that there were real democratic conditions in Poland. In this way, Mikołajczyk would legitimize the rule of the Moscow-led communists; but this ignored the warnings. In his cabinet, which was in office until July 2, 1947, he was also Minister for Labor and Welfare. Successor as Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile was Tadeusz Komorowski .

Arciszewski later belonged to the PPS from August 3, 1954 until his death, along with Władysław Anders and Edward Raczyński, in the so-called Council of Three (Polish Rada Trzech ), which was constituted after the exiled president August Zaleski made his resignation promise in 1947 after the seven-year-old had expired To redeem tenure. From 1961, around 80% of the Poles in exile supported the Council of Three, which held office until 1972.

References

Web links

• Biography on the homepage of the government chancellery (Polish)
• Biographical information in rulers.org

Footnotes

1. ↑ Miroslaw Szymanski: The Child Friends Movement in the Second Republic of Poland (1918-1939). (PDF) p. 16.
2. ^ List of ministers in the Moraczewski cabinet 1918–1919 , in: Herder Institute (Ed.): Documents and materials on East Central European history. Topic module "Second Polish Republic", edit. by Heidi Hein-Kircher . (Accessed April 25, 2014)
3. ↑ Funeral March? In: TIME magazine of February 26, 1945
4. ↑ Recognition. In: TIME magazine from January 15, 1945
5. ↑ Hans-Erich Volkmann, Bernhard Chiari: The Polish Home Army. History and myth of Armia Krajowa since World War II. 2003
6. ↑ "Chcemy przyłaczenia Prus Wschodnich, Górnego Śląska i części Pomorza. (...) Never chcemy ani Wrocławia, ani Szczecinia. Domagamy się naszych etnicznie i historycznie polskich obszarów. ” Quoted from: Władysław Pobóg-Malinowski: Najnowsza historia polityczna Polski. T. 3. London 1960, p. 825.
7. ↑ Detlef Brandes: The way to expulsion 1938-1945. Plans and decisions to "transfer" Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland. 2005
8. ^ Robert Brier: The Polish "Western Thought" after the Second World War (1944–1950). (PDF; 828 kB) Munich 2003, p. 23.
9. ^ Toward a Lost Peace. In: TIME magazine of January 9, 1956
10. ↑ Night Must Fall. In: TIME magazine of July 16, 1945
11. ^ A Brief History of Poland. Part 12 - World War II ( Memento from May 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
12. ^ Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Warsaw 2007, p. 340.