Wladyslaw Anders

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Wladyslaw Anders

Władysław Albert Anders (born August 11, 1892 in Krośniewice -Błonie, † May 12, 1970 in London ) was a Polish general and politician .

Life

In the tsarist empire

Władysław Anders was the son of Elisabeth (Elżbieta) Tauchert and Albert Anders, who administered a state estate in Livonia . Both parents were Baltic Germans .

Anders studied at the Technical University in Riga and served in the Imperial Army of Russia from 1913 . In 1917 he took a crash course at the Academy of the General Staff in Petrograd . He then fought in the ranks of the 1st Polish Corps (Imperial Russian Army), which was disbanded by them after the Germans had advanced eastwards.

Republic of Poland

After the re-establishment of Poland, Anders was appointed Chief of Staff of the Polish units during the Greater Poland uprising in Poznan in 1919. In the Polish-Soviet War in 1920 he was in command of the 15th Poznan Uhlan Regiment. After the war he attended the French Military Academy under an agreement between Warsaw and Paris. In 1925 he was appointed city commander of Warsaw . During Piłsudski's May coup in 1926, he commanded the government troops, thus opposing the putschists. But a little later he recognized the new balance of power and was entrusted with further troop commands.

Second World War

During the attack on Poland in 1939, Anders was in command of a cavalry brigade in eastern Poland . He was badly wounded in fighting with Soviet units and became a prisoner of war. The Soviet secret police NKVD imprisoned him first in Lviv , then in Moscow . In Soviet custody he vowed to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism if he survived.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was taken to the NKVD leaders Lavrenti Beria and Vsevolod Merkulov . They made him the offer to head several Polish divisions , which were to be formed from Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union for the fight against the Wehrmacht . Anders accepted the offer, the staff of the II Polish Corps was set up in the town of Buzuluk in the central Russian steppe. Anders had a search office organized to find the whereabouts of around 8,500 Polish officers who had been captured by the Soviets, and he entrusted Józef Czapski with its management . He hired the economics professor Stanisław Swianiewicz , who had been released from a labor camp, to prepare an analysis based on speculations about the whereabouts of the missing officers. Anders personally asked the NKVD leadership about his missing officers, but received only evasive answers. On December 4, 1941, in the Moscow Kremlin, he recorded the conversation between Josef Stalin and Władysław Sikorski , Prime Minister of the Polish government- in- exile in London, during which the host informed the Poles that the officers might have fled "to Manchuria ".

Since the Soviet authorities were unable and, according to Anders, also unwilling to provide sufficient supplies for the newly established Polish units on their territory, they were relocated via Iran to the British mandate areas in the Middle East . During this exodus, Anders learned of the discovery of the mass graves in Katyn Forest . He wrote in his memoirs: "It was clear that the crime of Katyn was committed by the Bolsheviks."

His units moved on to Italy, where they won the Battle of Monte Cassino for the Western Allies with great losses . Their troops had previously failed to storm the monastery fortress, they attributed the failure to the unfavorable weather. Anders then declared: "The rain does no harm to a Pole." This phrase entered the Polish language. After the declaration of Yalta , which he criticized in the harshest possible terms, he demanded the withdrawal of his soldiers from the combat area, which was rejected by the British. Anders protested sharply to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill against the annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, which was accepted by the Western Allies in Yalta. Churchill replied, according to Anders' memoir: “It is your own fault! We have been persuading you for a long time to settle your border affairs with Soviet Russia. [...] We have never guaranteed Poland's eastern border. We have enough armed forces today and no longer need your help. You can keep your divisions to yourself. We can do without them. "

At the end of February 1945 he gave up command of the II Polish Corps after he had been appointed Commander in Chief of the Polish Armed Forces in the West by the Polish government in exile .

British exile

After the end of the war he became one of the most important politicians of Polish emigration in London. The People's Republic of Poland withdrew his Polish citizenship and general title on September 26, 1946 (both were granted posthumously on March 15, 1989 ). The Foreign Office in London declined Anders' Please starting to work for an international investigation of the Katyn massacre, as from the historian Rohan D'Olier Butler written memorandum about the attitude of the British government to Causa Katyn ( Butler memorandum stating).

During the first of the Nuremberg trials , the lawyer Otto Stahmer , the defense attorney for Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring , tried to win other than witnesses for the indictment Katyn. Anders did not reply to the letter because he did not want to give the Soviet prosecutors the opportunity to portray him as the defender of a Nazi criminal. But he gave Stahmer a collection of documents. Stahmer also forwarded these documents to the US delegation in Nuremberg. In 1948, in London, where he had settled, Anders published the Polish “White Book” on Katyn, which became the basis for research into this war crime. In 1952, he testified in London before the Madden Commission , a congressional committee of inquiry into the alleged suppression of information about the Katyn massacre by the Roosevelt government.

According to his will, he was buried with his soldiers in the military cemetery of Monte Cassino .

Web links

Commons : Władysław Anders  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Władysław Anders biography on the homepage of the Technical University Rzeszów (Polish)
  2. ↑ Władysław Anders (Polish)
  3. ^ Stations of the military career according to: Aleksander Szczygło : Przedmowa. In: Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Wydawnictwo Bellona, ​​Warsaw 2007, ISBN 978-83-11-10685-7 , pp. 13-14.
  4. ^ Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Wydawnictwo Bellona, ​​Warsaw 2007, ISBN 978-83-11-10685-7 , pp. 45-48.
  5. ^ Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Wydawnictwo Bellona, ​​Warsaw 2007, ISBN 978-83-11-10685-7 , pp. 96-98.
  6. ↑ Józef Czapski: Na nieludzkiej ziemi. Czytelnik, Warsaw 1990, ISBN 83-07-02092-1 , p. 10.
  7. ↑ Stanisław Swianiewicz: W cieniu Katynia. Warsaw 2010, p. 305.
  8. ↑ Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów. Z przedmową Władysława Andersa. Gryf, London 1948, pp. 90, 97.
  9. ^ Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Wydawnictwo Bellona, ​​Warsaw 2007, ISBN 978-83-11-10685-7 , p. 116.
  10. ^ Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Wydawnictwo Bellona, ​​Warsaw 2007, ISBN 978-83-11-10685-7 , p. 191
  11. ↑ About the rain in Italy
  12. ↑ " Wy sami jesteście temu winningest. Od dawna namawiałem was do załatwienia sprawy granic z Rosją as well ascką… Myśmy wschodnich granic Polski nigdy never gwarantowali. Mamy dzisiaj dosyć wojska i waszej pomocy never potrzebujemy. Może Pan swoje dywizji zabrać. Obejdziemy się bez nich. “- Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Wydawnictwo Bellona, ​​Warsaw 2007, ISBN 978-83-11-10685-7 , p. 338.
  13. ^ William Jackson: The Mediterranean and Middle East: Volume VI Victory in the Mediterranean. Part III - November 1944 to May 1945. p. 226
  14. ^ The Butler Memorandum , p. 35.
  15. ^ Władysław Anders: Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939-1946. Wydawnictwo Bellona, ​​Warsaw 2007, ISBN 978-83-11-10685-7 , pp. 402-403.
  16. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg edition. Hamburg 2015, p. 379.
personal data
SURNAME Different, Wladyslaw
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Different, Władysław Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish general and politician
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Błonie
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1970
Place of death London