On May 21, 1945, a unit of the Polish

Home Army The Home Army (, ; abbreviated AK) was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Armed Resistance) established in the ...

(Armia Krajowa, AK), led by Colonel Edward Wasilewski, attacked a Soviet

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...

camp located in

Rembertów Rembertów () is a dzielnica, district of the city of Warsaw, the capital of Poland. Between 1939 and 1957 Rembertów was a separate town, after which it was incorporated as part of the borough of Praga-Południe. Between 1994 and 2002 it formed ...

in the eastern outskirts of

Warsaw Warsaw, officially the Capital City of Warsaw, is the capital and List of cities and towns in Poland, largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the Vistula, River Vistula in east-central Poland. Its population is officially estimated at ...

. Hundreds of Polish citizens had been imprisoned there, including members of the

and other members of the underground resistance.

Norman Davies Ivor Norman Richard Davies (born 8 June 1939) is a British and Polish historian, known for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland and the United Kingdom. He has a special interest in Central and Eastern Europe and is UNESCO Profes ...

, '' Rising '44'', 2004, Viking Penguin, , p. 495

, '' Rising '44'', 2003, Macmillan, , p. 495

, '' Rising '44'', 2004, Pan, , p. 497Tadeusz Piotrowski, ''Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947'', McFarland & Company, 1998, , p. 131
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Prisoners at the camp were being systematically

deported to Siberia From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly Population transfer, transferred populations of various groups. These act ...

. As a result of the attack, all of the Polish political prisoners were freed from the camp by the pro-independence resistance.

Background

Rembertów is located within the boundaries of Warsaw. In the 1940s, it was a separate town. In the summer of 1941, after the

Operation Barbarossa Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and several of its European Axis allies starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. More than 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the western Soviet Union along ...

the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the

Wehrmacht The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the German Army (1935–1945), ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmac ...

opened "Stalag 333", a camp for Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs), located in a former ammunition factory (or "pocisk" meaning "bullet") in Rembertów. In 1944, the Soviet forces captured the camp and reopened it. They imprisoned members of the

, who were seen as enemy combatants due to their loyalty to the

Polish government in exile The Polish government-in-exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile (), was the government in exile A government-in-exile (GiE) is a political group that claims to be the legitimate government of a sovere ...

NKVD camp

On July 26, 1944, the Soviet sponsored

Polish Committee of National Liberation The Polish Committee of National Liberation ( Polish: ''Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego'', ''PKWN''), also known as the Lublin Committee, was an executive governing authority established by the Soviet-backed communists in Poland at the la ...

gave NKVD agents their remit in the Polish territories. Then, on September 11, 1944, Soviet forces took the town of Rembertów.Tadeusz Piotrowsk, ''Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947'', McFarland & Company, 1998, , p.104
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The Soviet troops reopened the Rembertów prisoner of war camp to detain Polish and German prisoners as well as former Russian detainees, who were assumed to have collaborated with the

Nazis Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...

. The Polish detainees included soldiers of the Home Army as well as those of other resistance organizations such as the '' Narodowe Siły Zbrojne'' (NSZ, the national army force) and the '' Bataliony Chłopskie'' (BCh, the peasant battalions). Rembertów camp also became a mustering point for Polish anti-communists being sent to

Siberia Siberia ( ; , ) is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states ...

. Russian troops tried to hide this from the local Polish townsfolk by ordering the prisoners in broken German. The camp was surrounded by two barbed wire fences. Between the fences was a path patrolled by armed guards and their dogs. The camp was also guarded by NKVD officers armed with machine guns in towers. The camp commander, Colonel Alexandrov, held a roll call of prisoners at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. each day. Conditions in the camp were harsh. In his book, '' Rising '44'' (2004),

writes, "A man who passed through Rembertów described the conditions. They were not to be compared to the relative luxury at Sandbostel or Murnau" and throughout the winter of 1944–1945, "prisoners were frequently held in the open, without shelter, in a compound surrounded by barbed wire (...) According to the reports, when locals enquired about the suffering prisoners, who were clearly visible from a nearby road, they were told that the compound contained ''

Volksdeutsche In Nazi Germany, Nazi German terminology, () were "people whose language and culture had Germans, German origins but who did not hold German citizenship." The term is the nominalised plural of ''wikt:volksdeutsch, volksdeutsch'', with denoting ...

'' and Nazis". On March 25, 1945, the first rail transport of Polish soldiers left Rembertów for

. Over 1,000 soldiers were transported. One-quarter did not survive the journey. The dead were carried to a special rail car at the rear of the train. In early March 1945, the NKVD had arrested General Emil Fieldorf ("Nil"). Fieldorf remained unrecognised as he gave the name "Walenty Gdanicki". The Polish resistance soon learned that Fieldorf was imprisoned at the Rembertów camp. He was transported onwards to Siberia before Colonel

Jan Mazurkiewicz Jan Mazurkiewicz, pseudonym: "Zagłoba", "Socha", "Sęp", "Radosław" (27 August 1896 – 4 May 1988) was a Polish military leader and politician, colonel of Home Army and brigadier general of the Polish People's Army. Founder of the Secret Mil ...

("Radosław") could mount an operation to free him.

Attack

In April and May 1945, the NKVD brought more prisoners to the camp including General Edward Gruber, Colonel Kazimierz Marszewski and the philosopher, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The next transport to Siberia was planned for May 25, 1945. Captain Walenty Suda ("Młot": hammer), the Home Army commander of

Mińsk Mazowiecki Mińsk Mazowiecki (, ) is a town in eastern Poland with 40,999 inhabitants (2020). It is situated in the Masovian Voivodeship and is a part of the Warsaw metropolitan area. It is the capital of Mińsk County. Located 20 kilometers from the city li ...

District planned to attack the camp prior to the transport. Suda gave Lieutenant Edward Wasilewski ("Wichura": gale) command of 44 well-trained fighters. Thirty-two of the fighters were from Wasilewski's unit. Twelve were from the unit under Colonel Edmund Swiderski. While disguised as a soldier of the ''

Ludowe Wojsko Polskie The Polish People's Army (, ; LWP) was the second formation of the Polish Armed Forces in the East during the latter stages of the World War II, Second World War (1943–1945), and subsequently the armed forces of the History of Poland (1945 ...

'' (Polish Communist Army), Wasilewski reconnoitred the camp. On the night of Saturday, May 20, 1945, the prisoners' relatives brought large quantities of alcohol to the camp to ensure the NKVD guards would become drunk. The prisoners were informed of the imminent attack. The Soviet camp commander left for a party in the nearby village of Kawęczyn. The Polish Army unit travelled to Rembertów on horses from nearby Długa Kościelna village and then divided into three groups. The first group, led by "Wichura" (Gale), was to open the camp gate to release the prisoners. Wichura did not want to release German prisoners nor Russian soldiers from the units of General Andrei Vlasov. The second group's mission was to suppress the guards and the third group was to act as lookouts. The attack lasted approximately 25 minutes. The surprised NKVD guards offered little resistance and about 100 wounded and sick Polish prisoners were taken away on two trucks. The remaining prisoners dispersed into the forests and villages. Reports of the NKVD dead vary between 15 and 68 men. Approximately 40 Polish prisoners were killed by machine gun fire while escaping. Three members of the Home Army unit were injured but none killed.

Aftermath

The number of prisoners released in the attack vary from 466 in NKVD reports, 800 in Home Army reports and 1,400 in other historical analyses. On the morning of Sunday, May 21, 1945, Soviet troops, supported by aircraft, combed the area around Rembertów in search of the escapees. On that day, twenty-seven escapees, mostly German soldiers who did not know where to go, were recaptured. In the following days, approximately fifty escapees were caught and some summarily executed.

Lavrentiy Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria ka, ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია} ''Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria'' ( – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph ...

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

ordered a special investigation; dismissed the commander of the Rembertów camp and closed the camp; and ordered a review of all such camps. On May 21, 1995, a monument to commemorate the camp and the attack was unveiled in Rembertów. The text of the tablet on the monument reads: English translation:

References

*
LIKWIDACJA OBWODU "OBROŻA" AK. DRAMAT LAT 1944-1945
ŚWIATOWY ZWIĄZEK ŻOŁNIERZY ARMII KRAJOWEJ on the pages of Instytut Biotechnologii Przemysłu Rolno-Spożywczego * Marek Hołubicki, Stanisław Madras
ROZBICIE OBOZU NKWD W REMBERTOWIE. Fragment książki
- part of the book ''Sowieckiemu zniewoleniu NIE. Harcerska druga konspiracja 1944-1956'', LAD, 2005, * Andrzej Kulesza, , '' Nasz Dziennik'', 2005-05-21 * ANDRZEJ M. KOBOS
STALINOWSKI TERROR KOMUNISTYCZNY W POLSCE
Zwoje (The Scrolls) 6 (19), 1999 * Henryk Gojski, "Rembertów - maj 1945. Kontra NKWD". Article published in "

Gazeta Polska ''Gazeta Polska'' (Literal translation, lit.: ''Polish Newspaper'') is a Polish language pro-United Right (Poland), United Right right-wing populist to far-right weekly magazine published in Poland. Profile and history ''Gazeta Polsk''a was f ...

" weekly, August 1, 2007, page 17. *
General Serov's Souvenirs
',

Warsaw Voice ''Warsaw Voice: Polish and Central European Review'', commonly shortened to ''The Warsaw Voice'', is an English-language newspaper printed in Poland, concentrating on news about Poland and its neighbours. First released in October 1988, it is a ge ...

, 10 June 2001

External links