Anti-communist resistance in Poland (1944–1953)

BelligerentsCursed soldiersCommanders and leadersUnits involved ...and othersStrength 20,000 partisans
150,000-180,000 totalCasualties and losses 10,000 civilians killed

The anti-communist resistance in Poland, also referred to as the Polish anti-communist insurrection fought between 1944 and 1953, was an anti-communist and anti-Soviet armed struggle by the Polish Underground against the Soviet domination of Poland by the Soviet-installed People's Republic of Poland, since the end of World War II in Europe. The guerrilla warfare conducted by the resistance movement formed during the war, included an array of military attacks launched against communist prisons, state security offices, detention facilities for political prisoners, and prison camps set up across the country by the Stalinist authorities.

In January 1945, the pro-Soviet government installed in Poland by the advancing Red Army declared as "illegal" the Polish anti-Nazi resistance movement, principally the Home Army, and ordered its surviving members to come out into the open while guaranteeing them freedom and safety. Many underground fighters decided to lay down their arms and register, but after doing so, most of them were arrested and thrown in prison. Thousands of them were tortured and later deported into the Soviet Gulag camp system, or tried by kangaroo courts and murdered out of sight after extreme beatings (see, the Uroczysko Baran killing fields among similar others).

As a result of repression, Armia Krajowa (AK) members quickly stopped trusting the new government, and some of them regrouped clandestinely to oppose the new Soviet occupiers. They formed various post-AK resistance organisations, such as Wolność i Niezawisłość ("Freedom and Sovereignty"), and liberated hundreds of political prisoners. They became known as the "cursed soldiers" of the Polish underground, and most were eventually captured or killed by the security services and special assassination squads.