A major army, 400,000 strong, made a major difference in World War 2. Yet it doesn’t get enough attention in the West (nor, unfortunately, on this podcast). It’s the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army. From exposing the Holocaust, to breaking the German Enigma Code, to helping destroy V-2 rockets, the AK bridged the Eastern and Western Fronts of the Second World War.
Map 1: German invasion of Poland, September 1939
Map 2: Soviet invasion of Poland, September 1939
Historic photos
Flag of the Armia Krajowa, Polish Home Army
Gen. Michal Tadeusz Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz second-in-command of the Army of Warsaw
Wladyslaw Sikorski, Prime Minister of Polish Government-in-Exile
Elzbieta Zawacka, “Agent Zo"
Elzbieta Zawacka’s story, Agent Zo by Clare Mulley
Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 1943
SS burns the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943
SS transports Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto to extermination camps
AK fighters
Polish Boy Scouts in AK, 1944
Women members of AK
Enigma, the German coding machine
The three Polish cryptologists who broke the German Enigma code: left to right, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki, and Henryk Zygalski
Sources:
Antony Beevor, The Second World War. London, UK: Little, Brown and Co., 2012.
Richard Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1986, and University of Kentucky Press, 1986.
Home Army Museum/Muzeum Armii Krajowej, https://muzeum-ak.pl/
Wikipedia, various pages.
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