1946: Gen. Leopold Okulicki murdered in Soviet prison
December 24th, 2015 Headsman
The fate of the last Commander in Chief of Home Army General Leopold Okulicki “Niedzwiadka”, imprisoned in Moscow and murdered there, symbolize the postwar fate of the Home Army and of Poland.
-2012 resolution of the Polish parliament
On this date in 1946, Polish Home Army General Leopold Okulicki was murdered by the NKVD in a Moscow prison.
Okulicki (English Wikipedia entry | the much more detailed Polish) embarked his military career at the tender age of 16, when he ditched school in favor of an Austrian legion on the eastern front of World War I — then segued directly into newly independent Poland‘s subsequent war against the Soviets.
Already a veteran soldier, Okulicki proceeded to the Warsaw military academy and made soldiering his career. He had advanced to the brass by the time Hitler and Stalin destroyed Poland in 1939. Okulicki had the tragic honor to maintain the hopeless defense of Warsaw, but went underground thereafter with the remains of the Polish state — hunted by Germans and Soviets alike.
The NKVD caught him in January 1941, but his residence in the discomfiting environs of Lubyanka prison was ended by the Soviet Union’s arrangement with Poland following Operation Barbarossa. Paroled back into the field, he played a leading part for the Polish Home Army for the balance of the war — finally becoming its supreme commander in the last weeks of the war.
Now that the Nazis were no longer knocking on the gates of Moscow, the Soviets renewed their interest in detaining Okulicki, which was again effected with relative ease. (Comparing German and Soviet secret police, Okulicki would say that the NKVD made the Gestapo look like child’s play.) Sentenced “only” to a 10-year prison term at the Russians’ postwar show trial of Polish leadership, Okulicki disappeared into Soviet detention and was never seen again.
In the Khrushchev era, the USSR revealed that Okulicki had died on Christmas eve of 1946 at Butyrka prison; subsequent revelations of the medical records there revealed that he had succumbed to organ damage suggestive of having been beaten to death — perhaps as punishment for hunger-striking.
The post-Communist Russian state has posthumously exonerated Okulicki of his show-trial conviction; he is, of course, an honored figure in post-Communist Poland where many streets and squares bear his name.
On this day..
- 1701: Gottfried Lehmann, Ferenc Rakoczi liberator - 2019
- 1328: Willem de Deken, Flemish merchant-rebel - 2018
- 1969: Equatorial Guinea's Christmas Eve executions - 2017
- 1744: The Black Boy Alley Gang hanged at Tyburn - 2016
- 1774: William Ferguson, redcoat - 2014
- 1715: William Ainslie, Edinburgh Castle betrayer - 2013
- 1635: Hester Jonas, cunning-woman - 2012
- 1941: Eight Russian POWs at Flossenburg - 2011
- Unspecified Year: The Robbers of Nordenshaw - 2010
- 2008: Nine hanged in Iran - 2009
- 1705: John "Half-Hanged" Smith Half-Hanged - 2008
- 1684: Baillie of Jerviswood - 2007
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Bludgeoned,Borderline "Executions",Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Famous,Guerrillas,History,Martyrs,No Formal Charge,Occupation and Colonialism,Poland,Posthumous Exonerations,Russia,Soldiers,Summary Executions,Torture,USSR
Tags: 1940s, 1946, december 24, leopold okulicki, moscow, polish home army, world war ii
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