On this date in 1946, market day in the southeastern Polish town of Debica, three captured fighters* from the anti-communist Freedom and Independence (WiN) movement were publicly hanged.

This salutary, and surprise, hanging was a nasty public message during the dirty post-war war to consolidate communist authority in Poland.

The message, however, was not exactly meant for a world wider than Poland itself, so the fact that it was captured in a grainy photograph snapped by WiN agent Józef Stec and subsequently smuggled out to the West was not at all to the liking of Polish authorities.

According to a WiN eyewitness report also presumed to have been filed by Stec,

First the MO [local militia], the UB, and the military occupied the execution square holding their machine guns ready to fire. Then, a car came with uniformed individuals who placed the noose on the hook. After a short time the same car brought three condemned men in white shirts. Their hands and legs were tied with barbed wire. A Jewish prosecutor read the sentence and passed the condemned into the hands of the executioner. Before the execution, one of the condemned yelled: “Long live the Home Army. Long live General Anders and General Bor-Komorowski. Down with the commies. Brothers persevere or you’ll die like us. I swear before God that I have never been a bandit [as communist authorities designated them]. I am dying for the Motherland. Lord forgive them [the executioners] because they know not what they are doing.

* The victims were Józef Grebosz, Józef Kozlowski, and Franciszek Noster, according to the 2003 monograph After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish conflict in the wake of World War II, by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. This monograph is also the source for Stec’s quoted report on the hanging.

On this day..

• 1919: Henry Perry, made more vicious
• 1507: Paolo da Novi, Doge of the people
• 1941: George Johnson Armstrong, under the Treachery Act
• 1835: Ruel Blake, "often seen among negroes"
• 1535: Jacob van Campen, Amsterdam Anabaptist
• 1584: Francis Throckmorton, plotter
• 1654: Gerard the conspirator, and the Portuguese envoy's brother
• 1917: "John Nelson", mystery man
• 1950: American soldiers during the Korean War
• 1976: Costas Georgiou and three other mercenaries in Angola
• 2000: Dmitry Chikunov, secretly
• 2007: Zheng Xiaoyu, former Director of the State Food and Drug Administration