The Polish Military Organization (POW) was the secret army that Józef Piłsudski's camp built in Warsaw from August 1914. It trained young men, spied and sabotaged behind Russian lines, then turned against Germany after Piłsudski's arrest in 1917. In November 1918 its members helped disarm the German garrison and joined the new Polish Army.
The Polish Military Organization (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, POW) was the underground army of the Polish independence camp in the lands of the former Russian partition during World War I. It was founded in Warsaw in 1914 and, in November 1918, its soldiers were among those who took the city from its German garrison.1
This page follows the POW from its founding to the disarming of the Germans and its absorption into the Polish Army, and gives the German, Lithuanian and Soviet sides of the story. It is part of our guide to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921. For the handover of power in Warsaw, see the Regency Council, 1918.
When and how was the POW founded?
The historian Jacek Woyno dates the POW's creation to the first half of August 1914 in Warsaw, a few days after the outbreak of World War I. It came from the merger of two paramilitary groups loyal to Piłsudski, the Polish Rifle Squads (Polskie Drużyny Strzeleckie) and the Riflemen's Union (Związek Strzelecki), and Piłsudski was its first commander-in-chief. Jerzy Gaul also places the merger in August 1914. The Lithuanian encyclopedia VLE gives October 1914. That month Piłsudski's adjutant, Lieutenant Tadeusz Żuliński, arrived in Warsaw with the order to start fighting and sabotage behind the Russian lines at once, and a 1937 study by Wacław Brzozowski, cited by Woyno, treats 1 August to 22 October 1914 as the POW's "beginnings".2
What did the POW do? Spies and saboteurs behind Russian lines
Its founders, Gaul writes, saw the POW as a unit of the Polish army working behind the enemy's lines. Its basic task was the military training of young people, and its members were also to carry out sabotage and intelligence work against Russia in close cooperation with the First Brigade of the Polish Legions. Gaul describes how the intelligence work was done: women of its intelligence section watched Russian troops crossing the Warsaw bridges, reports written in tiny script on tissue paper were sewn into clothing and carried across the front, and when the front became almost impassable in the spring of 1915, coded news reached the Legions as small advertisements in two Warsaw newspapers.3
Why did the POW turn from Russia to Germany?
When the Russians left Warsaw in August 1915, the POW carried out a partial mobilization and formed a battalion that joined the First Brigade at the front, while most members stayed underground. In the autumn of 1915 a Chief Command in Warsaw under Captain Tadeusz Kasprzycki took charge, with Piłsudski still commander-in-chief, and the occupied Kingdom of Poland was divided into 19 districts. Russia remained the enemy, and the POW became above all a school for the cadres of a future Polish army. It also became a political tool. Until October 1916, Gaul writes, its people inside the recruiting offices sent volunteers into the underground instead of to the Legions, and Woyno describes the sharp dispute between Piłsudski and Colonel Władysław Sikorski, head of the Military Department of the Supreme National Committee, that ended in the break-up of the Legions.4
After the Central Powers announced a Kingdom of Poland on 5 November 1916, Piłsudski joined its Provisional Council of State. Michał Wenklar of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) writes that he then hoped to build a Polish army with the help of the POW, which was coming out of the underground. Berlin no longer wanted one: after the February Revolution in Russia, the Porta Polonica project notes, it was generally accepted in Germany that this was no longer the moment to create a Polish army.5
That hope ended in July 1917. Most of the recruits refused the oath of loyalty that the Germans demanded, and the occupiers interned the soldiers who refused. On the morning of 22 July 1917 the Germans arrested Piłsudski in Warsaw and held him, at the end in the fortress of Magdeburg, until November 1918. The POW went back underground.6
The German side had its own reasons. Governor-General Hans von Beseler told the Provisional Council of State that the German leadership had learned of the POW's change of attitude under Piłsudski and that he had become a threat to peace in the country and to the allied troops, the Porta Polonica project of the LWL museum in Bochum writes. A secret German report quoted by Gaul called the POW a precisely and firmly organized secret state within the state, whose attitude to the Central Powers had changed completely in May and June 1917, so that it had to be crushed.7
Who led the POW after Piłsudski's arrest?
Command of the POW passed to Colonel Edward Rydz-Śmigły. Woyno dates his takeover of the high command to October 1917, while a note by Jerzy Wojciechowski gives July 1917. Woyno writes that Rydz-Śmigły and his chief of staff, Julian Stachiewicz, placed four chief commands under the high command: KN I in Warsaw for the German-occupied part of the Kingdom, KN II in Kraków for Galicia, KN III in Kyiv for Russia, and KN IV in Lublin for the Austrian-occupied part of the Kingdom.8
The eastern command, known as KN3, had roots of its own. At the end of August 1914 Piłsudski sent Józef Bromirski to Kyiv, where with Henryk Józewski and others he founded a group called "Dniepr", which joined the POW a few months later, Jan Kęsik writes. KN3 worked across Ukraine and Russia until 1921. The historian Aleksander Holiczenko, using archives in Kyiv, Vinnytsia and Moscow, has since compiled the names of its members and found records of the repression they later suffered, Zygmunt Zalewski notes in his review.9
The POW reached north as well. On Piłsudski's orders a POW district for Vilnius, District XI, was organized from March 1915, and by the end of 1918 the POW was also at work in Lithuania.10
How were the Germans disarmed in Warsaw in November 1918?
The empires collapsed in early November. In Lublin, under the Austrian occupation, the Provisional People's Government of Ignacy Daszyński was formed, and Rydz-Śmigły became its minister of war. POW groups came out of hiding there, and Wojciechowski writes that a battalion of former POW members was formed in Lublin on 10 November.11
In the German zone the decisive day was 10 November. Piłsudski arrived in Warsaw from Magdeburg that morning and, the IPN historian Piotr Kilańczyk writes, was met at the station by a handful of POW members under their chief commandant, Adam Koc. Around midnight a delegation of the German soldiers' council, which formally commanded the Warsaw garrison, came to Piłsudski's lodgings at 2 Moniuszko Street. Its members said they were ready to leave the city if they were guaranteed free passage to Germany, and Piłsudski promised them a safe return home. Włodzimierz Suleja of the IPN writes that he reached an agreement with the soldiers' council almost at once.12
The disarming began on the night of 10 to 11 November and went on for days. The state education platform ZPE stresses that it was done not only by soldiers of the POW but also by the city's residents. Poles took over civil offices and supply and munitions depots, and there was street fighting in Warsaw, Robert Spät writes. The city militia was in the thick of it: its commandant reported that his men took the investigation office, the central jail, the Mokotów prison and railway stations.13
Most German soldiers had no will to fight, Jarosław Centek writes. The militia commandant observed that units grouped in barracks resisted and gave up their arms only after fights, while single soldiers in the street mostly did not resist at all.14
There were exceptions. Centek writes that in Warsaw the Germans resisted only at the city hall, where they gave up their arms after several hours and were allowed to go to the Citadel. Jacek Szczepański identifies them as a company of the officer cadets' regiment from Jabłonna guarding the German police president, Ernst von Glasenapp, who burned secret police files. On 12 November the POW's military police disarmed them, and Piłsudski's liaison officer to the soldiers' council, Ignacy Boerner, escorted the company back to the Citadel to calm its regiment.15
The Citadel was the hard case. On the evening of 9 November the cadets' regiment, about 2,000 disciplined and well-armed men by Boerner's count, had moved there from Jabłonna. An officer on the Government-General's staff, Bogdan Hutten-Czapski, later wrote that about a third of the garrison was not demoralized, refused to give up its weapons and held the Citadel, so that terrible and senseless bloodshed could have followed. Storming it would have cost heavy losses, Centek writes, so the two sides negotiated.16
An agreement was reached on 16 November, and on 19 November the last transport of German soldiers left Warsaw, Centek writes. Szczepański records shots exchanged on 18 November, when the Citadel's arsenal was handed to a Polish battalion, and a last stand-off at the border station of Mława, where the Jabłonna transport gave up its arms only after delegates of the German soldiers' council intervened. By 19 November, the ZPE lesson states, all German units had been evacuated from the former Kingdom of Poland.17
Outside the capital the pattern was similar. The disarming spread to Łódź, Białystok, Kalisz and Siedlce, with fighting in some places, and Poles also took over offices, post offices and railway junctions, Krzysztof Kozicki writes. At Jabłonna north of Warsaw a POW company of about 100 men attacked the barracks on 11 November, and the garrison raised a white flag on 14 November. Governor-General Beseler left Warsaw quietly for Berlin on 12 November.18
Why did the German garrison give up its arms?
Revolution reached the occupation army from home. From the sailors' revolt in Kiel in early November, councils of workers and soldiers formed in almost every German city and took power from authorities they no longer saw as legitimate. In occupied Poland too, Spät writes, the troops were breaking up by 8 November and forming soldiers' councils to organize their return to Germany.19
The garrison was also weak. Centek, using the German official history of the evacuation of the eastern army, counts about 12,000 soldiers under Beseler in mid-October 1918, nearly 3,000 of them fit only for rear duties, in Landsturm units of low quality. That official history admitted that the occupation troops, made up almost entirely of Landsturm, had failed completely and, with few honorable exceptions, let themselves be disarmed without resistance. Szczepański contrasts these weak battalions with the cadets' regiment, one of the best-trained units in the Government-General.20
The POW in the Prussian partition and Upper Silesia
A separate organization grew up under Prussian rule. The Polish Military Organization of the Prussian Partition was founded in the autumn of 1917 on the initiative of Wincenty Wierzejewski, Janusz Karwat writes for the IPN, and in October 1917 Wierzejewski met the head of the Warsaw command's intelligence department, Gaul notes. On 13 November 1918 an armed show of force by its members gave it the upper hand in the executive of the Poznań workers' and soldiers' council, in the run-up to the Greater Poland Uprising, and its cooperation with the Silesian Sokół led to a Polish Military Organization of Upper Silesia, which fought in the Silesian uprisings.21
What happened to the POW after November 1918?
The POW came out of hiding and joined the new army. A General Staff order of 16 November provided that the POW would be incorporated into the army after a separate mobilization, and in Piotrków, Woyno writes, a POW detachment of more than 500 men joined the local infantry regiment on 20 November, and on 23 November a POW company of 123 men left for the fighting at Lwów. Former POW soldiers joined the new units in Lublin and elsewhere, Wojciechowski writes, and the Józef Piłsudski Museum in Sulejówek counts the POW members mobilized by Piłsudski among the core of the new army.22
In the east the war did not end. KN3 worked on in the Russian civil war, and on 31 January 1919 it became "Area III" of the intelligence bureau of the Polish General Staff, Kęsik writes. In Lithuania the POW prepared a takeover meant to install a government friendly to Poland. The VLE dates the planned coup in Kaunas to the night of 28 to 29 August 1919 and records that the Lithuanian authorities learned of it, arrested its leaders and had broken up the organization by the end of September.23
A Lithuanian army court tried the POW members from 11 to 24 December 1920. The Lithuanian historian Pranas Janauskas counts eight life sentences, and most of those convicted were released by the end of 1922. The VLE gives 73 defendants and says most were amnestied at once.24
Veterans kept the memory alive. Former members first formed an association called Polish Freedom Organization and in 1929 the Union of POW Veterans, with Piłsudski as honorary president. A decree of 29 October 1930 created the Cross and Medal of Independence for those who had served the cause of independence before and during the war and in the fighting of 1918 to 1921, with a Cross with Swords for those who fought arms in hand. The Central Military Archives keep lists of KN3 members decorated with them.25
The name had a dark afterlife in the Soviet Union. In 1933 the Soviet political police in Ukraine fabricated the case of a supposed "Polish Military Organization" and arrested several hundred members of the Polish intelligentsia, among them teachers, cultural activists and party officials, Adam Kaczyński writes. The fiction outlived them: in the NKVD's Polish Operation of 1937 and 1938 Poles were charged with membership in this nonexistent POW, the IPN historian Anna Zechenter notes.26
How do historians judge the POW?
Zalewski sees the members of the eastern KN3 as people who served on the most dangerous stretch of the front. Krzysztof Kozicki of the Central Military Archives stresses the speed of the final stage of independence, about three weeks, which surprised European politicians and Polish centers of power alike.27
For the people around it, read our pages on Józef Piłsudski and the Polish Legions in World War I, and for why the country celebrates 11 November, Polish Independence Day.
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