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| This article is part of the series: Polish Secret State History of Poland |
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| The authorities |
| Government |
| Administration |
| Parliament |
| Courts |
| Political organizations |
| 1 PPS (socialists) |
| 2 SL (agrarian party) |
| 3 SN (right-wing party) |
| SP (Christian democrats) |
| 4 PPR (communists) |
| ONR (right-wing) |
| Falanga (extreme right) |
| SD (centrist) |
| Military organizations |
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| Armia Krajowa |
| Szare Szeregi |
| 1 MR PPR-WRN and GL WRN |
| 2 KB and BCh |
| 3 NOW and NSZ |
| 4 GL and AL |
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| See also: |
| History of Poland |
The Government of the Polish Republic in exile maintained a continuous existence from the time of the German occupation of Poland in September 1939 until the end of the Communist rule in Poland in 1990.
On September 17, 1939, the President of the Polish Republic, Ignacy Moscicki, who was then in the small town of Kosow near the southern Polish border, signed an act appointing Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz, the Speaker of the Senate, as his successor. This was done in accordance with Article 24 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, which provided as follows:
"In the event of war the term of the President's office shall be prolonged until three months after the conclusion of peace; the President of the Republic shall then, by a special act, promulgated in the Official Gazette, appoint his successor, in case the office falls vacant before the conclusion of peace. Should the President's successor assume office, the term of his office shall expire at the end of three months after the conclusion of peace."
Raczkiewicz, who was already in Paris, immediately took his constitutional oath at the Polish Embassy there and became President of the Republic of Poland. He then appointed General Wladyslaw Sikorski as Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces and Prime Minister.
Most of the Polish Navy escaped to Britain, and thousands of other Poles escaped through Romania or across the Baltic Sea to continue the fight. Many Poles took part in defence of France, in the Battle of Britain, at Cassino, Arnhem and other operations beside British forces.
The government in exile, based first in Paris and then in London, was recognised by all the Allied governments. Politically, the government was a coalition of the Polish Peasant PartyThe Polish Peasant Party ( Polish: Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe is a political party in Poland. The party's name traces its tradition to an agrarian political party in Austro-Hungarian controlled Galicia, which has sent MPs to the parliament in Vienna., the Polish Socialist Party and the National Democratic PartyThe National Democratic Party was a pre-WWII Polish right-wing political party co-founded by Roman Dmowski. During WWII became part of a coalition which formed the Polish Government in Exile. Closely linked with the controversial Narodowe Sily Zbrojne (Na, although these parties maintained only a vestigial existence in the circumstances of exile.
When Germany attacked the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1 in 19411941 is also the title of a Steven Spielberg movie made in 1979 see 1941 (film). Events January January 6 Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers his Four Freedoms Speech in the State of the Union Address. January 10 Lend-Lease is introduced into the United St, the Polish government in exile established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, despite Stalin'sIosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Stalin ( Russian: Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin , original name Ioseb Jughashvili ( Georgian: Russian: Iosif Dzhugashvili see Other names section ( December 21 [ December 9, Old Style], 1879 1 March 5, 1953) was a Bolshevik rev role in the destruction of Poland. Hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Soviet Union in eastern Poland in 1939, and many other Polish prisoners and deportees, were released and were allowed to leave the country via IranIran ( Persian: ) is a Middle Eastern country located in southwestern Asia that until 1935 was referred to in the West as Persia''. It borders Pakistan (909km of border) and Afghanistan (936km) to the east, Turkmenistan (1000km) to the northeast, the Casp. They formed the basis for the 2nd Polish Corps led by General Wladyslaw Anders, which together with other earlier created Polish units fought alongside the Allies.
In April 1943 the Germans announced that they had discovered the graves of 4,300 Polish officers who had been taken prisoner in 1939 and murdered by the Soviets, in a mass grave in Katyn Wood near Smolensk. The Germans invited the International Red Cross to visit the site, and they confirmed both that the graves contained Polish officers and that they had been killed with Soviet weapons. The Soviet government said that the Germans had fabricated the discovery. The Allied governments, for diplomatic reasons, formally accepted this, but the Polish government in exile refused to do so.
Stalin then severed relations with the government in exile. Since it was clear that it would be the Soviet Union, not the western Allies, who would liberate Poland from the Germans, this breach had fateful consequences for Poland. In an unfortunate coincidence, Sikorski, the most talented of the Polish exile leaders, was killed in an aircrash near Gibraltar in July. He was succeeded as head of the government in exile by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk.
During 1943 and 1944 the Allied leaders, particularly Winston Churchill, tried to bring about a resumption of talks between Stalin and the government in exile. But these efforts broke down over several issues. One was the massacre at Katyn. Another was Poland's postwar borders. Stalin insisted that the territories annexed in 1939, which had a majority of Ukrainians and Byelorussians, should remain in Soviet hands, and that Poland should be compensated with lands to be annexed from Germany. Mikolajczyk refused to compromise on this issue. A third issue was Mikolajczyk's insistence that Stalin not set up a Communist government in postwar Poland.
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