Summing up the preliminary results of the research on the difficult relations between Moscow and Berlin – whose academic analysis is still not suffi cient in many ways – it has to be stressed that practically throughout the period between 1933 and 1939, interest in the improvement of political relations between the countries was displayed by Stalin, who perceived in it both a certain guarantee of the security of the Soviet Union, which he understood in his own way, and a possibility to firmly establish the military power and political infl uence of his country in the international arena. To his tremendous disappointment, Stalin’s efforts in this area of foreign policy, which was of fundamental importance to him, met, in the best of cases, with a total lack of interest on the part of the Third Reich authorities. Only once, when Hitler came upon the idea of breaking the potential alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, making it possible to solve the perennial German problem of a war on two fronts, in the light of a looming conflict with England and France, did he react positively to the continued attempts by Moscow to establish closer relations with Berlin. It was not in any way tantamount to Hitler’s resignation from his main objective, which was to defeat the Soviet Union as a condition for further conquests and control of the European continent, but only entailed a postponement of its actual fulfi lment which, as it would turn out later, did not take so long. The development of the relations between the National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1939 was based on an ideological scenario, with only a few exceptions for the sake of a harsh pragmatism practised predominantly by Hitler, which, in fact, Stalin never understood. All in all, this was the measure of the nature and dimension of the political and military mistakes made by Kremlin between 1939 and 1941.

This article re-examines the opinion about wide-ranging cooperation between the Soviet and German systems of repression in organising crimes against Poles in 1939–1941. The author focuses on the alleged German and Soviet cooperation in the murder of Polish prisoners in the 1940 Katyń Massacre. The nature of the relationship between the Third Reich allied with the USSR gave rise to speculation that crimes against Poles, in particular those committed in the spring of 1940, the Katyń Massacre and AB-Aktion, were coordinated. The article points out diverse character of both crimes. Wasilewski challenges the opinion of scholars who treat meetings between representatives of the Third Reich and the USSR as evidence of Soviet-German cooperation in Katyń. Many such meetings took place in the period from the establishment of ally relations in the summer of 1939 until the outbreak of war in June 1941. Contacts between representatives of security services after the end of military operations in Poland in 1939, and before deterioration of German-Soviet relationships at the end of 1940, were particularly important for the possible transfer of knowledge about Katyń. Meetings were taking place in the capital cities of both states, in frontier towns, e.g. Brest, and towns near the border cordon, e.g. Lutsk, as well as other cities in the occupied Polish territories, interalia in Lviv, Cracow and Zakopane. The author proved that the meetings attracting the most interest of scholars – those in Cracow and Zakopane – are falsely portrayed in the historiography as NKVD – SS or Gestapo conferences on anti-Polish repressions (Katyń – AB-Aktion). He organised the knowledge about the meetings – convened in December 1939 and March 1940 – indicated their purpose (people exchange commissions), and concluded that there is no basis to claim that they were devoted to coordination of anti-Polish crimes. Wasilewski states that documentary sources fail to confirm that Russians shared information about Katyń with their ally during any of the meetings. Next, the author presents documents refl ecting the state of knowledge in the Third Reich about Poles held captive in the USSR during the period from autumn of 1939 to summer of 1941. The documents, produced by and circulated among German institutions, prove that the Nazis were not aware of the Katyń Massacre neither in the spring of 1940, nor at the moment of the attack on the USSR in June 1941. Finally, the author critically examines reports on the Germans’ complicity in the Soviets’ planning or execution of the murder in Katyń in 1940 and proved them unreliable. In the conclusion the author states that the German side had no knowledge about the Katyń Massacre while it remained an ally to the Soviets. He proposes a wider hypothesis stating that operations against the Polish underground political life were taken, and crimes against the Polish nation during the occupation of 1939–1941 were perpetrated with very limited information exchange and operational collaboration between the Third Reich’s and the USSR’s security services.

The text discusses the most signifi cant instrument of the National Socialist occupation policy in the multi-ethnic borderlands of Poland (Kresy), using the example of the Jewish and Ukrainian communities. Under the slogan of the New Order of Europe, a violent attempt was made to create ethnically homogeneous areas through the selection, transfer and extermination of people. During the Second World War, this negative population policy became a purposeful and radically implemented element of German eastern policy. Demographic development and migration were interfered with by the occupiers through expropriation and removal of whole groups of population, according to the occupiers’ desired objectives in order to obtain a correspondingly racially valuable population structure. The long-term objective of this occupation policy was to gain Lebensraum (living space) and fi nally secure biological survival that was exclusively reserved for the Germanic race. For the German occupying force, nationality policy, used in the text in contrast to the National Socialist term Population Policy, was both a cover-up measure and a completely universal means of transforming the Polish national state into a tribal society. As the war progressed, this arbitrary use of power in the occupied eastern areas for the sake of the German war economy paradoxically became characterised by the fact that the occupiers were destroying exactly the Lebensraum (living space), including its population, which was originally meant as the future resource paradise for the Great Germany. Additionally, on the basis of the Jewish policy (Holocaust) and the relative preferential treatment of the Ukrainian population (ukrainising), it shall be further on demonstrated how the German rule affected the interethnic relations on an everyday basis. In the field of tension between collaboration and ethnic cleansing it becomes clear what kind of hopes were inspired among the representatives of the individual groups, as well as what existential demands on each group at a given time arose in connection with the ideologically race-oriented rule of the caste. To this extent, on the one hand, this study pursues a synthesis of the ideological motives and legitimation, and on the other: that of civilisation break-up and the murderous consequences of the National Socialist policy with regard to the pre-war multiethnic Polish society.

The German economic policy in the occupied Eastern Poland has not been well analysed yet. In Eastern Poland, the occupiers encountered different economic structures than in the western part of the country. The size of population and the number of enterprises were much smaller, big industry was largely non-existent and the Soviet occupation authorities had nationalised most of the economy. The German occupiers were not interested in the development of the infrastructure and, to a large extent, limited themselves to the exploitation of raw materials, especially oil and natural gas in Eastern Galicia, as well as to the recruitment of labour force for the Reich. Additionally, the textile industry gained a certain importance for the German war economy. The re-privatisation was limited; a considerable part of the enterprises was shut down and never reopened. The Jewish minority, which had played a considerable role in the economic life, was expropriated and almost entirely murdered. The occupiers also displayed little interest in the re-privatisation of agriculture which – especially in Eastern Galicia – gained increasingly greater importance. In 1943, the Galicia District became the chief provider of grain in the occupied Poland. From the middle of 1942, the Soviet guerrilla war increasingly affected the economic exploitation in North-eastern Poland and from 1943 the activity of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) had the same effect in South-eastern Poland. Finally, the retreat of the Wehrmacht was accompanied with extensive destruction of the infrastructure and economy.

Under the notion of “collaboration”, the author understands any assistance to the occupation authorities that explicitly threatened the interest of the conquered people and state. On the other hand, assistance given to the enemy authorities in order to sustain the occupied territory’s vital state institutions and to protect, as far as possible, the people against the effects of war is treated by the author as “cooperation”. The author analysed this phenomenon in the General Government and concluded that representatives of occupation institutions provided a relatively narrow cooperation platform for the conquered Poles which strongly limited possibilities of advanced collaboration in the area. Even so, collaboration on several different planes did occur in the General Government, although to a limited extent. Collaborative behaviours were occurring, inter alia, on the political plane, even though Germans were not directly interested in political cooperation with Poles as they aimed to eliminate the Polish intelligentsia and reduce the rest of the society to the role of a primitive labour force. An example of political activities bordering on collaboration was Professor Władysław Studnicki’s attempts to come to an arrangement with Germans. Other forms of collaborative behaviours included individual or group participation in anti-Jewish riots resulting from the pre-war anti-Semitism of some Poles. The group of organisations intending to build their political capital through participation in anti-Jewish pogroms included National Radical Organisation (Narodowa Organizacja Radykalna) and “Atak” (“Attack”). Unmistakably collaborative behaviours were also taking place on the military and paramilitary plane. Even though top leaders of Third Reich were reluctant to form Polish armed divisions, in the autumn of 1944 they launched a campaign intended to recruit Poles to “Polish Wehrmacht”, which was to fi ght alongside Germans against the approaching Red Army. In spite of the obviously imminent collapse of the Nazi empire, the unit was joined by 699 people, some of whom were conscripted to “Hitler Jugend” due to young age. Others were distributed among different military units. Another example bordering on paramilitary collaboration was the activities of Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian police forces. They were being used by the enemy to perform operations clearly colliding with vital interests of the conquered people. Also, each offi cial employed in occupation public institutions and civil administration too eager to perform his/her enemy-imposed duties contravening the Polish raison d’état was crossing the thin line separating cooperation from collaboration. Another field where the line of permitted behaviour towards the enemy was being relatively easily crossed was culture and art. Particularly susceptible to collaboration were those writers and journalists who worked for the Nazi-controlled press titles published in the GG. All publications in those periodicals facilitated dissemination of propaganda among the conquered people. Also, the performances of some actors appearing in anti-Polish theatrical shows and propaganda fi lms had an unambiguously collaborative character. The most common and at the same time the most burdensome behaviour of a collaborative nature was individual denunciation, as well as regular cooperation with various Nazi police forces. In the final part of the article the author discusses the ways in which the Polish society and the Polish Underground State counteracted collaboration. Methods included stigmatisation of individual collaborators in the underground press, publication of codes of behaviour towards the enemy for different occupational groups, and went as far as creating an underground military and civil courts system. Independent courts were examining collaboration cases and passing death sentences in particularly gross cases.

The article seeks to illuminate the formulation and implementation of Nazi economic policy in the General Government (GG). The GG had initially been envisaged as a reception area for racially undesirable population and as a territory for economic plunder and cheap labour; but these ideas soon proved impossible to implement. In order to establish the GG as an area of low living costs and as a reserve of cheap labour, and to avoid any dependency on food subsidies from the Reich, it was imperative to keep immigration from the incorporated territories within acceptable limits. But for the GG to be able to take in more population, the economy needed to be rationalised. The analyses of the key economic sectors of agriculture, industry and labour show that the structural problem of economic utilisation of the GG was that the Reich authorities were simultaneously pursuing various mutually exclusive exploitation and utilisation projects. At the same time that they demanded increased delivery of agricultural products and Polish labourers, they also aimed to increase industrial and agricultural productivity in the GG and to transfer to the GG industries from territories more vulnerable to air strikes. In addition to these economic contradictions, political factors have to be taken into account, such as the damaging repercussions of resettlement actions and the terror against the population in the GG. Although the Reich’s expectations were never fully met, the Reich still extracted quite a substantial amount of foodstuffs and labour. The Reich authorities blamed the failure to fully meet the Reich’s demands for the delivery of agricultural produce and labourers and the anarchic situation in the industrial sector on Frank’s failure to create an economic order in the GG. However, while it could certainly be argued that a more systematic exploitation would have allowed even more extraction from the GG for the Reich’s purposes, the question remains how a more orderly system of exploitation could have been set up under the existing conditions. The article suggests that the mixture of repression, controls, and pragmatic laissez-faire toleration of the black market accepted by Frank and his GG administrators was more effective than the unrealistic demands for total control of the economy put forward by the Reich ministries.

Population policy (also biopolitics) is the interlocking of planning, resettlement and control of sociotechnical interventions in the structure of a society, either through a birth and family policy, through controlled migration, nationality policy or through a spatially differentiated development of infrastructure. On the basis of the comparative research on genocide by Raphael Lemkins, the present article describes the National Socialist population policy with regard to the General Government in the context of the competing Berlin (Heinrich Himmler), Cracow (Hans Frank) and regional (Odilo Globocnik) interests. Simultaneously, it analyses the biased preferential treatment of the Ukrainian minority, the mass murder of the Polish intelligentsia, the plans and implementation of the genocide of European Jews in the Lublin District, the epidemic-containment policy in the Warsaw Ghetto, the failed extension of the genocide policy with regard to the Polish majority in Zamość in 1942/43 and its antecedents in the Wartheland (Z-Aktion/subsistence farming) as cases of „negative” and „positive” population policies. In contrast to the perspective focused on the Generalplan Ost, this article emphasises the regional initiatives. In the context of the resettlement and extermination policy, the chief of police and SS in the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik is not regarded as the antipode of Hans Frank and his civilian administration but rather as a radicalising power that, both through cooperation and competition, radicalised the scope of resettlement and extermination policy.

The author of the article presents the formal principles and practice of taking over Polish property by the German authorities in the territory annexed to the Third Reich in autumn 1939. The article focuses on the actions headed to expropriation, confiscation, temporary management and sale of the farm as well as housing and building plots. The competences (jurisdiction) of the German central and regional – civil as well as SS administration were characterized, and thereby their responsibility for carrying out the expropriation. As the example served the Polish territories, that had been incorporated to the province of Silesia (a part of which was named since January 1941 Upper Silesia). The author brings closer the individual stages of the taking over of the Polish property – from registering and estimating its amount and value, by removing of the Polish owner and the management of expropriated farm or housing plot to the selling and leasing it to a German citizen (Reichsdeutsch, Volksdeutsch, displaced person) or its nationalization. There were in Reich three persons – and at the same time three central instances with a subordinated to them regional apparatus – who had an influence on the management and redistribution of the occupied Polish (and Jewish) property: Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring as the superior of the Chief Trust Office East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost), Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler as the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (Reichskommissar für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums), and the Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture (Reichsminister für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft) Richard Walter Darré (until 1942). The lack of clear-cut of jurisdiction caused frictions between these instances not only at the minister level, but also in the Region, among others in Upper Silesia. During the war Himmler was extending his infl uences on the control and redistribution of the occupied property, using his competences in the area of colonization of the annexed eastern territory.

The years 1939–1941 marked a dramatic breakthrough in the economy of the eastern territories of the II RP under Soviet occupation. Not only did the USSR’s invasion mean an occupation of the territories in the classical sense of the word, but also radically transformed the socio-economic system following the Soviet example. Economic changes of the years 1939–1941 were incomplete, mainly because they were interrupted by the outbreak of the German–Soviet war. But even in such a short time the economic life of the occupied territories was revolutionised. First of all, the pre-war ownership structure of the area’s economy, based on various types of ownership, was destroyed, never to be recreated again in its traditional form. There was a considerable step in the unifi cation of the territories with the economic system of the Soviet state. Reasons for the fast change included the introduction of Soviet legal and organisational structures and the lack of the territories’ self-suffi ciency in raw materials for the industry and everyday use articles. Before the war, the region was supplied with raw materials and fi nished goods, and sometimes even agricultural produce, by the central and western Poland. In the period 1939–1941, raw materials, goods and equipment were being delivered from the territory of the USSR. Supplies from the East were notoriously unreliable, but necessary for relatively stable functioning of the territories incorporated in 1939. Thus, not only due to strictly political, but also economic reasons (lack of self-suffi ciency in raw materials and processing industry) territories of the II RP became a part of the Soviet empire in a very short time (note: a peripheral part). Their interests were subjected to the interests of the empire. This infringed upon the interests of a large group of local people who experienced a severe slump in material and social status.

After the liberation of the western Ukraine from the occupation of the Third Reich, Stalin’s Communist regime has launched a broad attack on Catholicism, especially on its factions, as the Roman Catholic Church, the Armenian Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which dominated the religious life in Lviv, Stanislavsky, Drogobych and Ternopil regions. RCC (Roman Catholic Church), in particular, has reduced its presence tenfold (from more than 400 parishes in Lviv Archdiocese in 1944 to less than forty – in the late 1946, through the deportation of Poles from Ukraine and Ukrainians from Poland in 1944–1946) in the region. ACC, as an institution, was completely annihilated by the Bolshevik regime in 1945, by the so-called attempted revival of free Armenia. UGCC (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church), which included about 2300 religious communities, and which had great infl uence on public life of the Ukrainian western regions, formed their patriotic consciousness, and therefore did not fi t in the Bolshevik plan of “sovietization” of the Ukrainian population in the mentioned areas. Therefore the NKVD (People Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and the Bolshevik party elite decided to eliminate UGCC as an institution. The Council for Russian Orthodox Church in Sovnarcom Soviet Union and the Council for worship at Sovnarcom USSR developed a plan for the acquisition of parishes by the Russian Orthodox Church. This plan included: the elimination of monasteries, repression of the hierarchy, clergy, monks, which would prevent the so-called reunifi cation of UGCC with ROC. In May 1945, especially for this last point, the so-called Initiative Group was established (with the direct assistance of the NKVD and referred to as the Soviets). It was led by some leaders of the Greek Catholic priests, who had subsequently carried out this reuniting action. This group has been actively promoted by the local provincial councils, authorized for ROC and for religious worship, as well as functionaries of the provincial offices of the NKVD and Orthodox bishops. In October 1945, as a result of the abovementioned joint actions of these institutions, nearly 800 priests of 1259 – agreed to the reunifi cation. The danger of arrest, deportation of families to Siberia, prison by the NKVD of the Church hierarchy, together with Metropolitan Joseph Slipy and others – these were the reasons, which forced the majority of the Church to reunite. However, the Greek Catholic parishes did not feel such dangers, therefore only 9 of the 2286 religious communities passed to ROC till the end of 1945, so the community waited. To put the fag end in the annihilation of UGCC (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church), the leadership of the Union of the above-mentioned Councils decided to organise the Assembly, which should be prepared by the Initiative Group, pro-orthodox reunited clergy and the Moscow Patriarchate. The assembly took place in Lviv, March 8–10, 1946, in St. George church and took the following decisions: to annul the decision of the Union of Brest in 1596, return to orthodoxy, reunite with the Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate. These decisions-appeals were approved by Moscow Patriarch Aleksij . Greek Catholic historiography, based on the then USSR and USRR law considers this Assembly as non-canonical, because it was not appointed by the Church hierarchy, the church delegates have not been elected by the Greek-Catholic clergy, and the bishop of the Church did not participate in this Assembly, that is why the Assembly had no right to take the above decision. More than 400 priests of the „white” and „black” clergy, who did not agree with the decision of the Assembly and who still continued to practice the Greek-Catholic religious tradition, were arrested over the next four years and condemned by the NKVD executives. The Totalitarian regime begun to attack the Greek-Catholic monastery on the pretext of the so-called compression, as a result, in 1950, only a few male and female monasteries remained in force. Thanks to the efforts of the “authorized regional councils”, the Greek-Catholic religious communities slowly began to move into the structure of ROC. Over several years, some communities had the possibilities to avoid the reunion with ROC, as they were under the church care by hundreds of UGCC priests, so they were able to escape from prison and go underground. But the totalitarian government would put forward the struggle with the Greek Catholic Church in order to “cleanse” the western region of Ukraine and establish there the obedience to the Russian Orthodoxy.

Many contemporaries considered both German states as temporary arrangements. In 1952, there appeared a chance of reunifi cation and towards the end of the year a debate started whether Stalin’s note, dated 10 March 1952, which contained a proposal to create a united and neutral Germany was a real alternative. The files of the Soviet leadership, which were first analysed by the author, provide a clear answer: Stalin’s proposal was a manoeuvre against the rearmament of West Germany. Till the end of the “battle of notes”, the Soviet Union was not ready for a policy of neutrality even in relation to Austria. Thanks to the presented documents, the long-standing dispute over Stalin’s note is now settled.

“Ostiary” is the code name of a programme under which, in the period 1949–1958, airmen of East European countries, mainly Poles, were used to crew planes performing special operations. This was a part of the “Rollback” operation – an attempt to create armed opposition in the USSR and in its dependent countries. Flights to the territory of Albania, Bulgaria and Romania were operated from an air base in Athens. Nationalist Belarusian and Ukrainian organisations, as well as guerrilla groups in the Baltic states and Poland (5th headquarters of WiN – (Wolność i Niezawisłość – Freedom and Independence organisation) were being supplied from a base in Wiesbaden. The “Rollback” operation was a failure – most of operations were completely infi ltrated by the communist counterespionage. It did not, however, mean the end of the transfer of agents. Such operations started in the mid-1950s. This time however, the task of agents was to conduct espionage activities. Transfer of the Russian NTS agents (Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz – National Alliance of Russian Solidarists) is an example of such operations. At that time two independent programmes were launched. The fi rst consisted of the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft with the participation of Polish airmen. The second was an attempt to hij ack from the territory of Poland a MiG-15 aircraft by specially trained Polish airmen. The hij acking was not successful. Some of the airmen that were to take part in it were included in “Ostiary”. After the end of air drop operations, the Polish airmen were re-trained to fl y RB-69A aircraft and perform photo and radio-electronic reconnaissance on Warsaw Pact countries. These airmen were “borrowed” twice to carry out operations in Tibet and Indonesia. As a result of British protests against the use of United Kingdom citizens in secret operations, the “Ostiary” programme was abandoned in 1958. A number of the airmen changed their citizenship and were employed by CIA to take part in operations against Cuba and in the Congo.

According to a popular legend in the military world, colonel Moamer el-Kadhafi could owe his life solely to Hungarian radio reconnaissance stations. In April of 1986 the United States of America intended to kill the Libyan dictator by a quick and unexpected air-strike. It is alleged that the maintenance brigade of the Hungarian manufacturer were just doing regular maintenance works of the radio reconnaissance instruments, when they noticed and decoded the communication of the American attackers, and they alarmed Kadhafi who could this way survive the bombing. Although, the trustworthiness of some elements of the story can be questioned, it would only proper to ask how an East-Central European country could produce such kind of reconnaissance instruments and why they were placed out in an Arabian country. This study attempts to give additional information through presenting a special company of the national telecommunications industry about the socialist system of the 1970–80s. Countries of the Soviet block broke away fi nally from the technologically highly developed world during these two decades, because they were unable to keep up with the changes following the computer revolution. At the same time, the story of the production of radio reconnaissance instruments modulates this commonplace to a certain degree: it introduces the technological challenges Hungarian industry had to cope with, the international trends it tried to adopt, the efforts made in the fi eld of (military) research and development, and the changes what an East-Central European company could have in the market of high technology.

Edward Serwański (1912–2000), lawyer, historian, writer, civil and scouting activist, scholar at the Western Institute (Instytut Zachodni) in Poznań was being observed by the security services for over 30 years. Existing documents about Serwański cover the period from March 1946 to March 1977. During the 1939–1945 occupation, he was a member of the “Ojczyzna” (“Fatherland”) organisation originating from the nationalist movement. The organisation played an important role in building secret state administration structures and ZWZ-AK (Związek Walki Zbrojnej-Armia Krajowa – Union of Armed Struggle-Home Army), in particular in Wielkopolska. Its main forms of activity included secret education, charity, information and propaganda operations, as well as preparation for the seizure of territories stretching to the Odra and Nysa Łużycka rivers by Poland. In July 1945 “Ojczyzna” was dissolved. Many of its members started to work in institutions established in the so-called Regained Territories (Ziemie Odzyskane), in particular in the Ministry of Regained Territories, Polish Western Association (Polski Związek Zachodni) and the Western Institute (Instytut Zachodni). In the second half of 1947 the security services started an operation against the members of “Ojczyzna” under the code name “Alfa”. In the period 1947–1950, a number of the organisation’s activists were arrested and sentenced. Serwański, detained on 20 March 1948 upon refusal to cooperate with security services, was arrested and subjected to a brutal interrogation. On 29 August 1950 the Military Regional Court in Warsaw sentenced him to 7 years’ imprisonment (3.5 years after amnesty was announced). Upon his release from prison, Serwański returned to work at the Western Institute. He cooperated with the institute until 1993. In 1960 he obtained a PhD degree, and in 1971 a habilitation degree. His scholarly works and journalism include over 200 publications. In December 1976 the security services in Poznań objected to granting him the title of extraordinary professor. He received it only in 1981 in the time of the Solidarity movement when he was 70 years old. Serwański’s studies on the history of the underground organisations in Wielkopolska, from which came, among others, the book Wielkopolska w cieniu swastyki (“Wielkopolska Under the Shadow of the Swastika”) published in 1970 (after an 11-year long battle with censorship), were used by security services as a pretext to escalate the observation. The objective was to seize full control of Serwański’s scientifi c and educational work, as well as his contacts with combatants’ community. At the end of 1976 it was planned to undertake “special” actions intended to discredit Serwański as a scholar and to damage his reputation among colleagues and friends. Respective documents were not preserved.