Polish Military Organization (POW)

The Real POW: Piłsudski's Independence Army

The Polish Military Organization (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, POW) was founded in November 1914 by Józef Piłsudski through the merger of two youth paramilitary groups, the Polish Rifle Squads and the Riflemen's Association, in the Russian-held Kingdom of Poland. It served as the intelligence and sabotage arm of Piłsudski's Polish Legions, operating with unofficial Austro-Hungarian backing. Membership grew from a few hundred in 1914 to over 30,000 by 1918, with cells across the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth including Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

After the Oath Crisis of July 1917, Piłsudski was imprisoned by the Germans, and command passed to Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The POW went underground, shifting its sabotage operations against German and Austrian forces. In October–November 1918, as the Central Powers collapsed, POW members disarmed withdrawing German and Austrian garrisons, securing vast quantities of arms for the nascent Polish state. A core of roughly 400 fighters defended Lviv against the West Ukrainian People's Republic. In December 1918, all POW members were conscripted into the newly formed Polish Army, and the organization was formally dissolved in 1921.

The NKVD's Phantom: Order No. 00485 and the Polish Operation

In 1937, sixteen years after the POW had ceased to exist, the NKVD resurrected it as the central narrative device for the largest ethnically targeted mass killing of the Great Terror. NKVD Order No. 00485, signed by Nikolai Yezhov on 11 August 1937, was titled "On the liquidation of Polish diversionist and espionage groups and units of the POW." The order provided a framework for branding virtually any Soviet citizen of Polish background as a POW agent: at least 139,835 people were arrested, and 111,091 were summarily executed, most with a bullet to the back of the head.

The order targeted prisoners of war from the Polish-Soviet War who had remained in the USSR, Polish political émigrés (including communists exchanged through prisoner swaps), former members of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), and residents of Polish border districts. Yezhov's accompanying secret letter instructed NKVD units that the operation applied to "absolutely all Poles." The fabricated POW conspiracy served as the model for subsequent "national operations" targeting Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Romanians, Greeks, Chinese, Finns, and other diaspora nationalities.

References

• N. V. Petrov, A. B. Roginskii. "The Polish Operation of the NKVD 1937–1938" // Repressions against Poles and Polish Citizens. Moscow: Zven'ya, 1997.
• Nicolas Werth. "The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations (August 1937 – November 1938)." Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance – Research Network, 2010.
• "About the 'Polish Operation'." The 'Polish Operation' of the NKVD, operacja-polska.pl.