760C.61/2170: Telegram

The Chargé to the Polish Government in Exile (Schoenfeld) to the Secretary of State

13 Polish. I have today received communication quoted below dated January 17 addressed to me by Prime Minister Mikolajczyk and marked secret.

“On January 14 at 5:30 p.m. I received a telegram from the Commander of the Polish Underground Army53 in which he informed the Polish Government that an order from Moscow to the Soviet partisans operating in Eastern Poland had fallen into his hands. This order is as follows:

On the instructions of Comrade Nozenko, all partisans are ordered to disarm Polish detachment. Those resisting are to be shot on the spot. All Polish underground organizations are to be exterminated and their leaders executed. Signed: Dubov.

Following this order, one of the detachments of the Polish Underground Army has been surrounded by Soviet partisans on December 1, 1943. Nine officers and 135 men have been taken. Their Polish distinctions have been torn off. The men were forbidden to use their language, and the commander of the detachment and our [four?] officers were shot. The fate of the remaining officers and men is unknown. During the disarming of this detachment, 7 men were killed and 12 wounded.

While protesting most emphatically against this outrage, I should be grateful if you would, dear Mr. Schoenfeld, kindly transmit the foregoing to the State Department with the suggestion that the American Government consider the possibility of taking this matter up with the Soviet Government with a view to preventing the occurrence of acts of violence of that sort in the future.”

I understand that a similar communication has been addressed to Mr. Eden.54

[Schoenfeld]
  1. Lt. Gen. Tadeusz Komorowski, Commander in Chief of the Home Army, the “General Bor” of the Warsaw uprising (August-October 1944), and Commander in Chief of the Polish Army succeeding Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski after September 29, 1944.
  2. Anthony Eden, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.