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Without Lwów and Wilno There Is No Poland” the Cause of Kresy in Exiled Polish Army Press and Propaganda in Italy, 1944-1946

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Without Lwów and Wilno There Is No Poland” the Cause of Kresy in Exiled Polish Army Press and Propaganda in Italy, 1944-1946 “Without Lwów and Wilno There is No Poland” The Cause of Kresy in Exiled Polish Army Press and Propaganda in Italy, 1944-1946 By Adam M. Aksnowicz Submitted to Central European University Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Professor Maciej Janowski Second Reader: Professor Ostap Sereda CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2020 Statement of Copyright Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Central European Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. CEU eTD Collection Abstract This thesis looks at the role of press and propaganda of the Polish army in Italy during the Second World War aimed at securing Poland’s continued hold over its historically contested eastern borderlands, or Kresy, into the postwar period. More than approaching this goal as a political or military wartime objective of the exiled Polish state, the “Kresy cause” of exile Polish military elites developed into a multi-dimensional social, cultural, and ideological project succeeding prewar s1truggles over the eastern frontier’s vast and heterogeneous territories. This Kresowian project was perhaps most visibly apparent in the Polish II Corps’ 5th Kresy Infantry Division, which bore the name of the territories in question and acted as its symbolic reminder within Polish military exile in Italy. Through interconnected modes of propagation, Kresy Division officers sought to cultivate in their subordinates a sense of collective mentality and duty towards the borderlands by constructing a hierarchy of collective imaginations towards those aims. To deconstruct the dynamics “Kresy cause,” the case of the 5th Kresy Infantry Division and its journal On the Kresowian Trail acts as the nucleus of this investigation, along with supplemental primary and secondary sources for a broader contextualization which is required to understand its place within the Second World War, Poland history and memory, and broader theoretical questions related to the origins of community and identity. CEU eTD Collection 1 Pronounced Kreh-so-vian ii Figure 1. Territorial changes of Poland after the Second World War. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Curzon_line_en.svg CEU eTD Collection Figure 2. Legitimation booklet of the Polish II Corps’ 5th Kresy Infantry Division presented to soldiers with the divisional badge (illustrated on the obverse). On the reverse, the outline of pre-1939 Poland with the words, "Without Wilno and Lwów There is No Poland,” 1945. Source: Private collection. iii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Theoretical Framework ............................................................................................................................................ 1 Research Aims and Sources..................................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1. Origins of the Polish Problem and Kresy Cause during WWII.............................................................. 9 1.1 From the Lands of Italy to Poland?................................................................................................................... 9 1.2 Kresy: Introducing an ideological-territorial concept .................................................................................... 15 1.3 The Kresy Question, 1918-1939 ..................................................................................................................... 19 1.4 National Implosion and Fragmentation, September 1939 ............................................................................. 29 Chapter 2. General Anders and his army: a “Little Poland” in exile ..................................................................... 39 2.1 On the peripheries of the exiled Polish State ................................................................................................. 39 2.2 Nomadic center of Polish culture and civilization ......................................................................................... 49 2.3 The Borderland Division and the Kresy Cause .............................................................................................. 56 Chapter 3. The cause of Kresy in exiled Polish army press and propaganda in Italy ........................................... 66 3.1 Kresowians continue the fight for Poland ...................................................................................................... 66 3.2 A Little Poland of Free Kresowians, Varsovians, and Silesians ................................................................... 73 3.3 The Eagle, the Knight, and the Archangel: Kresy’s answer to the minority question? ............................... 92 3.4 For Your Freedom and Ours: Kresy and Polish Grand Narratives ............................................................. 108 Conclusion................................................................................................................................................................. 120 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................................. 124 CEU eTD Collection iv Introduction Theoretical Framework The current study investigates community-building attempts of Polish military exiles during the Second World War centered around Polish claims over the disputed eastern territories, or Kresy, by focusing on the divisional press and propaganda of the 5th Kresy “Borderlands” Infantry Division of the Polish II Corps2 in Italy. Although a majority of soldiers in the exiled Polish army’s “Borderlands” division were indeed originally from the contested eastern regions of the Polish Second Republic and reflected its prewar multiethnic and multilingual character to some degree, they served at a time when hundreds of years of Polish rule over those territories were coming to an end when decisions made by the Great Powers in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945) shifted Poland’s borders significantly westward along more ethnolingual lines. Despite Polish exile’s overall weak position in geopolitical affairs, the inviolability of Poland’s eastern borderlands constituted a core tenant of Polish wartime ideology and was especially strong in the culture of Polish military exile which had evacuated from the USSR, traveled through the Middle East, and fought in Italy. The 5th Kresy Infantry Division and what their commander General Nikodem Sulik called the “Kresy cause” offers the researcher an interesting historical case of the dynamic nature of identity-building projects. Although thousands of miles away from Polish Kresy, the peasant soldiers of the Kresy Division were expected to, borrowing the words of E. Weber3, become “Kresowians.” Much more than a demonym identifying a given soldier of the 5th Division, CEU eTD Collection becoming Kresowian was propagated as an ideological act of vital personal, national, and even 2 Also referred to as “Anders Army” 3 Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870-1914, (Standord, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). 1 civilizational importance. Among the Kresy cause’s numerous rallying cries, “Without Lwów and Wilno, there is no Republic of Poland” echoed this assertation, and often repeated which occasional addition of, “and without the Republic of Poland, there is no Free Europe.” By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland was still what Rogers Brubaker calls a “nationalizing state,” which was still working out the contours of a nation that had recently regained statehood. This required national integration and assimilation which meant not only infrastructural integration but the institutional and cultural shaping of communal mentalities towards the Polish “imagined community.4” Although, the contours of “Polishness” during the interwar period was generally contested between civic and ethnoreligious understandings of the nation, assimilation of ethnolingual minorities was seen as crucial to state prosperity and survival. In either case, the eastern borderlands posed the largest challenge to the fledgling state as its vast territories bordering the Soviet Union constituted the most diverse non- Polish populations of the Republic whose assimilation was a matter of state security. This resulted in “Kresy politics,” as called by Polish leader Joseph Piłsudski, which aimed to “bring stability and peace to the multi-ethnic region through state assimilation.5” However, “Kresy politics” would evolve to not only promote state assimilation (asymilacja państwowa) but eventually more forcefully push national-ethnic assimilation (asymilacja narodowa) through linguistic, cultural, and religious Polonization.6 As will be made clear throughout the study, so-called “Kresy politics” continued into Polish exile and manifested itself within the press and propaganda of Poland’s army in exile, CEU eTD Collection 4 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, (New York, NY: Verso,
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