40 Facts About Home Army

The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej established in the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasions in September 1939.

Home Army sabotaged German transports bound for the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, destroying German supplies and tying down substantial German forces.

The Home Army defended Polish civilians against atrocities by Germany's Ukrainian and Lithuanian collaborators.

Thousands of ex-Home Army personnel were deported to gulags and Soviet prisons, while other ex-members, including a number of senior commanders, were executed.

Home Army originated in the Service for Poland's Victory, which General Michal Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski set up on 27 September 1939, just as the coordinated German and Soviet invasions of Poland neared completion.

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Home Army was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile and to its agency in occupied Poland, the Government Delegation for Poland .

Home Army plans envisioned, at war's end, the restoration of the pre-war government following the return of the government-in-exile to Poland.

Until the major rising in 1944, the Home Army concentrated on self-defense and on attacks against German forces.

Home Army units carried out thousands of armed raids and intelligence operations, sabotaged hundreds of railway shipments, and participated in many partisan clashes and battles with German police and Wehrmacht units.

The Home Army assassinated prominent Nazi collaborators and Gestapo officials in retaliation against Nazi terror inflicted on Poland's civilian population; prominent individuals assassinated by the Home Army included Igo Sym and Franz Kutschera .

Home Army was intended to be a mass organisation that was founded by a core of prewar officers.

The third, largest group were "part-time members": sympathisers who led "double lives" under their real names in their real homes, received no payment for their services, and stayed in touch with their undercover unit commanders but were seldom mustered for operations, as the Home Army planned to use them only during a planned nationwide rising.

Home Army was intended to be representative of the Polish nation, and its members were recruited from most parties and social classes.

Notable women in the Home Army included Elzbieta Zawacka, an underground courier who was sometimes called the only female Cichociemna.

Home Army Headquarters was divided into five sections, two bureaus and several other specialized units:.

Home Army's commander was subordinate in the military chain of command to the Polish Commander-in-Chief of the Polish government-in-exile and answered in the civilian chain of command to the Government Delegation for Poland.

Home Army was divided geographically into regional branches or areas, which were subdivided into subregions or subareas or independent areas .

In 1943 the Home Army began recreating the organization of the prewar Polish Army, its various units now being designated as platoons, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, and operational groups.

Home Army supplied valuable intelligence to the Allies; 48 per cent of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources.

Home Army intelligence provided the Allies with information on German concentration camps and the Holocaust in Poland, German submarine operations, and, most famously, the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket.

Researchers who produced the first Polish–British in-depth monograph on Home Army intelligence described contributions of Polish intelligence to the Allied victory as "disproportionally large" and argued that "the work performed by Home Army intelligence undoubtedly supported the Allied armed effort much more effectively than subversive and guerilla activities".

The Home Army prepared for a rising in Krakow but aborted due to various circumstances.

Home Army sabotaged German rail- and road-transports to the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union.

The Home Army did not produce its own ammunition, but relied on supplies stolen by Polish workers from German-run factories.

The Home Army provided training and supplies to the Warsaw Ghetto's Jewish Combat Organization.

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The Home Army supported the Relief Council for Jews in Poland as well as the formation of Jewish resistance organizations.

The Home Army started carrying out death sentences for szmalcowniks in Warsaw in the summer of 1943.

Home Army provided the Warsaw Ghetto with firearms, ammunition, and explosives, but only after it was convinced of the eagerness of the Jewish Combat Organization to fight, and after Wladyslaw Sikorski's intervention on the Organization's behalf.

In January 1943 the Home Army delivered a larger shipment of 50 pistols, 50 hand grenades, and several kilograms of explosives, along with a number of smaller shipments that carried a total of 70 pistols, 10 rifles, 2 hand machine guns, 1 light machine gun, ammunition, and over 150 kilograms of explosives.

The Home Army had a more favorable attitude towards Jewish civilians and was more hesitant or hostile towards independent Jewish partisans, whom it suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies.

Some AK units were friendly to Jews, and in Hanaczow Home Army officers hid and protected an entire 250-person Jewish community, and supplied a Jewish Home Army platoon.

The Home Army leadership punished a number of perpetrators of antisemitic violence in its ranks, in some cases sentencing them to death.

In March 1944 the Home Army carried out reprisal attack against UPA in the village of Sahryn, remembered as "Sahryn massacre", ended in ethnic cleansing operations in which about 700 Ukrainian civilians were killed.

The Home Army command tried to limit operations against Ukrainian civilians to a minimum.

Home Army was officially disbanded on 19 January 1945 to avoid civil war and armed conflict with the Soviets.

Home Army soldiers stopped trusting the government after a number of broken promises in the first few years of communist control.

Persecution of the Home Army was only part of the Stalinist repressions in Poland.

Until the end of the People's Republic of Poland, Home Army soldiers remained under investigation by the secret police, and it was only in 1989, after the fall of communism, that the sentences of Home Army soldiers were finally declared null and void by Polish courts.

Many monuments to the Home Army have since been erected in Poland, including the Polish Underground State and Home Army Monument near the Sejm building in Warsaw, unveiled in 1999.

The Home Army is commemorated in the Home Army Museum in Krakow and in the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Warsaw.