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In World War II Poland was outnumbered and outgunned and fell to Germany and the Soviet Union in a month. But the country did not lack for courage. Witold Pilecki allowed himself to be captured by fucking Nazis and sent to Auschwitz so he could build a resistance inside the death camp to detail the atrocities and tell the rest of the world what was going on.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 21, 1940--
Poland lost a whopping 17% of its population during the war. Of the six million who died, only 250,000 were military casualties and the rest were civilians. More than half were Jewish. Over 90% of Jews in Poland were murdered during the occupation. For decades few knew of Witold Pilecki and his efforts to document the horror of Auschwitz, the largest of all the Nazi death camps.
Pilecki was a Polish cavalry officer and intelligence agent. Early in the war he co-founded a resistance movement, then permitted his own capture by fucking Nazis and sent to Auschwitz in the south of Poland, arriving on September 21, 1940. While inside he created a resistance movement to gather intelligence on what was going on inside the camp and smuggled it out to the Polish resistance, which forwarded it to London.
He stayed in the camp for almost three years, escaping in the spring of 1943 and writing a detailed report of the monstrous acts of inhumanity committed inside Auschwitz. He detailed the medical experiments and the gas chambers and the hundreds of thousands of people being murdered. The report was signed by several members of the Auschwitz resistance who’d escaped to attest to its veracity, and it was sent to the Polish resistance to encourage them to liberate the camp. But they were like yeah we can’t really do anything about that. And there was truth to it, because even if they had liberated the camp there was no way for them to transport, feed, and hide the rescued prisoners.
But the Allies got the report too. They knew about what was happening inside Auschwitz from Pilecki’s earliest intelligence reports while still inside Auschwitz, because the Polish resistance was sending them to the Polish government in exile in London, and they shared them with Allied governments. The Allies considered Pilecki’s reports on the Holocaust to be exaggerated.
Outside Auschwitz, Pilecki continued his resistance efforts, engaging in sabotage operations, followed by participating in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. He was captured by fucking Nazis during the uprising and sent to a POW camp but survived to be liberated.
After the war Poland became a satellite state of the Soviet Union, and Pilecki didn’t like that commie shit, with Poland trading one dictatorial regime for another, so he continued his intelligence gathering and sent it to the Polish Government in Exile. The Soviets captured Pilecki in 1947, tortured him, then executed him in 1948. It would be decades before the world learned of his bravery. His 1943 report of the Holocaust was first published in 2000.
Thanks, Szymon, for the suggestion of today’s topic.
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