Polish anti-communist insurgency

Anti-communist resistance in Poland
Part of Eastern European anti-Communist insurgencies
"Cursed soldiers" of the anti-Communist underground.
Date 1944–1946 / 1953 (last partisan killed in an ambush in 1963) Location Polish People's Republic, Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union Result Communist victory
Belligerents
Cursed soldiers	Polish People's Republic  Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
August Emil Fieldorf Witold Pilecki Zygmunt Szendzielarz Józef Kuraś Others	Bolesław Bierut Stanisław Radkiewicz Konstantin Rokossovsky Lavrentiy Beria Ivan Serov
Units involved
Freedom and Independence NIE Citizens' Home Army Peasants' Battalions National Armed Forces ...and others	Red Army NKVD SMERSH Polish People's Army Internal Security Corps ORMO Citiziens' Militia Department of Security
Strength
20,000 partisans	2,000,000 Red Army soldiers 35,000 NKVD officers 24,000 Polish soldiers and Ministry of Public Security officers
Casualties and losses
8,668 killed in fighting 79,000 arrested 5,000 executed 21,000 died in prison	12,000 1,000
10,000 civilians killed

The anti-communist resistance in Poland, also referred to as the Polish anti-Communist insurrection fought between 1944 and 1946 (and up until 1953), was an armed struggle by the Polish Underground against the Soviet takeover of Poland at the end of World War II in Europe. The guerrilla warfare conducted by the resistance movement formed during the war, included an array of military attacks launched against Communist prisons, state security offices, detention facilities for political prisoners, and prison camps set up across the country by the Stalinist authorities.

In January 1945, the pro-Soviet government installed in Poland by the advancing Red Army declared as "illegal" the Polish anti-Nazi resistance movement, principally the Home Army or the Armia Krajowa, and ordered its surviving members to come out into the open while guaranteeing them freedom and safety. Many underground fighters decided to lay down their arms and register, but after doing so, most of them were arrested and thrown in prison. Thousands of them were tortured and later deported into the Soviet Gulag camp system, or tried by Kangaroo courts and murdered out of sight after extreme beatings (see, the Uroczysko Baran killing fields among similar others).

As a result of repression, Armia Krajowa (AK) members quickly stopped trusting the new government, and some of them regrouped in a clandestine manner in order to oppose the new Soviet occupiers. They formed various post-AK resistance organisations, such as Wolność i Niezawisłość ("Freedom and Sovereignty"), and liberated hundreds of political prisoners. They became known as the "Cursed soldiers" of the Polish underground, and most were eventually captured or killed by the security services and special assassination squads.

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