In 2005, a woman from Wrocław, going through her late father's papers, found an officer's identity document bearing an emblem she could not identify at any Polish museum. Only after contacting the Sikorski Institute in London did she learn the truth: her father had served in the 2nd Polish Corps under General Anders and had fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy in 1944 — even though he had lived his entire post-war life in socialist Poland and never once spoke of this chapter of his life aloud. The fate of a Polish serviceman in the Second World War almost never fits into a single, straight line: the same man could, within six years, pass successively through the pre-war Polish army, Soviet captivity, the Polish army forming on USSR territory, and then a force fighting under British command in North Africa and Italy.
After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September 1939, two and a half weeks after the German attack, tens of thousands of Polish officers and soldiers fell into Soviet captivity. The records of the pre-war Polish army were partly destroyed and partly seized by German or Soviet forces, and the unified military record-keeping system that had existed before the war ceased to exist — in its place arose, for years to come, several parallel and almost entirely separate archival streams.
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet NKVD shot roughly 22,000 Polish officers, police officials and members of the intelligentsia held at the Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps — the mass shootings took place in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, as well as in Kalinin (today's Tver) and Kharkiv. The USSR officially denied responsibility for these killings until 1990, when the Soviet leadership first acknowledged the NKVD's guilt; complete name lists of the victims (the 'Katyn lists') were published in stages over the course of the 1990s, based on archival documents handed over by Russia to Poland, and are today accessible in consolidated form through Poland's Institute of National Remembrance and the Russian society Memorial.
If an ancestor was a Polish officer who went missing precisely during this period — late 1939 and the spring of 1940 — checking the Katyn lists should be one of the first steps in a search: for many families, decades of uncertainty ended precisely with finding a surname on one of the three camp lists.
The three camps produced lists of differing size: roughly 4,400 men were shot from Kozelsk, around 3,900 from Starobelsk, and about 6,300 from Ostashkov — and the prisoners at Ostashkov were mostly not army officers but policemen, gendarmes and prison guards, worth bearing in mind if an ancestor served in the pre-war police rather than the military. The mass graves near Smolensk were discovered by German forces in 1943, who used the find for propaganda purposes, which for decades complicated international acknowledgement of Soviet responsibility: only in 1990 did Mikhail Gorbachev first publicly admit NKVD involvement, and the full archival materials, including Beria's memorandum authorising the shootings, were handed over to Poland only in the early 1990s. The consolidated list of victims was later refined through the efforts of historians, including the Russian researcher Natalia Lebedeva, and is today available in its most complete form on the website of the Electronic Book of Memory of Katyn Victims, maintained by the Russian society Memorial.
Not all captured Polish officers ended up in the three execution camps — the camp at Gryazovets near Vologda held a separate group of roughly 400 officers whom the NKVD, for various reasons, did not include on the lists for execution. After the 1941 agreement, these men became the core of the forming Anders' Army, and their recollections — including of the fate of their comrades from Kozelsk and Starobelsk — later formed the basis of the first accounts of the Katyn massacre published in the West as early as the 1940s, at a time when the official Soviet version of events still denied any NKVD guilt.
Following the 1941 agreement between the Polish government-in-exile and the USSR (signed after Germany's attack on the Soviet Union), the formation of a Polish army from former prisoners of war and deportees began on Soviet territory, under the command of General Władysław Anders. In 1942 this army, together with civilians, was evacuated via Iran to the Middle East, and subsequently incorporated into the British armed forces as the 2nd Polish Corps, which became famous for taking Monte Cassino in May 1944. Documents from this period — servicemen's personal files, evacuation rosters, hospital records — are held today chiefly at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, founded in 1945 by the Polish government-in-exile itself, and partly at the UK National Archives.
Alongside the formation of Anders' Army, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) operated within Poland itself — the largest underground military organisation in occupied Europe, subordinate to the government-in-exile and reaching a peak strength of around 400,000 people. AK's documents, including personnel files, operational reports and materials related to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, are held today in the archive of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), established in 1999 specifically to handle documents from the German and Soviet occupation periods.
A distinctive feature of the Polish case is that the persecution of former AK fighters did not end with the war: after the establishment of communist rule, the security service (the Security Office, UB) treated former Home Army members as a potential threat to the new regime and opened investigative files on them, often resulting in arrest or imprisonment. These post-war investigative materials, also held at IPN, sometimes turn out to be more informative for family research than the actual 1939–1945 military documents, since interrogations included detailed biographical information about the detainee's pre-war life.
On 1 August 1944, the Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising — an attempt to liberate the capital before the arrival of Soviet forces, lasting 63 days and ending in surrender and the near-total destruction of the city on the orders of the German command. Given the uprising's scale and symbolic significance, documents about its participants are kept as a distinct body of records: beyond the general IPN archive, personal testimonies, lists of insurgent battalions and oral-history materials are collected by the Warsaw Rising Museum, opened in 2004 for the 60th anniversary of the events, while the broader archive of underground structures is also represented at the Studium Polski Podziemnej (Study Trust for the Polish Underground) in London, founded by former Resistance members already in exile. If an ancestor took part specifically in the uprising, rather than in AK's wider activities, it's worth checking all three sources separately, since their holdings overlap only partly.
Beyond servicemen, in 1940–1941 the Soviet authorities carried out four large-scale waves of deportation of Polish civilians from the eastern territories of pre-war Poland to Siberia, Kazakhstan and the northern regions of the USSR — estimates vary, with figures ranging from 320,000 to 990,000 people deported, depending on the counting methodology used. These families' fates were recorded not by military bodies but by special NKVD resettlement agencies, and today the principal source of information on the deported is the Index of Repressed Persons maintained by the Polish public archive KARTA (Ośrodek KARTA) in Warsaw, which has been gathering testimony, personal documents and archival extracts since the 1980s.
Alongside the Polish archive, Russian sources from the same period have also survived: registration cards for special settlers, compiled directly by the NKVD, are held at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and in the regional archives of the areas to which deportees were sent. For a family that has not found the surname they're looking for in the KARTA index, a direct request to GARF or to the regional archive for the presumed place of exile sometimes yields a more precise result, since Soviet cards often specify the exact settlement and date of arrival, details not always reflected in post-war Polish testimony.
Category
Where to search
What to know
Katyn victims (officers, 1940)
Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, Memorial
Lists from three camps: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov
Anders' Army / Polish Forces in the West
Sikorski Institute (London), UK National Archives
Personal files, evacuation and hospital rosters
Home Army and post-war investigative files
IPN (Warsaw)
Military and investigative documents are held separately from each other
Civilians deported in 1940–1941
Ośrodek KARTA (Warsaw)
Index of Repressed Persons, compiled since the 1980s
The Polish military archive of 1939–1945 is complex precisely because the same person could pass, one after another, through several mutually incompatible record-keeping systems — the pre-war Polish one, the Soviet camp system, the British military one, and, after returning home, the post-war investigative system of communist Poland. Understanding this sequence turns scattered archival fragments into a coherent biography.
Katyn — the site near Smolensk of the mass shooting of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in the spring of 1940, which became the umbrella name for all three camp executions (Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov).
Anders' Army — a Polish army formed in 1941–1942 on Soviet territory from former prisoners of war and deportees, under the command of General Władysław Anders.
Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum — the archive of the Polish government-in-exile and the Polish Forces in the West, founded in London in 1945.
Home Army (AK) — the largest underground military organisation in occupied Poland, subordinate to the government-in-exile.
IPN — Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, established in 1999 to hold and study documents from the German and Soviet occupation periods.
UB (Security Office) — Poland's communist-era security service, which opened investigative files on former underground fighters.
Ośrodek KARTA — a Polish public archive in Warsaw, maintaining the Index of Repressed Persons since the 1980s.
Gryazovets — a camp near Vologda holding a group of Polish officers who escaped the Katyn massacre and later became the core of Anders' Army.
Warsaw Uprising — an armed uprising by the Home Army in Warsaw, from 1 August to 2 October 1944, against German occupation.
Studium Polski Podziemnej — the Study Trust for the Polish Underground Movement in London, founded by former Resistance members in exile.
GARF — the State Archive of the Russian Federation, holding registration cards of special settlers and other documents of Soviet repressive agencies.