Introduction to research on the anti-communist underground in the Pszczyna district in the years 1945-1947

In the years 1945–1947, a few armed groups operated in the Pszczyna district which no doubt made it much more diffi cult for the communists to create their own state apparatus. The provincial Military Court in Katowice meted out very severe sentences to the arrested members of the armed organization; the goal of this policy was to deter both those who took active part in the struggle with People’s Power, as well as their helpers. Out of the 84 inhabitants of the Pszczyna district presented in the article who took part in activities targeted against the communists as well as their 21 helpers, 17 had been sentenced to capital punishment. 49 others had been sentenced to imprisonment. The remaining ones owned up to conspiring against the communist authorities on the basis of amnesty, or else escaped abroad, in this way avoiding penal proceedings. The not-guilty verdicts were proclaimed in isolated cases. The decreed verdicts were later verifi ed after the introduction of the act of amnesty. The members of the Pszczyna freedom organizations who have been presented in the article by no means make up all the fi ghters who took part in the struggle with the communists on this territory. According to the data gathered by the communist Citizens’ Militia (MO) and Security Service (SB) for the Katowice province in the years 1944–1975, in the year 1945 there operated as many as 4 underground resistance organizations in the Pszczyna area; their total membership amounted to 195 resistance fi ghters. In the year 1946, the number of resistance groups remained unchanged, yet the number of members increased to 275. In the year 1947, there were no longer any anti-communist organizations in the Pszczyna district. Thus the issue of anti-communist organizations on the territory of the Pszczyna district is anything but exhausted and requires further studies whose goal is, among others, to establish the total number of their members, the organization of clandestine activity, and the catalog of conducted operations targeted against the contemporary authorities