title: History of Poland

text: The proclamation of the March Constitution was followed by a short and turbulent period of constitutional order and parliamentary democracy that lasted until 1926. The legislature remained fragmented, without stable majorities, and governments changed frequently. The open-minded Gabriel Narutowicz was elected president constitutionally (without a popular vote) by the National Assembly in 1922. However, members of the nationalist right-wing faction did not regard his elevation as legitimate. They viewed Narutowicz rather as a traitor whose election was pushed through by the votes of alien minorities. Narutowicz and his supporters were subjected to an intense harassment campaign, and the president was assassinated on 16 December 1922, after serving only five days in office.


title: History of Poland

text: Land reform measures were passed in 1919 and 1925 under pressure from an impoverished peasantry. They were partially implemented, but resulted in the parcellation of only 20% of the great agricultural estates. Poland endured numerous economic calamities and disruptions in the early 1920s, including waves of workers' strikes such as the 1923 Kraków riot. The German–Polish customs war, initiated by Germany in 1925, was one of the most damaging external factors that put a strain on Poland's economy. On the other hand, there were also signs of progress and stabilization, for example a critical reform of finances carried out by the competent government of Władysław Grabski, which lasted almost two years. Certain other achievements of the democratic period having to do with the management of governmental and civic institutions necessary to the functioning of the reunited state and nation were too easily overlooked. Lurking on the sidelines was a disgusted army officer corps unwilling to subject itself to civilian control, but ready to follow the retired Piłsudski, who was highly popular with Poles and just as dissatisfied with the Polish system of government as his former colleagues in the military.


title: History of Poland

text: On 12 May 1926, Piłsudski staged the May Coup, a military overthrow of the civilian government mounted against President Stanisław Wojciechowski and the troops loyal to the legitimate government. Hundreds died in fratricidal fighting. Piłsudski was supported by several leftist factions who ensured the success of his coup by blocking the railway transportation of government forces. He also had the support of the conservative great landowners, a move that left the right-wing National Democrats as the only major social force opposed to the takeover.


title: History of Poland

text: Following the coup, the new regime initially respected many parliamentary formalities, but gradually tightened its control and abandoned pretenses. The Centrolew, a coalition of center-left parties, was formed in 1929, and in 1930 called for the "abolition of dictatorship". In 1930, the Sejm was dissolved and a number of opposition deputies were imprisoned at the Brest Fortress. Five thousand political opponents were arrested ahead of the Polish legislative election of 1930, which was rigged to award a majority of seats to the pro-regime Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (BBWR).


title: History of Poland

text: The authoritarian Sanation regime ("sanation" meant to denote "healing") that Piłsudski led until his death in 1935 (and would remain in place until 1939) reflected the dictator's evolution from his center-left past to conservative alliances. Political institutions and parties were allowed to function, but the electoral process was manipulated and those not willing to cooperate submissively were subjected to repression. From 1930, persistent opponents of the regime, many of the leftist persuasion, were imprisoned and subjected to staged legal processes with harsh sentences, such as the Brest trials, or else detained in the Bereza Kartuska prison and similar camps for political prisoners. About three thousand were detained without trial at different times at the Bereza internment camp between 1934 and 1939. In 1936 for example, 369 activists were taken there, including 342 Polish communists. Rebellious peasants staged riots in 1932, 1933 and the 1937 peasant strike in Poland. Other civil disturbances were caused by striking industrial workers (e.g. events of the "Bloody Spring" of 1936), nationalist Ukrainians and the activists of the incipient Belarusian movement. All became targets of ruthless police-military pacification. Besides sponsoring political repression, the regime fostered Józef Piłsudski's cult of personality that had already existed long before he assumed dictatorial powers.


title: History of Poland

text: Piłsudski signed the Soviet–Polish Non-Aggression Pact in 1932 and the German–Polish declaration of non-aggression in 1934, but in 1933 he insisted that there was no threat from the East or West and said that Poland's politics were focused on becoming fully independent without serving foreign interests. He initiated the policy of maintaining an equal distance and an adjustable middle course regarding the two great neighbors, later continued by Józef Beck. Piłsudski kept personal control of the army, but it was poorly equipped, poorly trained and had poor preparations in place for possible future conflicts. His only war plan was a defensive war against a Soviet invasion. The slow modernization after Piłsudski's death fell far behind the progress made by Poland's neighbors and measures to protect the western border, discontinued by Piłsudski from 1926, were not undertaken until March 1939.


title: History of Poland

text: Sanation deputies in the Sejm used a parliamentary maneuver to abolish the democratic March Constitution and push through a more authoritarian April Constitution in 1935; it reduced the powers of the Sejm, which Piłsudski despised. The process and the resulting document were seen as illegitimate by the anti-Sanation opposition, but during World War II, the Polish government-in-exile recognized the April Constitution in order to uphold the legal continuity of the Polish state.


title: History of Poland

text: Between 1932 and 1933 Piłsudski and Beck initiated several incidents along the borders with Germany and Danzig, both to test whether Western powers would protect the Versailles arrangements (on which Polish security depended), and as preparation for a preventative war against Germany. At the same time they sent emissaries to London and Paris, looking for their support in stopping Germany's rearmament effort. An invasion to Danzig by Poland was scheduled for April 21, 1933, but the amassing of troops was discovered and the invasion was postponed. At the time an invasion by Poland would have posed a serious military threat to Germany, but with the British rejecting the idea (in favor of the Four-Power Pact), and with wavering support from the French, the Poles had eventually reneged on the idea of invasion. Between 1933 and 1934 Germany would increase its armament expenditures by 68%, and by January 1934 the two powers would sign a ten-year non-aggression pact.


title: History of Poland

text: When Marshal Piłsudski died in 1935, he retained the support of dominant sections of Polish society even though he never risked testing his popularity in an honest election. His regime was dictatorial, but at that time only Czechoslovakia remained democratic in all of the regions neighboring Poland. Historians have taken widely divergent views of the meaning and consequences of the coup Piłsudski perpetrated and his personal rule that followed.


title: History of Poland

text: Independence stimulated the development of Polish culture in the Interbellum and intellectual achievement was high. Warsaw, whose population almost doubled between World War I and World War II, was a restless, burgeoning metropolis. It outpaced Kraków, Lwów and Wilno, the other major population centers of the country.


title: History of Poland

text: Mainstream Polish society was not affected by the repressions of the Sanation authorities overall; many Poles enjoyed relative stability, and the economy improved markedly between 1926 and 1929, only to become caught up in the global Great Depression. After 1929, the country's industrial production and gross national income slumped by about 50%.


title: History of Poland

text: The Great Depression brought low prices for farmers and unemployment for workers. Social tensions increased, including rising antisemitism. A major economic transformation and multi-year state plan to achieve national industrial development, as embodied in the Central Industrial Region initiative launched in 1936, was led by Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski. Motivated primarily by the need for a native arms industry, the initiative was in progress at the time of the outbreak of World War II. Kwiatkowski was also the main architect of the earlier Gdynia seaport project.


title: History of Poland

text: The prevalent in political circles nationalism was fueled by the large size of Poland's minority populations and their separate agendas. According to the language criterion of the Polish census of 1931, the Poles constituted 69% of the population, Ukrainians 15%, Jews (defined as speakers of the Yiddish language) 8.5%, Belarusians 4.7%, Germans 2.2%, Lithuanians 0.25%, Russians 0.25% and Czechs 0.09%, with some geographical areas dominated by a particular minority. In time, the ethnic conflicts intensified, and the Polish state grew less tolerant of the interests of its national minorities. In interwar Poland, compulsory free general education substantially reduced illiteracy rates, but discrimination was practiced in a way that resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of Ukrainian language schools and official restrictions on Jewish attendance at selected schools in the late 1930s.


title: History of Poland

text: The population grew steadily, reaching 35 million in 1939. However, the overall economic situation in the interwar period was one of stagnation. There was little money for investment inside Poland, and few foreigners were interested in investing there. Total industrial production barely increased between 1913 and 1939 (within the area delimited by the 1939 borders), but because of population growth (from 26.3 million in 1919 to 34.8 million in 1939), the "per capita" output actually decreased by 18%.


title: History of Poland

text: Conditions in the predominant agricultural sector kept deteriorating between 1929 and 1939, which resulted in rural unrest and a progressive radicalization of the Polish peasant movement that became increasingly inclined toward militant anti-state activities. It was firmly repressed by the authorities. According to Norman Davies, the failures of the Sanation regime (combined with the objective economic realities) caused a radicalization of the Polish masses by the end of the 1930s, but he warns against drawing parallels with the incomparably more repressive regimes of Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union.


title: History of Poland

text: After Piłsudski's death in 1935, Poland was governed until (and initially during) the German invasion of 1939 by old allies and subordinates known as "Piłsudski's colonels". They had neither the vision nor the resources to cope with the perilous situation facing Poland in the late 1930s. The colonels had gradually assumed greater powers during Piłsudski's life by manipulating the ailing marshal behind the scenes. Eventually they achieved an overt politicization of the army that did nothing to help prepare the country for war.


title: History of Poland

text: Foreign policy was the responsibility of Józef Beck, under whom Polish diplomacy attempted balanced approaches toward Germany and the Soviet Union, unfortunately without success, on the basis of a flawed understanding of the European geopolitics of his day. Beck had numerous foreign policy schemes and harbored illusions of Poland's status as a great power. He alienated most of Poland's neighbors, but is not blamed by historians for the ultimate failure of relations with Germany. The principal events of his tenure were concentrated in its last two years. In the case of the 1938 Polish ultimatum to Lithuania, the Polish action nearly resulted in a German takeover of southwest Lithuania, the Klaipėda Region (Memel Territory), which had a largely German population. Also in 1938, the Polish government opportunistically undertook a hostile action against the Czechoslovak state as weakened by the Munich Agreement and annexed a small piece of territory on its borders. In this case, Beck's understanding of the consequences of the Polish military move turned out to be completely mistaken, because in the end the German occupation of Czechoslovakia markedly weakened Poland's own position. Furthermore, Beck erroneously believed that Nazi-Soviet ideological contradictions would preclude their cooperation.


title: History of Poland

text: At home, increasingly alienated and suppressed minorities threatened unrest and violence. Extreme nationalist circles such as the National Radical Camp grew more outspoken. One of the groups, the Camp of National Unity, combined many nationalists with Sanation supporters and was connected to the new strongman, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, whose faction of the Sanation ruling movement was increasingly nationalistic.


title: History of Poland

text: In the late 1930s, the exile bloc Front Morges united several major Polish anti-Sanation figures, including Ignacy Paderewski, Władysław Sikorski, Wincenty Witos, Wojciech Korfanty and Józef Haller. It gained little influence inside Poland, but its spirit soon reappeared during World War II, within the Polish government-in-exile.


title: History of Poland

text: In October 1938, Joachim von Ribbentrop first proposed German-Polish territorial adjustments and Poland's participation in the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union. The status of the Free City of Danzig was one of the key bones of contention. Approached by Ribbentrop again in March 1939, the Polish government expressed willingness to address issues causing German concern, but effectively rejected Germany's stated demands and thus refused to allow Poland to be turned by Adolf Hitler into a German puppet state. Hitler, incensed by the British and French declarations of support for Poland, abrogated the German–Polish declaration of non-aggression in late April 1939.


title: History of Poland

text: To protect itself from an increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany, already responsible for the annexations of Austria (in the Anschluss of 1938), Czechoslovakia (in 1939) and a part of Lithuania after the 1939 German ultimatum to Lithuania, Poland entered into a military alliance with Britain and France (the 1939 Anglo-Polish military alliance and the Franco-Polish alliance (1921), as updated in 1939). However, the two Western powers were defense-oriented and not in a strong position, either geographically or in terms of resources, to assist Poland. Attempts were therefore made by them to induce Soviet-Polish cooperation, which they viewed as the only militarily viable arrangement.


title: History of Poland

text: Diplomatic manoeuvers continued in the spring and summer of 1939, but in their final attempts, the Franco-British talks with the Soviets in Moscow on forming an anti-Nazi defensive military alliance failed. Warsaw's refusal to allow the Red Army to operate on Polish territory doomed the Western efforts. The final contentious Allied-Soviet exchanges took place on 21 and 23 August 1939. The regime of Joseph Stalin was the target of an intense German counter-initiative and was concurrently involved in increasingly effective negotiations with Hitler's agents. On 23 August, an outcome contrary to the exertions of the Allies became a reality: in Moscow, Germany and the Soviet Union hurriedly signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which secretly provided for the dismemberment of Poland into Nazi- and Soviet-controlled zones.


title: History of Poland

text: On 1 September 1939, Hitler ordered an invasion of Poland, the opening event of World War II. Poland had signed an Anglo-Polish military alliance as recently as the 25th of August, and had long been in alliance with France. The two Western powers soon declared war on Germany, but they remained largely inactive (the period early in the conflict became known as the Phoney War) and extended no aid to the attacked country. The technically and numerically superior "Wehrmacht" formations rapidly advanced eastwards and engaged massively in the murder of Polish civilians over the entire occupied territory. On 17 September, a Soviet invasion of Poland began. The Soviet Union quickly occupied most of the areas of eastern Poland that were inhabited by a significant Ukrainian and Belarusian minority. The two invading powers divided up the country as they had agreed in the secret provisions of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Poland's top government officials and military high command fled the war zone and arrived at the Romanian Bridgehead in mid-September. After the Soviet entry they sought refuge in Romania.


title: History of Poland

text: Among the military operations in which Poles held out the longest (until late September or early October) were the Siege of Warsaw, the Battle of Hel and the resistance of the Independent Operational Group Polesie. Warsaw fell on 27 September after a heavy German bombardment that killed tens of thousands civilians and soldiers. Poland was ultimately partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union according to the terms of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty signed by the two powers in Moscow on 29 September.


title: History of Poland

text: Gerhard Weinberg has argued that the most significant Polish contribution to World War II was sharing its code-breaking results. This allowed the British to perform the cryptanalysis of the Enigma and decipher the main German military code, which gave the Allies a major advantage in the conflict. As regards actual military campaigns, some Polish historians have argued that simply resisting the initial invasion of Poland was the country's greatest contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany, despite its defeat. The Polish Army of nearly one million men significantly delayed the start of the Battle of France, planned by the Germans for 1939. When the Nazi offensive in the West did happen, the delay caused it to be less effective, a possibly crucial factor in the victory of the Battle of Britain.


title: History of Poland

text: After Germany invaded the Soviet Union as part of its Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the whole of pre-war Poland was overrun and occupied by German troops.


title: History of Poland

text: German-occupied Poland was divided from 1939 into two regions: Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany directly into the German "Reich" and areas ruled under a so-called General Government of occupation. The Poles formed an underground resistance movement and a Polish government-in-exile that operated first in Paris, then, from July 1940, in London. Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations, broken since September 1939, were resumed in July 1941 under the Sikorski–Mayski agreement, which facilitated the formation of a Polish army (the Anders' Army) in the Soviet Union. In November 1941, Prime Minister Sikorski flew to the Soviet Union to negotiate with Stalin on its role on the Soviet-German front, but the British wanted the Polish soldiers in the Middle East. Stalin agreed, and the army was evacuated there.


title: History of Poland

text: The organizations forming the Polish Underground State that functioned in Poland throughout the war were loyal to and formally under the Polish government-in-exile, acting through its Government Delegation for Poland. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Poles joined the underground Polish Home Army ("Armia Krajowa"), a part of the Polish Armed Forces of the government-in-exile. About 200,000 Poles fought on the Western Front in the Polish Armed Forces in the West loyal to the government-in-exile, and about 300,000 in the under the Soviet command on the Eastern Front. The pro-Soviet resistance movement in Poland, led by the Polish Workers' Party, was active from 1941. It was opposed by the gradually forming extreme nationalistic National Armed Forces.


title: History of Poland

text: Beginning in late 1939, hundreds of thousands of Poles from the Soviet-occupied areas were deported and taken east. Of the upper-ranking military personnel and others deemed uncooperative or potentially harmful by the Soviets, about 22,000 were secretly executed by them at the Katyn massacre. In April 1943, the Soviet Union broke off deteriorating relations with the Polish government-in-exile after the German military announced the discovery of mass graves containing murdered Polish army officers. The Soviets claimed that the Poles committed a hostile act by requesting that the Red Cross investigate these reports.


title: History of Poland

text: From 1941, the implementation of the Nazi Final Solution began, and the Holocaust in Poland proceeded with force. Warsaw was the scene of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April–May 1943, triggered by the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto by German SS units. The elimination of Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland took place in many cities. As the Jewish people were being removed to be exterminated, uprisings were waged against impossible odds by the Jewish Combat Organization and other desperate Jewish insurgents.


title: History of Poland

text: At a time of increasing cooperation between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Nazi invasion of 1941, the influence of the Polish government-in-exile was seriously diminished by the death of Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski, its most capable leader, in a plane crash on 4 July 1943. Around that time, Polish-communist civilian and military organizations opposed to the government, led by Wanda Wasilewska and supported by Stalin, were formed in the Soviet Union.


title: History of Poland

text: In July 1944, the Soviet Red Army and Soviet-controlled Polish People's Army entered the territory of future postwar Poland. In protracted fighting in 1944 and 1945, the Soviets and their Polish allies defeated and expelled the German army from Poland at a cost of over 600,000 Soviet soldiers lost.


title: History of Poland

text: The greatest single undertaking of the Polish resistance movement in World War II and a major political event was the Warsaw Uprising that began on 1 August 1944. The uprising, in which most of the city's population participated, was instigated by the underground Home Army and approved by the Polish government-in-exile in an attempt to establish a non-communist Polish administration ahead of the arrival of the Red Army. The uprising was originally planned as a short-lived armed demonstration in expectation that the Soviet forces approaching Warsaw would assist in any battle to take the city. The Soviets had never agreed to an intervention, however, and they halted their advance at the Vistula River. The Germans used the opportunity to carry out a brutal suppression of the forces of the pro-Western Polish underground.


title: History of Poland

text: The bitterly fought uprising lasted for two months and resulted in the death or expulsion from the city of hundreds of thousands of civilians. After the defeated Poles surrendered on 2 October, the Germans carried out a planned destruction of Warsaw on Hitler's orders that obliterated the remaining infrastructure of the city. The Polish First Army, fighting alongside the Soviet Red Army, entered a devastated Warsaw on 17 January 1945.


title: History of Poland

text: From the time of the Tehran Conference in late 1943, there was broad agreement among the three Great Powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union) that the locations of the borders between Germany and Poland and between Poland and the Soviet Union would be fundamentally changed after the conclusion of World War II. Stalin's view that Poland should be moved far to the west was accepted by Polish communists, whose organizations included the Polish Workers' Party and the Union of Polish Patriots. The communist-led State National Council, a quasi-parliamentary body, was in existence in Warsaw from the beginning of 1944. In July 1944, a communist-controlled Polish Committee of National Liberation was established in Lublin, to nominally govern the areas liberated from German control. The move prompted protests from Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk and his Polish government-in-exile.


title: History of Poland

text: By the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the communists had already established a Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland. The Soviet position at the conference was strong because of their decisive contribution to the war effort and as a result of their occupation of immense amounts of land in central and eastern Europe. The Great Powers gave assurances that the communist provisional government would be converted into an entity that would include democratic forces from within the country and active abroad, but the London-based government-in-exile was not mentioned. A Provisional Government of National Unity and subsequent democratic elections were the agreed stated goals. The disappointing results of these plans and the failure of the Western powers to ensure a strong participation of non-communists in the immediate post-war Polish government were seen by many Poles as a manifestation of Western betrayal.


title: History of Poland

text: A lack of accurate data makes it difficult to document numerically the extent of the human losses suffered by Polish citizens during World War II. Additionally, many assertions made in the past must be considered suspect due to flawed methodology and a desire to promote certain political agendas. The last available enumeration of ethnic Poles and the large ethnic minorities is the Polish census of 1931. Exact population figures for 1939 are therefore not known.


title: History of Poland

text: According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 3 million Polish Jews and at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians were killed. According to the historians Brzoza and Sowa, about 2 million ethnic Poles were killed, but it is not known, even approximately, how many Polish citizens of other ethnicities perished, including Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Germans. Millions of Polish citizens were deported to Germany for forced labor or to German extermination camps such as Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibór. Nazi Germany intended to exterminate the Jews completely, in actions that have come to be described collectively as the Holocaust. The Poles were to be expelled from areas controlled by Nazi Germany through a process of resettlement that started in 1939. Such Nazi operations matured into a plan known as the "Generalplan Ost" that amounted to displacement, enslavement and partial extermination of the Slavic people and was expected to be completed within 15 years.


title: History of Poland

text: The majority of Poles remained indifferent to the Jewish plight, and neither assisted nor persecuted Jews. Of those who have helped rescue, shelter and protect Jews from the Nazi atrocity, Yad Vashem and the State of Israel have recognized 6,992 individuals as "Righteous Among the Nations".


title: History of Poland

text: In an attempt to incapacitate Polish society, the Nazis and the Soviets executed tens of thousands of members of the intelligentsia and community leadership during events such as the German AB-Aktion in Poland, Operation Tannenberg and the Katyn massacre. Over 95% of the Jewish losses and 90% of the ethnic Polish losses were caused directly by Nazi Germany, whereas 5% of the ethnic Polish losses were caused by the Soviets and 5% by Ukrainian nationalists. The large-scale Jewish presence in Poland that had endured for centuries was rather quickly put to an end by the policies of extermination implemented by the Nazis during the war. Waves of displacement and emigration that took place both during and after the war removed from Poland a majority of the Jews who survived. Further significant Jewish emigration followed events such as the Polish October political thaw of 1956 and the 1968 Polish political crisis.


title: History of Poland

text: In 1940–1941, some 325,000 Polish citizens were deported by the Soviet regime. The number of Polish citizens who died at the hands of the Soviets is estimated at less than 100,000.


title: History of Poland

text: In 1943–1944, Ukrainian nationalists associated with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army perpetrated the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Estimates of the number of Polish civilian victims vary greatly, from tens to hundreds of thousands.


title: History of Poland

text: Approximately 90% of Poland's war casualties were the victims of prisons, death camps, raids, executions, the annihilation of ghettos, epidemics, starvation, excessive work and ill treatment. The war left one million children orphaned and 590,000 persons disabled. The country lost 38% of its national assets (whereas Britain lost only 0.8%, and France only 1.5%). Nearly half of pre-war Poland was expropriated by the Soviet Union, including the two great cultural centers of Lwów and Wilno.


title: History of Poland

text: The policies of Nazi Germany have been judged after the war by the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg trials and Polish genocide trials to be aimed at extermination of Jews, Poles and Roma, and to have "all the characteristics of genocide in the biological meaning of this term".


title: History of Poland

text: By the terms of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement signed by the three victorious Great Powers, the Soviet Union retained most of the territories captured as a result of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, including western Ukraine and western Belarus, and gained others. Lithuania and the Königsberg area of East Prussia were officially incorporated into the Soviet Union, in the case of the former without the recognition of the Western powers.


title: History of Poland

text: Poland was compensated with the bulk of Silesia, including Breslau (Wrocław) and Grünberg (Zielona Góra), the bulk of Pomerania, including Stettin (Szczecin), and the greater southern portion of the former East Prussia, along with Danzig (Gdańsk), pending a final peace conference with Germany which eventually never took place.


title: History of Poland

text: Collectively referred to by the Polish authorities as the "Recovered Territories", they were included in the reconstituted Polish state. With Germany's defeat Poland was thus shifted west in relation to its prewar location, to the area between the Oder–Neisse and Curzon lines, which resulted in a country more compact and with much broader access to the sea. The Poles lost 70% of their pre-war oil capacity to the Soviets, but gained from the Germans a highly developed industrial base and infrastructure that made a diversified industrial economy possible for the first time in Polish history.


title: History of Poland

text: The flight and expulsion of Germans from what was eastern Germany prior to the war began before and during the Soviet conquest of those regions from the Nazis, and the process continued in the years immediately after the war.


title: History of Poland

text: Early expulsions in Poland were undertaken by the Polish communist authorities even before the Potsdam Conference (the "wild expulsions" from June to mid July 1945, when the Polish military and militia expelled nearly all people from the districts immediately east of the Oder–Neisse line), to ensure the establishment of ethnically homogeneous Poland. About 1% (100,000) of the German civilian population east of the Oder–Neisse line perished in the fighting prior to the surrender in May 1945, and afterwards some 200,000 Germans in Poland were employed as forced labor prior to being expelled. Many Germans died in labor camps such as the Zgoda labour camp and the Potulice camp. Of those Germans who remained within the new borders of Poland, many later chose to emigrate to post-war Germany.


title: History of Poland

text: On the other hand, 1.5–2 million ethnic Poles moved or were expelled from the previously Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. The vast majority were resettled in the former German territories. At least one million Poles remained in what had become the Soviet Union, and at least half a million ended up in the West or elsewhere outside of Poland. However, contrary to the official declaration that the former German inhabitants of the Recovered Territories had to be removed quickly to house Poles displaced by the Soviet annexation, the Recovered Territories initially faced a severe population shortage.


title: History of Poland

text: Many exiled Poles could not return to the country for which they had fought because they belonged to political groups incompatible with the new communist regimes, or because they originated from areas of pre-war eastern Poland that were incorporated into the Soviet Union (see Polish population transfers (1944–1946)). Some were deterred from returning simply on the strength of warnings that anyone who had served in military units in the West would be endangered. Many Poles were pursued, arrested, tortured and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for belonging to the Home Army or other formations (see Anti-communist resistance in Poland (1944–1946)), or were persecuted because they had fought on the Western front.


title: History of Poland

text: Territories on both sides of the new Polish-Ukrainian border were also "ethnically cleansed". Of the Ukrainians and Lemkos living in Poland within the new borders (about 700,000), close to 95% were forcibly moved to the Soviet Ukraine, or (in 1947) to the new territories in northern and western Poland under Operation Vistula. In Volhynia, 98% of the Polish pre-war population was either killed or expelled; in Eastern Galicia, the Polish population was reduced by 92%. According to Timothy D. Snyder, about 70,000 Poles and about 20,000 Ukrainians were killed in the ethnic violence that occurred in the 1940s, both during and after the war.


title: History of Poland

text: According to an estimate by historian Jan Grabowski, about 50,000 of the 250,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Nazis during the liquidation of ghettos survived without leaving Poland (the remainder perished). More were repatriated from the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and the February 1946 population census showed about 300,000 Jews within Poland's new borders. Of the surviving Jews, many chose to emigrate or felt compelled to because of the anti-Jewish violence in Poland.


title: History of Poland

text: Because of changing borders and the mass movements of people of various nationalities, the emerging communist Poland ended up with a mainly homogeneous, ethnically Polish population (97.6% according to the December 1950 census). The remaining members of ethnic minorities were not encouraged, by the authorities or by their neighbors, to emphasize their ethnic identities.


title: History of Poland

text: In response to the February 1945 Yalta Conference directives, a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in June 1945 under Soviet auspices; it was soon recognized by the United States and many other countries. The Soviet domination was apparent from the beginning, as prominent leaders of the Polish Underground State were brought to trial in Moscow (the "Trial of the Sixteen" of June 1945). In the immediate post-war years, the emerging communist rule was challenged by opposition groups, including militarily by the so-called "cursed soldiers", of whom thousands perished in armed confrontations or were pursued by the Ministry of Public Security and executed. Such guerillas often pinned their hopes on expectations of an imminent outbreak of World War III and defeat of the Soviet Union. The Polish right-wing insurgency faded after the amnesty of February 1947.


title: History of Poland

text: The Polish people's referendum of June 1946 was arranged by the communist Polish Workers' Party to legitimize its dominance in Polish politics and claim widespread support for the party's policies. Although the Yalta agreement called for free elections, the Polish legislative election of January 1947 was controlled by the communists. Some democratic and pro-Western elements, led by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, former prime minister-in-exile, participated in the Provisional Government and the 1947 elections, but were ultimately eliminated through electoral fraud, intimidation and violence. In times of severe political confrontation and radical economic change, members of Mikołajczyk's agrarian movement (the Polish People's Party) attempted to preserve the existing aspects of mixed economy and protect property and other rights. However, after the 1947 elections, the Government of National Unity ceased to exist and the communists moved towards abolishing the post-war partially pluralistic "people's democracy" and replacing it with a state socialist system. The communist-dominated front Democratic Bloc of the 1947 elections, turned into the Front of National Unity in 1952, became officially the source of governmental authority. The Polish government-in-exile, lacking international recognition, remained in continuous existence until 1990.


title: History of Poland

text: The Polish People's Republic ("Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa") was established under the rule of the communist Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). The name change from the Polish Republic was not officially adopted, however, until the proclamation of the Constitution of the Polish People's Republic in 1952.


title: History of Poland

text: The ruling PZPR was formed by the forced amalgamation in December 1948 of the communist Polish Workers' Party (PPR) and the historically non-communist Polish Socialist Party (PPS). The PPR chief had been its wartime leader Władysław Gomułka, who in 1947 declared a "Polish road to socialism" as intended to curb, rather than eradicate, capitalist elements. In 1948 he was overruled, removed and imprisoned by Stalinist authorities. The PPS, re-established in 1944 by its left wing, had since been allied with the communists. The ruling communists, who in post-war Poland preferred to use the term "socialism" instead of "communism" to identify their ideological basis, needed to include the socialist junior partner to broaden their appeal, claim greater legitimacy and eliminate competition on the political Left. The socialists, who were losing their organization, were subjected to political pressure, ideological cleansing and purges in order to become suitable for unification on the terms of the PPR. The leading pro-communist leaders of the socialists were the prime ministers Edward Osóbka-Morawski and Józef Cyrankiewicz.


title: History of Poland

text: During the most oppressive phase of the Stalinist period (1948–1953), terror was justified in Poland as necessary to eliminate reactionary subversion. Many thousands of perceived opponents of the regime were arbitrarily tried and large numbers were executed. The People's Republic was led by discredited Soviet operatives such as Bolesław Bierut, Jakub Berman and Konstantin Rokossovsky. The independent Catholic Church in Poland was subjected to property confiscations and other curtailments from 1949, and in 1950 was pressured into signing an accord with the government. In 1953 and later, despite a partial thaw after the death of Stalin that year, the persecution of the Church intensified and its head, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, was detained. A key event in the persecution of the Polish Church was the Stalinist show trial of the Kraków Curia in January 1953.


title: History of Poland

text: In 1944, large agricultural holdings and former German property in Poland started to be redistributed through land reform, and industry started to be nationalized. Communist restructuring and the imposition of work-space rules encountered active worker opposition already in the years 1945–1947. The moderate Three-Year Plan of 1947–1949 continued with the rebuilding, socialization and socialist restructuring of the economy. It was followed by the Six-Year Plan of 1950–1955 for heavy industry. The rejection of the Marshall Plan in 1947 made aspirations for catching up with West European standards of living unrealistic.


title: History of Poland

text: The government's highest economic priority was the development of heavy industry useful to the military. State-run or controlled institutions common in all the socialist countries of eastern Europe were imposed on Poland, including collective farms and worker cooperatives. The latter were dismantled in the late 1940s as not socialist enough, although they were later re-established; even small-scale private enterprises were eradicated. Stalinism introduced heavy political and ideological propaganda and indoctrination in social life, culture and education.


title: History of Poland

text: Great strides were made, however, in the areas of employment (which became nearly full), universal public education (which nearly eradicated adult illiteracy), health care and recreational amenities. Many historic sites, including the central districts of Warsaw and Gdańsk, both devastated during the war, were rebuilt at great cost.


title: History of Poland

text: The communist industrialization program led to increased urbanization and educational and career opportunities for the intended beneficiaries of the social transformation, along the lines of the peasants-workers-working intelligentsia paradigm. The most significant improvement was accomplished in the lives of Polish peasants, many of whom were able to leave their impoverished and overcrowded village communities for better conditions in urban centers. Those who stayed behind took advantage of the implementation of the 1944 land reform decree of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, which terminated the antiquated but widespread parafeudal socioeconomic relations in Poland. The Stalinist attempts at establishing collective farms generally failed. Due to urbanization, the national percentage of the rural population decreased in communist Poland by about 50%. A majority of Poland's residents of cities and towns still live in apartment blocks built during the communist era, in part to accommodate migrants from rural areas.


title: History of Poland

text: In March 1956, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow ushered in de-Stalinization, Edward Ochab was chosen to replace the deceased Bolesław Bierut as first secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party. As a result, Poland was rapidly overtaken by social restlessness and reformist undertakings; thousands of political prisoners were released and many people previously persecuted were officially rehabilitated. Worker riots in Poznań in June 1956 were violently suppressed, but they gave rise to the formation of a reformist current within the communist party.


title: History of Poland

text: Amidst the continuing social and national upheaval, a further shakeup took place in the party leadership as part of what is known as the Polish October of 1956. While retaining most traditional communist economic and social aims, the regime led by Władysław Gomułka, the new first secretary of the PZPR, liberalized internal life in Poland. The dependence on the Soviet Union was somewhat mollified, and the state's relationships with the Church and Catholic lay activists were put on a new footing. A repatriation agreement with the Soviet Union allowed the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Poles who were still in Soviet hands, including many former political prisoners. Collectivization efforts were abandoned—agricultural land, unlike in other Comecon countries, remained for the most part in the private ownership of farming families. State-mandated provisions of agricultural products at fixed, artificially low prices were reduced, and from 1972 eliminated.


title: History of Poland

text: The legislative election of 1957 was followed by several years of political stability that was accompanied by economic stagnation and curtailment of reforms and reformists. One of the last initiatives of the brief reform era was a nuclear weapons–free zone in Central Europe proposed in 1957 by Adam Rapacki, Poland's foreign minister.


title: History of Poland

text: Culture in the Polish People's Republic, to varying degrees linked to the intelligentsia's opposition to the authoritarian system, developed to a sophisticated level under Gomułka and his successors. The creative process was often compromised by state censorship, but significant works were created in fields such as literature, theater, cinema and music, among others. Journalism of veiled understanding and varieties of native and Western popular culture were well represented. Uncensored information and works generated by émigré circles were conveyed through a variety of channels. The Paris-based "Kultura" magazine developed a conceptual framework for dealing with the issues of borders and the neighbors of a future free Poland, but for ordinary Poles Radio Free Europe was of foremost importance.


title: History of Poland

text: One of the confirmations of the end of an era of greater tolerance was the expulsion from the communist party of several prominent "Marxist revisionists" in the 1960s.


title: History of Poland

text: In 1965, the Conference of Polish Bishops issued the Letter of Reconciliation of the Polish Bishops to the German Bishops, a gesture intended to heal bad mutual feelings left over from World War II. In 1966, the celebrations of the 1,000th anniversary of the Christianization of Poland led by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński and other bishops turned into a huge demonstration of the power and popularity of the Catholic Church in Poland.


title: History of Poland

text: The post-1956 liberalizing trend, in decline for a number of years, was reversed in March 1968, when student demonstrations were suppressed during the 1968 Polish political crisis. Motivated in part by the Prague Spring movement, the Polish opposition leaders, intellectuals, academics and students used a historical-patriotic "Dziady" theater spectacle series in Warsaw (and its termination forced by the authorities) as a springboard for protests, which soon spread to other centers of higher education and turned nationwide. The authorities responded with a major crackdown on opposition activity, including the firing of faculty and the dismissal of students at universities and other institutions of learning. At the center of the controversy was also the small number of Catholic deputies in the Sejm (the Znak Association members) who attempted to defend the students.


title: History of Poland

text: In an official speech, Gomułka drew attention to the role of Jewish activists in the events taking place. This provided ammunition to a nationalistic and antisemitic communist party faction headed by Mieczysław Moczar that was opposed to Gomułka's leadership. Using the context of the military victory of Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, some in the Polish communist leadership waged an antisemitic campaign against the remnants of the Jewish community in Poland. The targets of this campaign were accused of disloyalty and active sympathy with Israeli aggression. Branded "Zionists", they were scapegoated and blamed for the unrest in March 1968, which eventually led to the emigration of much of Poland's remaining Jewish population (about 15,000 Polish citizens left the country).


title: History of Poland

text: With the active support of the Gomułka regime, the Polish People's Army took part in the infamous Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, after the Brezhnev Doctrine was informally announced.


title: History of Poland

text: In the final major achievement of Gomułka diplomacy, the governments of Poland and West Germany signed in December 1970 the Treaty of Warsaw, which normalized their relations and made possible meaningful cooperation in a number of areas of bilateral interest. In particular, West Germany recognized the post-World War II "de facto" border between Poland and East Germany.


title: History of Poland

text: Price increases for essential consumer goods triggered the Polish protests of 1970. In December, there were disturbances and strikes in the Baltic Sea port cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Szczecin that reflected deep dissatisfaction with living and working conditions in the country. The activity was centered in the industrial shipyard areas of the three coastal cities. Dozens of protesting workers and bystanders were killed in police and military actions, generally under the authority of Gomułka and Minister of Defense Wojciech Jaruzelski. In the aftermath, Edward Gierek replaced Gomułka as first secretary of the communist party. The new regime was seen as more modern, friendly and pragmatic, and at first it enjoyed a degree of popular and foreign support.


title: History of Poland

text: To revitalize the economy, from 1971 the Gierek regime introduced wide-ranging reforms that involved large-scale foreign borrowing. These actions initially caused improved conditions for consumers, but in a few years the strategy backfired and the economy deteriorated. Another attempt to raise food prices resulted in the June 1976 protests. The Workers' Defence Committee (KOR), established in response to the crackdown that followed, consisted of dissident intellectuals determined to support industrial workers, farmers and students persecuted by the authorities. The opposition circles active in the late 1970s were emboldened by the Helsinki Conference processes.


title: History of Poland

text: In October 1978, the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła, became Pope John Paul II, head of the Catholic Church. Catholics and others rejoiced at the elevation of a Pole to the papacy and greeted his June 1979 visit to Poland with an outpouring of emotion.


title: History of Poland

text: Fueled by large infusions of Western credit, Poland's economic growth rate was one of the world's highest during the first half of the 1970s, but much of the borrowed capital was misspent, and the centrally planned economy was unable to use the new resources effectively. The 1973 oil crisis caused recession and high interest rates in the West, to which the Polish government had to respond with sharp domestic consumer price increases. The growing debt burden became insupportable in the late 1970s, and negative economic growth set in by 1979.


title: History of Poland

text: Around 1 July 1980, with the Polish foreign debt standing at more than $20 billion, the government made yet another attempt to increase meat prices. Workers responded with escalating work stoppages that culminated in the 1980 general strikes in Lublin. In mid-August, labor protests at the Gdańsk Shipyard gave rise to a chain reaction of strikes that virtually paralyzed the Baltic coast by the end of the month and, for the first time, closed most coal mines in Silesia. The Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee coordinated the strike action across hundreds of workplaces and formulated the 21 demands as the basis for negotiations with the authorities. The Strike Committee was sovereign in its decision-making, but was aided by a team of "expert" advisers that included the well-known dissidents Jacek Kuroń, Karol Modzelewski, Bronisław Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki.


title: History of Poland

text: On 31 August 1980, representatives of workers at the Gdańsk Shipyard, led by an electrician and activist Lech Wałęsa, signed the Gdańsk Agreement with the government that ended their strike. Similar agreements were concluded in Szczecin (the Szczecin Agreement) and in Silesia. The key provision of these agreements was the guarantee of the workers' right to form independent trade unions and the right to strike. Following the successful resolution of the largest labor confrontation in communist Poland's history, nationwide union organizing movements swept the country.


title: History of Poland

text: Edward Gierek was blamed by the Soviets for not following their "fraternal" advice, not shoring up the communist party and the official trade unions and allowing "anti-socialist" forces to emerge. On 5 September 1980, Gierek was replaced by Stanisław Kania as first secretary of the PZPR.


title: History of Poland

text: Delegates of the emergent worker committees from all over Poland gathered in Gdańsk on 17 September and decided to form a single national union organization named "Solidarity".


title: History of Poland

text: While party–controlled courts took up the contentious issues of Solidarity's legal registration as a trade union (finalized by November 10), planning had already begun for the imposition of martial law. A parallel farmers' union was organized and strongly opposed by the regime, but Rural Solidarity was eventually registered (12 May 1981). In the meantime, a rapid deterioration of the authority of the communist party, disintegration of state power and escalation of demands and threats by the various Solidarity–affiliated groups were occurring. According to Kuroń, a "tremendous social democratization movement in all spheres" was taking place and could not be contained. Wałęsa had meetings with Kania, which brought no resolution to the impasse.


title: History of Poland

text: Following the Warsaw Pact summit in Moscow, the Soviet Union proceeded with a massive military build-up along Poland's border in December 1980, but during the summit Kania forcefully argued with Leonid Brezhnev and other allied communists leaders against the feasibility of an external military intervention, and no action was taken. The United States, under presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, repeatedly warned the Soviets about the consequences of a direct intervention, while discouraging an open insurrection in Poland and signaling to the Polish opposition that there would be no rescue by the NATO forces.


title: History of Poland

text: In February 1981, Defense Minister General Wojciech Jaruzelski assumed the position of prime minister. The Solidarity social revolt had thus far been free of any major use of force, but in March 1981 in Bydgoszcz three activists were beaten up by the secret police. In a nationwide "warning strike" the 9.5-million-strong Solidarity union was supported by the population at large, but a general strike was called off by Wałęsa after the 30 March settlement with the government. Both Solidarity and the communist party were badly split and the Soviets were losing patience. Kania was re-elected at the Party Congress in July, but the collapse of the economy continued and so did the general disorder.


title: History of Poland

text: At the first Solidarity National Congress in September–October 1981 in Gdańsk, Lech Wałęsa was elected national chairman of the union with 55% of the vote. An appeal was issued to the workers of the other East European countries, urging them to follow in the footsteps of Solidarity. To the Soviets, the gathering was an "anti-socialist and anti-Soviet orgy" and the Polish communist leaders, increasingly led by Jaruzelski and General Czesław Kiszczak, were ready to apply force.


title: History of Poland

text: In October 1981, Jaruzelski was named first secretary of the PZPR. The Plenum's vote was 180 to 4, and he kept his government posts. Jaruzelski asked parliament to ban strikes and allow him to exercise extraordinary powers, but when neither request was granted, he decided to proceed with his plans anyway.


title: History of Poland

text: On 12–13 December 1981, the regime declared martial law in Poland, under which the army and the ZOMO special police forces were used to crush Solidarity. The Soviet leaders insisted that Jaruzelski pacifies the opposition with the forces at his disposal, without Soviet involvement. Almost all Solidarity leaders and many affiliated intellectuals were arrested or detained. Nine workers were killed in the Pacification of Wujek. The United States and other Western countries responded by imposing economic sanctions against Poland and the Soviet Union. Unrest in the country was subdued, but continued.


title: History of Poland

text: During martial law, Poland was ruled by the so-called Military Council of National Salvation. The open or semi-open opposition communications, as recently practiced, were replaced by underground publishing (known in the eastern bloc as Samizdat), and Solidarity was reduced to a few thousand underground activists.


title: History of Poland

text: Having achieved some semblance of stability, the Polish regime relaxed and then rescinded martial law over several stages. By December 1982 martial law was suspended and a small number of political prisoners, including Wałęsa, were released. Although martial law formally ended in July 1983 and a partial amnesty was enacted, several hundred political prisoners remained in jail. Jerzy Popiełuszko, a popular pro-Solidarity priest, was abducted and murdered by security functionaries in October 1984.


title: History of Poland

text: Further developments in Poland occurred concurrently with and were influenced by the reformist leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union (processes known as Glasnost and Perestroika). In September 1986, a general amnesty was declared and the government released nearly all political prisoners. However, the country lacked basic stability, as the regime's efforts to organize society from the top down had failed, while the opposition's attempts at creating an "alternate society" were also unsuccessful. With the economic crisis unresolved and societal institutions dysfunctional, both the ruling establishment and the opposition began looking for ways out of the stalemate. Facilitated by the indispensable mediation of the Catholic Church, exploratory contacts were established.


title: History of Poland

text: Student protests resumed in February 1988. Continuing economic decline led to strikes across the country in April, May and August. The Soviet Union, increasingly destabilized, was unwilling to apply military or other pressure to prop up allied regimes in trouble. The Polish government felt compelled to negotiate with the opposition and in September 1988 preliminary talks with Solidarity leaders ensued in Magdalenka. Numerous meetings that took place involved Wałęsa and General Kiszczak, among others. In November, the regime made a major public relations mistake by allowing a televised debate between Wałęsa and Alfred Miodowicz, chief of the All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions, the official trade union organization. The fitful bargaining and intra-party squabbling led to the official Round Table Negotiations in 1989, followed by the Polish legislative election in June of that year, a watershed event marking the fall of communism in Poland.


title: History of Poland

text: The Polish Round Table Agreement of April 1989 called for local self-government, policies of job guarantees, legalization of independent trade unions and many wide-ranging reforms. The current Sejm promptly implemented the deal and agreed to National Assembly elections that were set for 4 June and 18 June. Only 35% of the seats in the Sejm (national legislature's lower house) and all of the Senate seats were freely contested; the remaining Sejm seats (65%) were guaranteed for the communists and their allies.


title: History of Poland

text: The failure of the communists at the polls (almost all of the contested seats were won by the opposition) resulted in a political crisis. The new April Novelization to the constitution called for re-establishment of the Polish presidency and on 19 July the National Assembly elected the communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to that office. His election, seen at the time as politically necessary, was barely accomplished with tacit support from some Solidarity deputies, and the new president's position was not strong. Moreover, the unexpected definitiveness of the parliamentary election results created new political dynamics and attempts by the communists to form a government failed.


title: History of Poland

text: On 19 August, President Jaruzelski asked journalist and Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to form a government; on 12 September, the Sejm voted approval of Prime Minister Mazowiecki and his cabinet. Mazowiecki decided to leave the economic reform entirely in the hands of economic liberals led by the new Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz, who proceeded with the design and implementation of his "shock therapy" policy. For the first time in post-war history, Poland had a government led by non-communists, setting a precedent soon to be followed by other Eastern Bloc nations in a phenomenon known as the Revolutions of 1989. Mazowiecki's acceptance of the "thick line" formula meant that there would be no "witch-hunt", i.e., an absence of revenge seeking or exclusion from politics in regard to former communist officials.


title: History of Poland

text: In part because of the attempted indexation of wages, inflation reached 900% by the end of 1989, but was soon dealt with by means of radical methods. In December 1989, the Sejm approved the Balcerowicz Plan to transform the Polish economy rapidly from a centrally planned one to a free market economy. The Constitution of the Polish People's Republic was amended to eliminate references to the "leading role" of the communist party and the country was renamed the "Republic of Poland". The communist Polish United Workers' Party dissolved itself in January 1990. In its place, a new party, Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland, was created. "Territorial self-government", abolished in 1950, was legislated back in March 1990, to be led by locally elected officials; its fundamental unit was the administratively independent gmina.


title: History of Poland

text: In October 1990, the constitution was amended to curtail the term of President Jaruzelski. In November 1990, the German–Polish Border Treaty, with unified Germany, was signed.


title: History of Poland

text: In November 1990, Lech Wałęsa was elected president for a five-year term; in December, he became the first popularly elected president of Poland. Poland's first free parliamentary election was held in October 1991. 18 parties entered the new Sejm, but the largest representation received only 12% of the total vote.


title: History of Poland

text: There were several post-Solidarity governments between the 1989 election and the 1993 election, after which the "post-communist" left-wing parties took over. In 1993, the formerly Soviet Northern Group of Forces, a vestige of past domination, left Poland.


title: History of Poland

text: In 1995, Aleksander Kwaśniewski of the Social Democratic Party was elected president and remained in that capacity for the next ten years (two terms).


title: History of Poland

text: In 1997, the new Constitution of Poland was finalized and approved in a referendum; it replaced the Small Constitution of 1992, an amended version of the communist constitution.


title: History of Poland

text: Poland joined NATO in 1999. Elements of the Polish Armed Forces have since participated in the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. Poland joined the European Union as part of its enlargement in 2004. However, Poland has not adopted the euro as its currency and legal tender, but instead uses the Polish złoty.


title: History of Poland

text: In April 2010, Polish president Lech Kaczynski and dozens of the country's top political and military leaders died in the Smolensk air disaster.


title: History of Poland

text: After the election of the conservative Law and Justice party in 2015, the Polish government repeatedly clashed with EU institutions on the issue of judicial reform and was accused by the European Commission and the European Parliament of undermining "European Values" and eroding democratic standards. However, the Polish government headed by the Law and Justice party maintained that the reforms were necessary due to the prevalence of corruption within the Polish judiciary and the continued presence of holdover Communist era judges.


title: History of Poland

text: In October 2019, Poland's governing Law and Justice party (PiS) won parliamentary election, keeping its majority in the lower house. The second was centrist Civic Coalition (KO). The government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki continued. However, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński was considered the most powerful political figure in Poland although not a member of government. In July 2020, President Andrzej Duda, supported by PiS, was re-elected.


title: History of Poland

text: "a."Piłsudski's family roots in the Polonized gentry of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the resulting perspective of seeing himself and people like him as legitimate Lithuanians put him in conflict with modern Lithuanian nationalists (who in Piłsudski's lifetime redefined the scope and meaning of the "Lithuanian" identity), and, by extension, with other nationalists including the Polish modern nationalist movement.


title: History of Poland

text: "b."In 1938, Poland and Romania refused to agree to a Franco-British proposal that in the event of war with Nazi Germany, Soviet forces would be allowed to cross their territories to aid Czechoslovakia. The Polish ruling elites considered the Soviets in some ways more threatening than the Nazis.


title: History of Poland

text: The Soviet Union repeatedly declared intention to fulfill its obligations under the 1935 treaty with Czechoslovakia and defend Czechoslovakia militarily. A transfer of land and air forces through Poland and/or Romania was required and the Soviets approached about it the French, who also had a treaty with Czechoslovakia (and with Poland and with the Soviet Union). Edward Rydz-Śmigły rebuked the French suggestion on that matter in 1936, and in 1938 Józef Beck pressured Romania not to allow even Soviet warplanes to fly over its territory. Like Hungary, Poland was looking into using the German-Czechoslovak conflict to settle its own territorial grievances, namely disputes over parts of Zaolzie, Spiš and Orava.


title: History of Poland

text: "c." In October 1939, the British Foreign Office notified the Soviets that the United Kingdom would be satisfied with a postwar creation of small ethnic Poland, patterned after the Duchy of Warsaw. An establishment of Poland restricted to "minimal size", according to ethnographic boundaries (such as the lands common to both the prewar Poland and postwar Poland), was planned by the Soviet People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in 1943–1944. Such territorial reduction was recommended by Ivan Maisky to Vyacheslav Molotov in early 1944, because of what Maisky saw as Poland's historically unfriendly disposition toward Russia and the Soviet Union, likely in some way to continue. Joseph Stalin opted for a larger version, allowing a "swap" (territorial compensation for Poland), which involved the eastern lands gained by Poland at the Peace of Riga of 1921 and now lost, and eastern Germany conquered from the Nazis in 1944–1945. In regard to the several major disputed areas: Lower Silesia west of the Oder and the Eastern Neisse rivers (the British wanted it to remain a part of the future German state), Stettin (in 1945 the German communists already established their administration there), "Zakerzonia" (western Red Ruthenia demanded by the Ukrainians), and the Białystok region (Białystok was claimed by the communists of the Byelorussian SSR), the Soviet leader made decisions that favored Poland.


title: History of Poland

text: Other territorial and ethnic scenarios were also possible, generally with possible outcomes less advantageous to Poland than the form the country assumed.


title: History of Poland

text: "d."Timothy D. Snyder spoke of about 100,000 Jews killed by Poles during the Nazi occupation, the majority probably by members of the collaborationist Blue Police. This number would have likely been many times higher had Poland entered into an alliance with Germany in 1939, as advocated by some Polish historians and others.


title: History of Poland

text: "e."Some may have falsely claimed the Jewish identity hoping for permission to emigrate. The communist authorities, pursuing the concept of Poland of single ethnicity (in accordance with the recent border changes and expulsions), were allowing the Jews to leave the country. For a discussion of early communist Poland's ethnic politics, see Timothy D. Snyder, "The Reconstruction of Nations", chapters on modern "Ukrainian Borderland".


title: History of Poland

text: "f."A Communist Party of Poland had existed in the past, but was eliminated in Stalin's purges in 1938.


title: History of Poland

text: "g."The Soviet leadership, which had previously ordered the crushing of the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968, in late 1970 became worried about potential demoralizing effects that deployment against Polish workers would have on the Polish army, a crucial Warsaw Pact component. The Soviets withdrew their support for Gomułka, who insisted on the use of force; he and his close associates were subsequently ousted from the Polish Politburo by the Polish Central Committee.


title: History of Poland

text: "h."East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the population was 43% Polish, 33% Ukrainian, 8% Belarusian and 8% Jewish. The Soviet Union did not want to appear as an aggressor, and moved its troops to eastern Poland under the pretext of offering protection to "the kindred Ukrainian and Belorussian people".


title: History of Poland

text: "i."Joseph Stalin at the 1943 Tehran Conference discussed with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt new post-war borders in central-eastern Europe, including the shape of a future Poland. He endorsed the Piast Concept, which justified a massive shift of Poland's frontiers to the west. Stalin resolved to secure and stabilize the western reaches of the Soviet Union and disable the future military potential of Germany by constructing a compact and ethnically defined Poland (along with the Soviet ethnic Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania) and by radically altering the region's system of national borders. After 1945, the Polish communist regime wholeheartedly adopted and promoted the Piast Concept, making it the centerpiece of their claim to be the true inheritors of Polish nationalism. After all the killings and population transfers during and after the war, the country was 99% "Polish".


title: History of Poland

text: "j.""All the currently available documents of Nazi administration show that, together with the Jews, the stratum of the Polish intelligentsia was marked for total extermination. In fact, Nazi Germany achieved this goal almost by half, since Poland lost 50 percent of her citizens with university diplomas and 35 percent of those with a gimnazium diploma." According to Brzoza and Sowa, 450,000 of Polish citizens had completed higher, secondary, or trade school education by the outbreak of the war. 37.5% of people with higher education perished, 30% of those with general secondary education, and 53.3% of trade school graduates.


title: History of Poland

text: "k."Decisive political events took place in Poland shortly before the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Władysław Gomułka, a reformist party leader, was reinstated to the Politburo of the PZPR and the Eighth Plenum of its Central Committee was announced to convene on 19 October 1956, all without seeking a Soviet approval. The Soviet Union responded with military moves and intimidation and its "military-political delegation", led by Nikita Khrushchev, quickly arrived in Warsaw. Gomułka tried to convince them of his loyalty but insisted on the reforms that he considered essential, including a replacement of Poland's Soviet-trusted minister of defense, Konstantin Rokossovsky. The disconcerted Soviets returned to Moscow, the PZPR Plenum elected Gomułka first secretary and removed Rokossovsky from the Politburo. On 21 October, the Soviet Presidium followed Khrushchev's lead and decided unanimously to "refrain from military intervention" in Poland, a decision likely influenced also by the ongoing preparations for the invasion of Hungary. The Soviet gamble paid off, because Gomułka in the coming years turned out to be a very dependable Soviet ally and an orthodox communist.


title: History of Poland

text: However, unlike the other Warsaw Pact countries, Poland did not endorse the Soviet armed intervention in Hungary. The Hungarian Revolution was intensely supported by the Polish public.


title: History of Poland

text: "l."The delayed reinforcements were coming and the government military commanders General Tadeusz Rozwadowski and Władysław Anders wanted to keep on fighting the coup perpetrators, but President Stanisław Wojciechowski and the government decided to surrender to prevent the imminent spread of civil war. The coup brought to power the "Sanation" regime under Józef Piłsudski (Edward Rydz-Śmigły after Piłsudski's death). The Sanation regime persecuted the opposition within the military and in general. Rozwadowski died after abusive imprisonment, according to some accounts murdered. Another major opponent of Piłsudski, General Włodzimierz Zagórski, disappeared in 1927. According to Aleksandra Piłsudska, the marshal's wife, following the coup and for the rest of his life Piłsudski lost his composure and appeared over-burdened.


title: History of Poland

text: At the time of Rydz-Śmigły's command, the Sanation camp embraced the ideology of Roman Dmowski, Piłsudski's nemesis. Rydz-Śmigły did not allow General Władysław Sikorski, an enemy of the Sanation movement, to participate as a soldier in the country's defense against the Invasion of Poland in September 1939. During World War II in France and then in Britain, the Polish government-in-exile became dominated by anti-Sanation politicians. The perceived Sanation followers were in turn persecuted (in exile) under prime ministers Sikorski and Stanisław Mikołajczyk.


title: History of Poland

text: "m."General Zygmunt Berling of the Soviet-allied First Polish Army attempted in mid-September a crossing of the Vistula and landing at Czerniaków to aid the insurgents, but the operation was defeated by the Germans and the Poles suffered heavy losses.


title: History of Poland

text: "n."The decision to launch the Warsaw Uprising resulted in the destruction of the city, its population and its elites and has been a source of lasting controversy. According to the historians Czesław Brzoza and Andrzej Leon Sowa, orders of further military offensives, issued at the end of August 1944 as a continuation of Operation Tempest, show a loss of the sense of responsibility for the country's fate on the part of the underground Polish leadership.


title: History of Poland

text: "o."One of the party leaders Mieczysław Rakowski, who abandoned his mentor Gomułka following the 1970 crisis, saw the demands of the demonstrating workers as "exclusively socialist" in character, because of the way they were phrased. Most people in communist Poland, including opposition activists, did not question the supremacy of socialism or the socialist idea; misconduct by party officials, such as not following the provisions of the constitution, was blamed. From the time of Gierek, this assumed standard of political correctness was increasingly challenged: pluralism, and then free market, became frequently used concepts.


title: History of Poland

text: "p."The Polish Sanation authorities were provoked by the independence-seeking Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). OUN engaged in political assassinations, terror and sabotage, to which the Polish state responded with a repressive campaign in the 1930s, as Józef Piłsudski and his successors imposed collective responsibility on the villagers in the affected areas. After the disturbances of 1933 and 1934, the Bereza Kartuska prison camp was established; it became notorious for its brutal regime. The government brought Polish settlers and administrators to parts of Volhynia with a centuries-old tradition of Ukrainian peasant rising against Polish land owners (and to Eastern Galicia). In the late 1930s, after Piłsudski's death, military persecution intensified and a policy of "national assimilation" was aggressively pursued. Military raids, public beatings, property confiscations and the closing and destruction of Orthodox churches aroused lasting enmity in Galicia and antagonized Ukrainian society in Volhynia at the worst possible moment, according to Timothy D. Snyder. However, he also notes that "Ukrainian terrorism and Polish reprisals touched only part of the population, leaving vast regions unaffected" and "the OUN's nationalist prescription, a Ukrainian state for ethnic Ukrainians alone was far from popular". Halik Kochanski wrote of the legacy of bitterness between the Ukrainians and Poles that soon exploded in the context of World War II. See also: History of the Ukrainian minority in Poland.


title: History of Poland

text: "q."In Poland, officials of central government (the provincial office of "wojewoda") can overrule elected territorial and municipal local governments. However, in such cases "wojewoda" decisions have sometimes been invalidated by courts.


title: History of Poland

text: "r."Foreign policy was one of the few governmental areas in which Piłsudski took an active interest. He saw Poland's role and opportunity as lying in Eastern Europe and advocated passive relations with the West. He felt that a German attack should not be feared, because even if this unlikely event were to take place, the Western powers would be bound to restrain Germany and come to Poland's rescue.


title: History of Poland

text: "s."According to the researcher Jan Sowa, the Commonwealth failed as a state because it was not able to conform to the emerging new European order established at the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Poland's elective kings, restricted by the self-serving and short-sighted nobility, could not impose a strong and efficient central government with its characteristic post-Westphalian internal and external sovereignty. The inability of Polish kings to levy and collect taxes (and therefore sustain a standing army) and conduct independent foreign policy were among the chief obstacles to Poland competing effectively on the changed European scene, where absolutist power was a prerequisite for survival and became the foundation for the abolition of serfdom and gradual formation of parliamentarism.


title: History of Poland

text: "t."Besides the Home Army there were other major underground fighting formations: Bataliony Chłopskie, National Armed Forces (NSZ) and Gwardia Ludowa (later Armia Ludowa). From 1943, the leaders of the nationalistic NSZ collaborated with Nazi Germany in a case unique in occupied Poland. The NSZ conducted an anti-communist civil war. Before the arrival of the Soviets, the NSZ's Holy Cross Mountains Brigade left Poland under the protection of the German army. According to the historians Czesław Brzoza and Andrzej Leon Sowa, participation figures given for the underground resistance are often inflated. In the spring of 1944, the time of the most extensive involvement of the underground organizations, there were most likely considerably fewer than 500,000 military and civilian personnel participating, over the entire spectrum, from the right wing to the communists.


title: History of Poland

text: "u."According to Jerzy Eisler, about 1.1 million people may have been imprisoned or detained in 1944–1956 and about 50,000 may have died because of the struggle and persecution, including about 7,000 soldiers of the right-wing underground killed in the 1940s. According to Adam Leszczyński, up to 30,000 people were killed by the communist regime during the first several years after the war.


title: History of Poland

text: "v."According to Andrzej Stelmachowski, one of the key participants of the Polish systemic transformation, Minister Leszek Balcerowicz pursued extremely liberal economic policies, often extraordinarily painful for society. The December 1989 Sejm statute of credit relations reform introduced an "incredible" system of privileges for banks, which were allowed to unilaterally alter interest rates on already existing contracts. The exceedingly high rates they instantly introduced ruined many previously profitable enterprises and caused a complete breakdown of the apartment block construction industry, which had long-term deleterious effects on the state budget as well. Balcerowicz's policies also caused permanent damage to Polish agriculture, an area in which he lacked expertise, and to the often successful and useful Polish cooperative movement.


title: History of Poland

text: According to Karol Modzelewski, a dissident and critic of the economic transformation, in 1989 Solidarity no longer existed, having been in reality eliminated during the martial law period. What the "post-Solidarity elites" did in 1989 amounted to a betrayal of the old Solidarity base, and the retribution was only a matter of time.


title: History of Poland

text: "w."Led by Władysław Anders, the Polish II Corps fought in 1944–1945 in the Allied Italian Campaign, where the corps' main engagement was the Battle of Monte Cassino.


title: History of Poland

text: "x."The Piast Concept, of which the chief proponent was Jan Ludwik Popławski (late 19th century), was based on the claim that the Piast homeland was inhabited by so-called "native" aboriginal Slavs and Slavonic Poles since time immemorial and only later was "infiltrated" by "alien" Celts, Germanic peoples, and others. After 1945, the so-called "autochthonous" or "aboriginal" school of Polish prehistory received official backing and a considerable degree of popular support in Poland. According to this view, the Lusatian Culture, which flourished between the Oder and the Vistula in the early Iron Age, was said to be Slavonic; all non-Slavonic tribes and peoples recorded in the area at various points in ancient times were dismissed as "migrants" and "visitors". In contrast, the critics of this theory, such as Marija Gimbutas, regarded it as an unproved hypotheses and for them the date and origin of the westward migration of the Slavs were largely uncharted; the Slavonic connections of the Lusatian Culture were entirely imaginary; and the presence of an ethnically mixed and constantly changing collection of peoples on the North European Plain was taken for granted.


title: History of Poland

text: "y."According to the count presented by Prime Minister and Internal Affairs Minister Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski before the Sejm committee in January 1938, 818 people were killed in police suppression of labor protests (industrial and agricultural) during the 1932–1937 period.


title: History of Poland

text: "z."John II Casimir Vasa is known for his remarkable and accurate prediction of the Partitions of Poland, made over a century before the event's occurrence.


title: History of Poland

text: "a1."According to war historian Ben Macintyre, "The Polish contribution to allied victory in the Second World War was extraordinary, perhaps even decisive, but for many years it was disgracefully played down, obscured by the politics of the Cold War."


title: History of Poland

text: "b1."Piłsudski left the Polish Socialist Party in 1914 and severed his connections with the socialist movement, but many activists from the Left and of other political orientations presumed his continuing involvement there.


title: History of Poland

text: "c1."Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points program was subsequently weakened by internal developments in the US, Britain, France, and Germany. In the last case, Poland was denied the city of Danzig on the Baltic coast.


title: History of Poland

text: "d1."The government of Soviet Russia issued in August 1918 a decree strongly supportive of the independence of Poland, but at that time no Polish lands were under Russian control.


title: Iain Stirling

text: Iain Andrew Stirling (born 27 January 1988) is a British comedian, writer, television presenter, actor, narrator and Twitch streamer from Edinburgh, Scotland.


title: Iain Stirling

text: Having started stand-up whilst in his final year of Law at the University of Edinburgh, a year which saw him make the final of both the Paramount Funniest Student and Chortle Student Comedian Of The Year competitions, Stirling is a regular on the UK comedy circuit. Having been dubbed one of Scotland's 'Hottest Newcomers' by "The Scotsman" after his performance in front of 750 people at the Glasgow Fruitmarket, he now gigs all over the UK including The Stand (Edinburgh and Glasgow), The Comedy Store (Manchester and London), Off The Kerb and various smaller clubs.


title: Iain Stirling

text: In August 2009, Stirling performed in the final of the Chortle Student Comedian Of The Year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, finishing runner-up to winner Joe Lycett.


title: Iain Stirling

text: After being spotted at a gig, Stirling presented the CBBC Channel along with his canine sidekick Hacker T. Dog from the CBBC TV show "Scoop", and other sidekicks including Dodge the Dog, 'The Toad of Wisdom', and 'Pig With 'Tasche'. He has also worked as a writer on a number of projects for the likes of CBBC and BBC Scotland. He also appeared in "Scoop" as the postboy in the first four episodes of the new series.


title: Iain Stirling

text: In early October 2013, Stirling began recording for a new series for CBBC, "The Dog Ate My Homework", which was commissioned as the CBBC answer to "Mock the Week". The show features two teams of comedians or celebrities and a child as team leader. Stirling hosts the show of 'off-the-wall questions, nonsensical studio games, and slapstick challenges'. He was nominated for a BAFTA in 2014 for best children's presenter for his hosting of the programme for two series.


title: Iain Stirling

text: In 2012 Iain appeared on Russell Howard's Good News In June 2015, Stirling became the narrator of ITV2 reality series "Love Island", which entered its eighth series in 2022. Stirling hosted "Scotland's Big Night Out" on 31 December 2017, as part of BBC Scotland's Hogmanay 2017. In February 2019, it was announced that Stirling would be a contestant on the eighth series of "Taskmaster". He also was the host of the first programme on the BBC Scotland channel, "A Night at the Theatre".


title: Iain Stirling

text: In April–May 2019, over six episodes, Stirling featured as one of the six comedians on the TV show "Comedy Bus", in which each comedian took the others back to their home towns, Stirling took the group back to his native Edinburgh.


title: Iain Stirling

text: On 19 November 2020, Stirling featured as a panellist on the ITV Daytime show, "Loose Women", and made history as being part of the show's first all male panel in the show's 21 year history.


title: Iain Stirling

text: Since June 2020, Stirling has appeared as a regular cast member on "Celebrity Gogglebox", alongside his wife, Laura Whitmore.


title: Iain Stirling

text: In March 2021, Stirling announced he had created a new sitcom with Steve Bugeja. "Buffering" began airing on ITV2 in summer 2021.


title: Iain Stirling

text: Stirling operates his own channel on the internet streaming service Twitch in which he interacts with viewers whilst playing video games such as FIFA. As of October 2021 his channel has grown to over 65,000 followers.


title: Iain Stirling

text: In June 2022 he and his wife Laura started a true crime podcast together called "Partners in Crime with Laura Whitmore and Iain Stirling".


title: Iain Stirling

text: In 2020, Stirling married presenter, model and actress Laura Whitmore in a humanist ceremony at Dublin City Hall. Whitmore gave birth to the couple's daughter in late March 2021.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: Freydís Eiríksdóttir (born 970) was a Icelandic woman said to be the daughter of Erik the Red (as in her patronym), who figured prominently in the Norse exploration of North America as an early colonist of Vinland, while her brother, Leif Erikson, is credited in early histories of the region with the first European contact. The medieval and primary sources that mention Freydís are the two Vinland sagas: the "Saga of the Greenlanders" and the "Saga of Erik the Red". The two sagas offer differing accounts, though Freydís is portrayed in both as a strong woman.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: The "Saga of the Greenlanders" is a crude version of the accounts that happened to the Norse in Vinland. Freydís' experiences in Vinland are relayed in Chapter 8 of this saga, which describes her as Leif Erikson's full sister. This is the most famous account we have of Freydís.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: After the success of expeditions to Vinland led by Leif Erikson, Þorvaldr Eiríksson, and Þorfinnr Karlsefni, Freydís wanted the prestige and wealth associated with a Vinland journey. She made a deal with two Icelandic men, Helgi and Finnbogi, that they should go together to Vinland and share all profits half-and-half. Freydís asked her brother Leif Erikson for permission to use the homes and stables that he had built in Vinland. He agreed that they all could use the houses. Helgi and Finnbogi agreed that they would bring the same number of men and supplies as Freydis, but Freydís smuggled more men into her ship. Helgi and Finnbogi, arriving early, took refuge in the houses; when Freydís arrived, she ordered the brothers to move, as the houses were her brother's and meant for her. This was the first of many disagreements between Freydís and the brothers.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: In Vinland, there was tension between the two groups. Helgi and Finnbogi set up a settlement separate from Freydis and her crew. Freydis eventually went to the brothers' hut and asked how they were faring. "Well," responded the brothers; "but we do not like this ill-feeling that has sprung up between us." The two sides made peace.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: When she returned to her husband, Freydís claimed that Helgi and Finnbogi had beaten her, and, calling him a coward, demanded that he exact revenge on her behalf, or else she would divorce him. He gathered his men and killed Helgi and Finnbogi as well as the men in their camp when they were sleeping. When he refused to kill the five women in the camp, Freydís herself picked up an axe and massacred them.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: Freydís, to conceal her treachery, threatened death to anyone who told of the killings. She went back to Greenland after a year's stay and told her brother Leif Eiriksson that Helgi and Finnbogi had decided to stay in Vinland. However, word of the killings eventually reached Leif. He had three men from Freydís's expedition tortured until they confessed the whole occurrence. Thinking ill of the deeds, Leif still did not want "to do that to Freydís, my sister, which she has deserved." However, he remarked that he foresaw Freydís' descendants having little prosperity. The saga concludes that everyone thought ill of her descendants afterwards.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: The "Saga of Erik the Red" was written after "The Saga of the Greenlanders". This saga portrays Freydís as a notable and strong woman, the half-sister to Leif Erikson. She joined an expedition to Vinland led by Þorfinnr Karlsefni, but is only mentioned once in the saga when the expedition was attacked by natives (also known as the "Skrælingjar" in Icelandic). The natives, equipped with "war-slings, or catapults," stealthily attacked the expedition's camp at night and shot at the warriors.


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: Many of the Nordic invaders panicked, having never seen such weaponry. As men fled during the confusion, Freydís, who was eight months pregnant, admonished them, saying: "Why run you away from such worthless creatures, stout men that ye are, when, as seems to me likely, you might slaughter them like so many cattle? Let me but have a weapon, I know I could fight better than any of you."


title: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

text: Ignored, Freydís picked up the sword of the fallen Thorbrand Snorrisson and engaged the attacking natives. Surrounded by enemies, she undid her garment and beat the sword upon her breast. At this the natives retreated to their boats and fled. Karlsefni and the other survivors praised her zeal.


title: Joey Bosa

text: Joseph Anthony Bosa (born July 11, 1995) is an American football outside linebacker for the Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Ohio State and was selected third overall by the (then San Diego) Chargers in the 2016 NFL Draft, where he was named NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year. Bosa has since been cited as among the best pass rushers in the NFL. He is the son of former NFL player John Bosa and the older brother of current NFL player Nick Bosa.


title: Joey Bosa

text: Bosa attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he played high school football and basketball for the Raiders. He was rated by Rivals.com as a four-star recruit and was ranked as the fourth best defensive end in his class. Bosa committed to play college football at Ohio State University in April 2012.


title: Joey Bosa

text: As a true freshman in 2013, Bosa started 10 of 14 games, recording 44 tackles and 7.5 sacks. He was named a freshman All-American by the "Sporting News" and "College Football News". In 2014, Bosa was named a Unanimous First-team All-American, becoming the 27th Buckeye in 84 years to do so. He finished his sophomore year with 13.5 sacks on 55 tackles. He earned Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year.


title: Joey Bosa

text: On July 30, 2015, it was announced that Bosa would be suspended from the first game of the 2015 season with three other Ohio State football players for undisclosed reasons. During his junior year, Bosa finished with five sacks and an interception on 47 tackles. On December 31, 2015, he announced his intentions to enter the 2016 NFL Draft. During the 2016 Fiesta Bowl against Notre Dame on January 1, 2016, Bosa was ejected in the first quarter for a targeting penalty when he made a hit on quarterback DeShone Kizer. Ohio State won the Bowl game by a score of 44–28. After his junior season, he entered the 2016 NFL Draft.


title: Joey Bosa

text: Bosa was a highly decorated Buckeye receiving National and Conference honors beginning his Freshman year. In 2013, Bosa was named a First-team Freshman All-American as well as selected to the Freshman All-Big Ten First-team. In 2014, his sophomore year, he was named Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year, Big Ten Lineman of the Year, First-team All-American, and All-Big Ten, as well as a Lombardi Award Finalist. He repeated most of the honors his Junior year, falling short of claiming the Nagurski-Woodson Defensive Player of the Year for the second time.


title: Joey Bosa

text: In March 2016, Bosa was projected to be a top 10 pick in the 2016 NFL Draft by NFL analyst Daniel Jeremiah. Bosa received an invitation to the NFL combine as a top prospect in the upcoming draft. He completed all of the required combine drills and also participated in positional drills. Bosa met and interviewed with 13 NFL teams at the combine, including the Baltimore Ravens, New Orleans Saints, Dallas Cowboys, Cleveland Browns, and Tennessee Titans. His overall performance at the combine was thought by scouts to be impressive.


title: Joey Bosa

text: Bosa was drafted in the first round with the third overall selection by the San Diego Chargers. He was the first of five Ohio State players to be drafted in the first round of the 2016 NFL Draft, followed by Ezekiel Elliott, Eli Apple, Taylor Decker, and Darron Lee.


title: Joey Bosa

text: For the National Football League My Cause My Cleats program, Bosa has worn cleats in support of pediatric cancer research. The cleats include #MoreThan4 to advocate that more than 4 percent of funding from the National Cancer Institute total annual budget should be allocated to pediatric cancer research.


title: Joey Bosa

text: In May 2021, as part of a Mental Health Awareness Month campaign for the National Football League, Bosa spoke about how he learned to focus on physical and mental well-being.


title: Joey Bosa

text: Bosa missed the first four weeks of the season due to a hamstring injury. On 9 October, Bosa made his regular season debut against AFC West rival Oakland Raiders. Although Bosa only played 27 snaps, he finished the game with two sacks, a hit, and four hurries. The following game against the Denver Broncos, he had one quarterback hit, five hurries, and a stop while also drawing double teams throughout the game. Bosa was named Defensive Rookie of the Month for October. Despite being limited to 12 games, Bosa finished his rookie year with 41 tackles, 10.5 sacks, and a forced fumble. He was named the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year. He was named to the NFL All-Rookie Team. He was ranked as the 100th best player in the league by his peers on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2017.


title: Joey Bosa

text: Bosa followed his impressive rookie season with a solid second season, which began with the Chargers' move from San Diego to Los Angeles. He and Melvin Ingram formed one of the best pass rushing duos in the league, with Bosa totaling 70 tackles and 12.5 sacks - seventh in the NFL. On 19 December 2017, Bosa was named to his first Pro Bowl. He was ranked #37 by his fellow players on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2018.


title: Joey Bosa

text: Bosa suffered a foot injury, which sidelined him until Week 11 of the 2018 season. In seven games, he recorded 5.5 sacks, 23 combined tackles, nine quarterback hits, and one fumble recovery. He made his playoff debut in the against the Baltimore Ravens. In the 23-17 win, he had one sack, two tackles, and one quarterback hit. In the against the New England Patriots, he had one tackle in the 41-28 loss. He was ranked 56th by his fellow players on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2019.


title: Joey Bosa

text: On 12 April 2019, Bosa switched his jersey number from 99 to 97. He wore 97 during his tenure with Ohio State. On 23 April 2019, the Chargers picked up the fifth-year option on Bosa's contract.


title: Joey Bosa

text: In Week 8 against the Chicago Bears, Bosa recorded another two sacks on Mitch Trubisky in the 17–16 win.


title: Joey Bosa

text: He was named the AFC Defensive Player of the Week for his performance while his brother, Nick Bosa, won the award for the NFC.