Aleksander Krzyżanowski

Polish army officer and partisan leader (1895–1951)

Aleksander Krzyżanowski nom de guerre "Wilk" (18 February 1895 – 29 September 1951) was an artillery colonel of the Polish Army, officer of the Service for Poland's Victory, Union of Armed Struggle, commander of the Vilnius District of the Home Army, political prisoner of the Stalinist period. In 1994 he was posthumously promoted to the rank of brigade general. also issuing explicit orders that no ethnic group, including Jews, should be mistreated. He also opened negotiations with the representatives of the Lithuanian and Belarusian resistance but they were fruitless. The relationship between the Soviets and Sikorski's Polish government in exile, formally a commanding force of the AK, was strained at best, especially in the wake of the evidence of the mass execution of the Polish POW officers by the Soviets at Katyn which was discovered in 1943. As Soviet partisans were ordered to liquidate Polish Home Army units, so the local AK commanders considered the Soviets as just another enemy. As ordered by Moscow on 22 June 1943, the Soviet partisans in Poland started an open fight both against the German forces as well as the local Polish partisans. There are no known joint Polish German actions, with the German attempts to turn the Poles toward fighting exclusively against the Soviets being unsuccessful. The collaboration of local commanders with the Germans was atypical, and condemned by AK High Command. Krzyżanowski would not agree to such a withdrawal and the fighting escalated, eventually culminating in the Polish victory over the Lithuanian collaborationist forces in the battle of Murowana Oszmianka Lithuanian Security Police forces, which had recently suffered a loss of several members in a skirmish with AK, massacred 37 Polish civilians in Glinciszki, a village known to support the Polish partisans. Krzyżanowski ordered his forces to increase the activity against the Lithuanians in retribution and, according to the accounts published in Lithuania, his forces conducted a multitude of actions against the Lithuanian civil population. It is unclear whether he was aware of the Dubingiai incident, in which an AK unit massacred a number of Lithuanian civilians (the estimated number of victims vary between 27 and close to a hundred or more). Although the Armia Krajowa's actions are still controversial in Lithuania, a Lithuanian historian Arunas Bubnys has stated that there were no mass murders by the AK (the only exception being Dubingiai), but that the AK was guilty only of some war crimes against individuals or selected families. He also noted that accusations of genocide or widespread activities by the AK are false and have underlying political motives, including to counteract accusations of widespread German Lithuanian collaboration and crimes committed by units such as the Lithuanian Security Police.

Krzyżanowski was in prison until 1947. In August 1947 he escaped but was quickly re arrested when he approached a Polish official who worked for the Polish communists. He was repatriated to Poland in October 1947. He did not support any secret resistance against the Soviets, like Freedom and Independence, arguing that it was pointless in the face of Soviet numerical superiority and the Western betrayal, but he remained in contact with many of his former subordinates. He was however still viewed as a danger to the state by the Polish communist regime and was arrested in 1948 by the secret police, Urząd Bezpieczeństwa. In prison, his health deteriorated, and he died from tuberculosis on 29 September 1951.

He was buried in an unmarked grave, but in the wake of destalinization in 1957, his body was exhumed and buried in the Powązki Military Cemetery. In 1994 he was posthumously promoted to the rank of brigade general.