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The Government of the Polish Republic in Exile was the government of Poland after the country had been occupied by Germany and the Soviet Union during September-October 1939. The Polish Government in Exile commanded Polish armed forces operating in Poland and abroad during the war. Though largely unrecognized and without effective power after World War II, it remained in existence until the end of Communist rule in Poland in 1990, when it formally passed on its responsibilities to the new government.
Establishment On September 17, 1939, the President of the Polish Republic, Ignacy Mościcki, who was then in the small town of Kosów near the southern Polish border, signed an act appointing Władysław Raczkiewicz, the Speaker of the Senate, as his successor. This was done in accordance with Article 24 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, adopted in April 1935, which provided as follows: "In event of war, the term of the President's office shall be extended until three months after the conclusion of peace; in such circumstances, the President of the Republic shall, by a special act promulgated in the Official Gazette, appoint his successor, in case the office should fall vacant before the conclusion of peace. Should the President's successor assume office, the term of his office shall expire at the end of three months after the conclusion of peace." Raczkiewicz, who was already in Paris, immediately took his constitutional oath at the Polish Embassy and became President of the Republic of Poland. He then appointed General Władysław Sikorski to be Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces. Most of the Polish Navy had escaped to Britain before September 1, 1939, and tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and airmen escaped through Hungary and Romania or across the Baltic Sea to continue the fight in France and French-mandated Syria. Many Poles subsequently took part in Allied operations in Norway (Narvik), France, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, North Africa (notably Tobruk), Italy (notably at Cassino and Ancona), Arnhem, Wilhelmshaven and elsewhere beside other Allied forces. Even after the fall of Poland, and before the Soviet Union's entry into the war, Poland remained the third strongest Allied belligerent, after France and Britain. (Other Polish military units, formed in the Soviet Union after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, fought alongside and under the command of the Soviets.) Wartime history The Polish Government in Exile, based first in Paris and then in London, was recognized by all the Allied governments. Politically, it was a coalition of the Polish Peasant Party, the Polish Socialist Party and the National Democratic Party, although these parties maintained only a vestigial existence in the circumstances of exile. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Polish Government in Exile established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, despite Stalin's role in the earlier dismemberment of Poland. Hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Soviets in eastern Poland in 1939, and many civilian Polish prisoners and deportees, were released and allowed to form military units ("Anders' Army") and evacuate to Iran and the Middle East, where they were desperately needed by the British, hard pressed by Rommel's Afrika Korps. These Polish units formed the basis for the Polish 2nd Corps, led by General Władysław Anders, which together with other, earlier-created Polish units fought alongside the Allies. In April 1943 the Germans announced that they had discovered at Katyn Wood, near Smolensk, Russia, mass graves of 4,300 Polish officers who had been taken prisoner in 1939 and murdered by the Soviets. The Germans invited the International Red Cross to visit the site, and the graves were confirmed to contain the corpses of Polish officers who had been killed with Soviet weapons. The Soviet government said that the Germans had fabricated the discovery. The other Allied governments, for diplomatic reasons, formally accepted this; the Polish Government in Exile refused to do so. Stalin then severed relations with the Polish Government in Exile. Since it was clear that it would be the Soviet Union, not the western Allies, who would liberate Poland from the Germans, this breach had fateful consequences for Poland. In an unfortunate coincidence, Sikorski, widely regarded as the most capable of the Polish exile leaders, was killed in an air crash at Gibraltar in July 1943. He was succeeded as head of the Polish Government in Exile by Stanisław Mikołajczyk. During 1943 and 1944 the Allied leaders, particularly Winston Churchill, tried to bring about a resumption of talks between Stalin and the Polish Government in Exile. But these efforts broke down over several matters. One was the massacre at Katyń (also Kalinin and Kharkiv). Another was Poland's postwar borders. Stalin insisted that the territories annexed by the Soviets in 1939, which had majority Ukrainian and Belarusian populations, should remain in Soviet hands, and that Poland should be compensated with lands to be annexed from Germany. Mikołajczyk, however, refused to compromise on the question of Poland's sovereignty over her prewar eastern territories. A third matter was Mikołajczyk's insistence that Stalin not set up a Communist government in postwar Poland. Postwar history
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