After the War

The Poles' gift, to their western Allies, of Enigma decryption, a little over a month before the outbreak of World War II, came not a moment too soon.

Without the Polish assistance, British code-breakers would, at the very least, have been considerably delayed in reading Enigma. Author Hugh Sebag-Montefiore concludes that substantial breaks into German Army and Air Force Enigma ciphers by the British would have occurred only after November 1941 at the earliest, after an Enigma machine and key lists had been captured, and similarly Naval Enigma only after late 1942. Former Bletchley Park cryptologist Gordon Welchman goes further, writing that the Army and Air Force Enigma section, Hut 6, "would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military ... Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use".

Intelligence gained from solving high-level German ciphers-intelligence code named "Ultra" by the British and Americans-came chiefly from Enigma decrypts. While the exact contribution of Ultra intelligence to Allied victory is disputed, Kozaczuk and Straszak note that "it is widely believed that Ultra saved the world at least two years of war and possibly prevented Hitler from winning." The English historian Sir Harry Hinsley, who worked at Bletchley Park, similarly assessed it as having "shortened the war by not less than two years and probably by four years". The availability of Ultra was due in large part to the early Polish work on Enigma.

Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill was to tell King George VI after the war: "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war."

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower called Ultra "decisive" to Allied victory.

Col. Janusz Albrecht, after a defeat of 1939, went underground and participated in setting up AK (Home Army). AK was the main Polish underground combat organization throughout the rest of the war.

In 1940, Gestapo arrested Janusz Albreht. He resisted torture and depravations. An officer of Gestapo, the same he met in Magdeburg, visited him. They talked in the officer's mess, like old friends. For the old time sake, he was liberated. Gestapo expected he will lead them, in time, to others. He jumped out of the 3rd. floor window during the second arrest. His son, Janusz Kazimierz Albreht, the member of AK unit "Baszta", died during Warsaw Uprising at the age of 18.

Stanisław Byczyński, the Polish senator, vanished without leaving traces during Warsaw Uprising in 1944 among its 250,000 victims.

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Wacław Święcki survived the war in Hungarian POW camp. There he developed a marked interest for water painting. He evaded the soviet NKVD net, settled in Zakopane. Before he died, he asked for a big stone to be put on his grave. "I was carrying a cross whole my life..."

Capt. Antońy Landowski survived the war too. He immigrated to USA and lived in New Jersey. He retired in Las Vegas, gambled his money away and died penniless. In 1992, I put his ashes, according to his will, on a cactus covered hills near Phoenix, Arizona. He wanted a place with a good view.

Severyn Kulesza, survived the war as well, he immigrated to USA and finished his days teaching the horse back riding to Hollywood stars and starlets. I interviewed him in California in 1974.

After the war, soviet communists declared Polish resistance movements: "bandit organizations" and promoted real bandits to a status of "socialist" resistance fighters. In 1947, my other grandfather, along with his wife, dauther and son, were arrested by NKVD agents in Poland for being members of Polish resistance movement NSZ. He died in communist jail after 9 years. My grandmother was finally freed after 10 years of suffering vices of jewish comunist jailers.

Jerzy Różycki, Jan Gralinski and Piotr Smolenski had perished in the January 1942 sinking of a French passenger ship in the Mediterranean. Marian Rejewski and Henryk Żygalski fled France for Spain, where they were arrested in Spain January 30, 1943. They were incarcerated for three months before being released, upon Red Cross intervention, on May 4, 1943, and continuing on their way to the Polish Armed Forces in Britain.

Despite their ordeal, Rejewski and Żygalski had fared better than some of their colleagues. Cadix's Polish military chiefs, Langer and Ciezki, had also been captured by the Germans, as they tried to cross from France into Spain, the night of March 10-11, 1943 - along with three of the other Poles, Antoni Palluth, Edward Fokczynski and Kazimierz Gaca. The first two became prisoners of war, and the other three were sent as slave labor to Germany, where Palluth and Fokczynski died. Palluth died during an Allied air raid at the German Sachsenhausen concentration camp. All five men protected the secret of Enigma decryption.

A number of other Cadix Poles, including Wiktor Michalowski, managed to reach Britain. Before the war, Antoni Palluth (one of the lecturers in the 1929 secret Poznań University cryptology course), had been co-owner of AVA, a Warsaw radio-manufacturing enterprise that produced equipment for the Cipher Bureau. Under German occupation, some AVA workers were interrogated by the Germans but managed to say nothing that might lead the Germans to suspect that the Enigma cipher had been compromised.

The man behind the "Red Orchestra"; Trepper, survived all the players... with German and French help. To wash himself off the sticky collaboration dirt he published a book full of how he wanted to be remembered, not as he realy was. Finally, the time overcame him in 70's, in France.
Mendel Strolnikoff and Joseph Joanovici, Trepper's partners, survived the war too. At the end of the war Strolnikoff was executed on Spanish soil by French "barbouses", while Joanovici tried to emigrate to Israel... but even Israel did not wanted him... so he tried to rejoin his masters in South America... they did not wanted him as well. The story of these two could make a book on jewish colaboration during World War II.

Kombrig Ivan Serov survived the war too. He became Beria's deputy. In Hungary, him and Yuri Andropov distinguished themselves, in 1956, by kidnapping, torturing and executing leaders of the Hungarian uprising. For which, in december 1958, he was appointed a chief of GRU (soviet military intelligence). His retribution came in 1962 for a friendship with Oleg Penkovsky. He was demoted and striped of his decorations. In 1963, his protegé vanished burned alive in Aquarium's oven, a special treatment reserved for bad apples of GRU's upper class. 1 July 1991, Ivan Serov died in Moscow. Lech Wałęsa; the president of Poland, in 1995, signed a decree presenting posthumously Ivan Serow with the highest Polish Military Order; "Virtuti Militari" with 4 stars, a direct insult to all holders of the same order. What can one expect from an ignorant altar boy?

It will be difficult to assess the total number of people executed by NKVD, or its predecessors, between 1917 and 1989. The executioners were liquidated at the end of their work. A figure of 30 to 40 millions is about right... all in the name of "worker's and farmer's paradise", but realy, so the jewish investment bankers could get richer!

Prolog   Cavalry   Players   Trip   Meeting   Airport   Boat ride   Castle   Visiting   Bad Harzburg   Epilog   Executions   Photos   The End