Poland - TheHistoryFiles.com

Poland Early 18th Century – The Reign of Anarchy I

Augustus II of Poland. 17th Centruy Polish Dragoons By the last quarter of the seventeenth century it was becoming obvious to all that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a very different kind of political unit from all the surrounding states, and that it did not lend itself to the conduct of the kind of policies they […]

History, Poland

Poland Early 18th Century – The Reign of Anarchy II

Polish army throughout the 18th century, by Karol Linder. Sweden had been wiped out as a significant power by the débâcle of Poltava. Turkey was decisively defeated (Hetman Feliks Potocki’s victory at Podhajce in 1697 was the last Polish-Tatar battle), and by the Treaty of Karlowitz in January 1699 the Commonwealth regained Kamieniec and the […]

History, Poland

Poland in the Age of Napoleon and Alexander I

Jan Henryk Dąbrowski in front of the Polish Legions. The dismemberment of the Commonwealth presents the historian of Poland with something of a dilemma: should he henceforth chart the progress of each of the orphan nations—the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, Germans and other minorities which inhabited its territory—or should he concentrate on the Poles? The […]

Poland

Polish Insurgency I

Polish General Staff wore navy blue uniforms reminiscent of Napoleonic-era attire. Soldiers of each regiment wore uniforms in colours of their land. On the night of 29 November 1830 a group of officer cadets broke into the Belvedere Palace to assassinate Grand Duke Constantine while another attacked a nearby Russian cavalry barracks. Everything went wrong. […]

Poland

Polish Insurgency II

“Battle of Ostrołęka of 1831”, an 1838 painting by Karol Malankiewicz In the early summer the mood in Germany and in the Frankfurt Parliament began to veer away from internationalist liberalism, and deputies representing the German population of Poznania, Silesia and Pomerania began to voice anti-Polish sentiments. As the liberal ardour spent itself, the Berlin […]

History, Poland

Polish Insurgency

The battle of Grochow, fought on 25 February 1831. Painted in 1887, and improved in 1928, by Wojciech Kossak (1856–1942), the scene depicts the 4th regiment of the line of the Polish army in action. General Chłopicki, the overall Polish commander, can be seen on horseback in civilian dress. Observing the battle on the Russian […]

Poland

Polish Resistance WWII

Polish resistance, first against the German occupiers and later also against the Soviets, was so vast and complex as to defy a satisfactory accounting in so short a tale as ours. Fortunately, the topic boasts a substantial literature; at least in English, however, this literature is rather one-sided and uniformly patriotic. The Poles, if one […]

Poland

Polish Revolutions

Battle at Miłosław, 1868 painting by Juliusz Kossak. The central European nation of Poland spent much of its history between the 17th and 20th centuries struggling for the right to exist as an independent nation. Yet, throughout this period, the rebellious spirit of the Polish people was never completely eradicated. In a series of agreements […]

History, Poland

TADEUSZ KOŚCIUSZKO, (1746-1817)

Polish patriot. Born on 4 February 1746, Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kościuszko came from a middling noble family in eastern Poland. His fight for national independence, his support for social justice, and his selflessness earned him acclaim in his lifetime and veneration from later generations of both nationalists and social radicals. Kościuszko studied military engineering in […]

Poland

Invasion of Poland by Germany

During the early hours of 1 September 1939, Hitler’s other undercover operations pulled together by a special Abwehr army and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) or SD volunteers, infiltrated Poland about 3 a.m. to seize vital bridges, railway junctions, coalmines, and factories. In many places the operations run into stiff resistance. Two strategically important bridges over the […]