The commander ultimately chosen by Władysław Sikorski to lead the new army, Lieutenant General Władysław Anders, had just been released from the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, on 4 August, and did not issue his first orders or announce his appointment as commander until 22 August. Its first commander, General Michał Tokarzewski, began the task of forming this army in the Soviet town of Totskoye on 17 August.
The release of many thousands of former citizens of Poland (including Ukrainians and Belorussians) from the Soviet Gulags, following the signing of the Polish-Russian Military Agreement on 14 August 1941, allowed for the creation of a Polish Army on Soviet soil. The Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 effectively ended on 22 June 1941 when the German Wehrmacht invaded the USSR.
Victims of Soviet deportations from occupied Poland in 1939–40 had been processed by the NKVD and sent to prison or exile in Siberia.
0 kommentar(er)
