National Armed Forces

Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (English National Armed Forces, NSZ) was a faction of the Polish resistance movement in World War II, fighting the Nazi German occupation of Poland in General Government.

NSZ was created on September 20, 1942, from the merger of the Military Organization Lizard Union (Organizacja Wojskowa Związek Jaszczurczy) and part of the National Military Organization (Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa). At the maximum strength it reached about a total of 70,000-75,000 members, making it the second largest organization of the Polish resistance (after Armia Krajowa).^[1] Part of NSZ joined the Armia Krajowa in March of 1944. The one arm that did not join was known as NSZ-ZJ (after "Związek Jaszczurczy" or the "Salamander Union"). NSZ units took part in the Warsaw Uprising.

In January 1945, the NSZ Holy Cross Mountains Brigade (Brygada Świętokrzyska) retreated before the Red Army with the German approval into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. However, it resumed the fight against the Nazis again on May 5, 1945 in Bohemia, where the NSZ brigade freed women from a concentration camp in Holiszowo. The brigade suffered heavy casualties.

NSZ occupied the extreme right wing of the political spectrum. Its program included the fight for Polish independence against the Nazi Germany as well as the Stalinist Soviet Union, with the aim at keeping the Second Polish Republics pre-war eastern borders while gaining additional territories to the west.

During and after the war, NSZ had been subjected to provocations by Polish communists including their paramilitary organizations such as Gwardia Ludowa (GL) and Armia Ludowa (AL). Reportedly, communist partisans engaged in planting of false evidence like papers and forged receipts at the sites of their own robberies pointing fingers at NSZ. It was a method of political warfare practised against NSZ also by Polish secret police (UB) and Milicja Obywatelska (MO) right after the war as revealed by PRL court documents. NSZ has been blamed for various pacification operations; yet, not taken to war crime tribunal for lack of evidence.^[2]

Due to policy of non-cooperation with the Soviets, and unlike Home Army (AK), which was completely transparent to communist security services, NSZ remained an idependent military and political power also after Poland was taken over by the Red Army. The anti-communist stance of the National Armed Forces was never thoroughly analyzed though. One should not consider it as an exclusively ideological conflict. The Polish communists, controlled and at the disposal of Moscow, tried to sabotage the patriotic movement with no less energy than the German invader. ^{[citation needed]} The communist bands plundered the country side. ^{[citation needed]} Murder and rape was the order of the day. ^{[citation needed]} One of the NSZ goals was to give protection to the population against the banditry and violence. ^{[citation needed]} The NSZ described and evaluated the communist activities in the following way:

"One can die by the method proven in Katyn, that is by a single shot in the back of the head, or in the Soviet Forced Labour Camps, or in German Nazi concentration camps (...) there is no real difference in the way one dies (...) therefore it is our duty to stamp out the Soviet agents in Poland. This is simply demanded by the Polish reasons of state."

The members of NSZ, as other cursed soldiers, were persecuted in the Stalinist years after the war. In Autumn of 1946 a group of 100-200 soldiers of NSZ group were lured into a trap and then massacred..^[3] However, in 1992, after Poland regained independence from the Soviet occupation, their soldiers were rehabilitated and given the status of war veterans.

Commanders:

• Colonel Ignacy Oziewicz
• Colonel Tadeusz Kurcyusz
• Colonel Stanislaw Kasznica

• Forest Brothers
• Holy Cross Mountains Brigade
• Ukrainian Insurgent Army

• Narodowe Siły Zbrojne