Jak Armia Czerwona zdobywała Kraków w styczniu 1945 roku

Abstract

HOW THE RED ARMY CAPTURED KRAKÓW IN JANUARY 1945

The aim of the article is to present the capturing of Kraków by the Red Army on 19 January 1945 preceded by a description of Germans’ preparations for the defence of the city. The author focuses on the accounts of the events’ direct witnesses written at the time and reconstructs the course of events by complementing these accounts with literature on the subject and archival records generated by the Red Army. He also introduces into the debate previously unknown or scarcely used memoire source texts, such as monastic chronicles and parish chronicles. These sources document how the local residents construed the German preparations for the defence of the city and interpreted the course of that campaign itself, while the character of these preparations raised the residents’ justified concern about their own lives and the city’s survival. The author attempts to complement the image of the capturing of the city in terms of the perception of the course of the defensive cam-paign and its duration. The course of the battle of Kraków and the perception thereof based on the above-mentioned sources differs from the concise, unemotional descriptions included in battle logs, and from the fixed notions existing in collective memory.Intensive preparations for the defence of Kraków against the probable uprising and the inevitable offensive of the Red Army lasted from the end of July 1944 until January 1945. Germans had created an entire system of fortifica-tions which encompassed the outskirts of the city, as well as its inner districts, including the historical city centre. The author brings up researchers’ latest findings concerning the construction of fortifications as part of the Ortstützpunkt Krakau (Local Fortified Base) project.The Red Army captured the city as a result of the Vistu-la-Oder offensive. In the battle of Kraków Soviet forces used their full range of air force, artillery, tanks and infantry. In the course of the battle, a unique flanking manoeuvre was used which involved the cooperation of two general armies and one air force army whose military potential guarran-teed success. Avoiding siege and highly destructive street fighting in a fortified city was the result of the situation on the front, a coincidence of many factors which have been recounted and presented in the present article.In contrast to the overwhelming scale of war damage that devastated Polish cities in the course of the last year of the war, Kraków’s fate seems exceptional. Was that really the case? The paper written by Dr Ludwika Majewska which can also be found in the present volume of Krzysztofory dis-cusses the preparations for and the course of the battle of Łódź, captured on 19 January 1945. This will give readers the opportunity to compare the situation of Poland’s two largest cities at the time. The identical date of the capturing of the two cities became the starting point for discussion. Considering the diverse history and the different character of the two cities, the similarities between the two battles over their capturing may be quite surprising.