Is it true that mention of the Bereza Kartuska concentration camp (1934-1939) has been banned in Poland?

[gebhk]

Hi WM

I think the point is there was no sentencing - that would imply some trial and a crime that had been committed. Whereas the fundamental principle of the Presidential Decree 473 (art 1), was that the detained would be "persons whose activities or behaviour gave basis to an assumption that they are a threat to the security, peace or public order" and it explicitly went on to say that the detained were not to be housed in "places intended for persons convicted or arrested in connection with criminal offences". Thus the few persons who were charged, tried, convicted and sentenced after their detention, were removed from BK and re-housed in regular prisons.

Who gave the directive (zarzadzenie) to detain a person was kept deliberately vague (art 2) - the "general administrative authorities'. The directive was then subject to confirmation (postanowienie) by an Investigating Judge (Sedzia Sledczy) on the basis of the government's substantiated directive alone which was deemed adequate evidence for the issue of the confirmation.The investigating judge was appointed by the administrative college of the BK regional court. The confirmation had to be handed to the detained within 48 hours of detention which gave the investigating judge little or no time to carry out an independent investigation even if he was inclined to do so. There is little to suggest that the confirmation was more than a rubber stamp. There was no right of appeal.

You are quite right that it wasn't a punishment as, by definition, no crime had been committed. The detained were abused 'preventively' because they might commit a crime or even just might be a nuisance to the government in the future.

Detention was for a three-month period, albeit it could be extended for another three months on conclusion, an infinite number of times (art 4) albeit AFAIK the longest anyone spent there was 1 year.

In practice, the decree gave the authorities the right to detain any person they thought might be a nuisance, for an indefinite period of time, with no possibility of legal defence and no right of appeal.

[gebhk]

It is is probably right to mention, that the Brzesc Affair (Sprawa Brzeska) of 1930/31 has been considered by many a sinister omen of things to come.

[wm]

As far as I know, Brześć was a local initiative in absence of clear instructions from Warsaw.
Basically, a bunch of intellectuals (or better) got treatment reserved for uncooperative "lesser folks": lumpenproletariat, criminals, peasants.
Again, as far as I know, that (i.e., third-degree in prisons and police stations) was the norm everywhere in Europe. And it wasn't just the police; the entire society was massively more brutal than today.
When the Nazis arrived on the scene in 1933, their brutality wasn't actually invented; it was largely acquired.

[gebhk]

I'm afraid you are entirely wrong in your assessment of the Brzesc Affair. It was not a local initiative, it was carried out entirely on clear instructions from Warsaw - specifically of J Pilsudski who made the final corrections to the list of those to be arrested personally. The arrest warrant was signed by the Minister for Internal Affairs, Felicjan Slawoj-Skladkowski - unlawfully and unconstitutionally.

They were not 'a bunch of intellectuals' (albeit I don't see why it would be OK if they were) but members of parliament and former members of parliament, specifically the leaderships of the opposition parties and in most cases men who, regardless of political view, were owed a deep debt of gratitude by Poland.

While, yes, it was not unusual then (and much later, for that matter) for suspects to be beaten up in police custody to extract confessions, this is not it. The prisoners were held illegally in a military prison, beaten by teams of military personnel, deliberately poisoned, subjected to mock executions etc. For nearly a year they were denied access to their families and legal counsel. Perhaps the most notorious was the case of Deputy Liebermann, a 60-year-old man who, incidentally, had parliamentary immunity. On the way to prison, he was dragged out of the car, stripped naked and beaten unconscious with clubs. Over thirty open wounds were counted on his body on arrival. Karol Popiel, whom I met many times in Rome as a child, still bore the scars from the beating with iron rods he received in Brzesc Fortress.

It is the pre-emptive nature of the government action - to eliminate political opposition (in the Brzesc case it was timed to 'behead' the opposition during parliamentary elections), isolating the victims from outside contact at a remote location, the methods of abuse, the deliberate circumvention of due legal process and the fact that few of the prisoners were charged with any crime, that are cited as common features of both Brzesc and Bereza Kartuska. In addition the damage both these outrages did to the Government's reputation within Poland and to Poland's reputation abroad left similar echoes.

[wm]

I meant the treatment of the prisoners, not their arrest. Sorry!

Although later, they were sentenced in an independent court of law for criminal conspiracy, the sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court.
And even their legal defense (and they had the best there was) didn't dispute the conspiracy charges.

[gebhk]

I would suggest the independence of the court is debatable.

A few points are of note:
They were not charged with criminal conspiracy but with organising a coup d'etat. Given who initiated the process and that one of the accused was Wincenty Witos, this has to be considered one of the big jokes of the 20th Century. Of this they were all found not guilty. Instead they were convicted of - in effect - opposing the government, organising demonstrations (which took place 3-4 days after they had been arrested) and that they 'intended' these demonstrations to be violent (in effect of thought crime).

Their legal defence team did not dispute that the accused acted in concert, there was no reason why they should. Indeed it is one of the contentions of the current motion to set the convictions aside - that the court deemed legal and open political activity, protected by the constitution, as a 'conspiracy'.

It is perhaps debatable that the legal defence was the best there was. It is just that few decent lawyers wanted to touch the Government's crock with a bargepole and against the barely competent team that was eventually assembled, any half-decent defence had to shine.