The August Decree and Postwar Poland

Abstract

In Poland, justice in the immediate aftermath of World War II is usually associated with the Soviet-style military tribunals that were deployed to neutralize members of the London-backed underground. These political trials support a popular narrative about Polish victimhood at the hands of a brutal Soviet occupier, one that overshadows a very different type of postwar justice. In August 1944, just weeks after Poland’s provisional socialist government had reinstated the prewar system of civilian courts, along with its procedural and criminal codes, it enacted special legislation to punish Nazi collaborators, known colloquially as the “August Decree.” Although cases prosecuted under its auspices initially fell under the jurisdiction of a newly created “Special Court” system with simplified legal procedures, these were far from politically motivated Soviet-style show trials, and the August Decree was “not a communist law in content” (91). Instead, these vengeance-seeking efforts were sophisticated processes that were fairly independent from the fledgling socialist dictatorship.