Visas for Life · Episode 3 · 1 h 9 min
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In autumn 1939, Vilnius changed hands yet again, becoming a petri dish for the chaos that would define World War II. Into a temporary gap in totalitarianism flooded not just ordinary refugees, but professionals—intelligence operatives and military officers from a shattered Poland.
This episode delves into the Byzantine complexity of Vilnius as a laboratory of desperation, where Polish underground networks reformed with astonishing speed. We uncover Lithuanian intelligence reports revealing secret meetings, false identities, and fractured organizations—some cooperative, others plotting insurgency and even terrorism. From memos warning of a “putsch” to the cynical use of the Red Cross as cover for partisan activities, this is a spy novel come to life.
But in that breathing room, something extraordinary—and dangerous—emerged.
Transcript
Welcome to History Shadows. Today we continue with Episode 3: The Underground Republic.
You know, there is this moment in history, autumn 1939, where if you squint just right, if you look at it from the proper angle, Vilnius becomes something extraordinary. Not extraordinary in the way we usually mean it, not heroic, not glorious, but extraordinary in the sense that it becomes a kind of laboratory. A petri dish for all the chaos and desperation and Byzantine complexity that would come to define the Second World War.
Think about it. The city has just changed hands. Again. For the hundredth time in its long, blood-soaked history. The Soviets were here; now they weren’t. Now it’s the Lithuanians. And to understand what that means, you have to understand what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean the steel boot. Not yet. It doesn’t mean the midnight knock on the door, not in the same way. It means something different, something softer. And that softness is going to create a space, a breathing room, a temporary gap in the crushing vise of totalitarianism. And into that gap flowed the refugees.
Now, when I say refugees, I need you to understand these aren’t just ordinary people fleeing war. I mean, they are that, but they are also something more. Some of them are professionals: intelligence operatives, military officers, people who just weeks before were part of a functioning, sovereign Polish state. And here is where it gets interesting. Because for them Lithuania isn’t just an enemy, not like Moscow, not like Berlin. It’s something entirely different. It’s an opportunity.
You have to ask yourself: if you were one of these people, if you had just watched your entire country get carved up like a Christmas turkey between two of the most murderous regimes in human history, what would you do? Would you give up, accept defeat, fade into the woodwork? Or would you do what humans have always done when pushed to the brink? You would adapt, probably. And that’s exactly what happens here.
Within weeks, and I want you to appreciate how fast this is, within weeks these Polish intelligence operatives begin to reorganize. They slip into new roles, new identities. They start building networks. Because that’s what intelligence people do, right? It’s their whole thing. They find weaknesses. They identify potential assets. They create structures in the shadows. And the Lithuanian State Security Department, the SSD, they are watching. Oh, they are definitely watching.
Now imagine you are a Lithuanian intelligence officer in late 1939. Your country has just gotten Vilnius back, the city that’s been part of Polish national mythology for 20 years. You’ve got tens of thousands of Poles suddenly living under your jurisdiction. And you know, you absolutely know, that some percentage of them aren’t just civilians. So what do you do? You watch, you document, you file reports.
And what do those reports reveal? Man, it’s like something out of a spy novel. Except it’s real. Secret meetings, false names, networks within networks, and slowly paranoia starts to crystallize into something more concrete. Because these underground organizations are not unified; they are fractured. Some of them are cautious, willing to cooperate, maybe even collaborate with the new Lithuanian administration. And others? They are dangerous.
Let me read you something. This is from a note to the Lithuanian Prime Minister. And the language here, the language is brutal: “The Polish activists in Vilnius will be guided by the following tactics: using every weakness of the Lithuanians, every mistake and every occasion, raising noise, eventually carrying out acts of boycott and even of terrorism. The activists’ motto is to organize themselves with all eagerness, waiting for a favorable moment for a putsch.”
A putsch. Think about that word. That’s not the language of refugees seeking shelter. That’s the language of insurgency.
And who’s behind it? Well, according to Lithuanian intelligence, these aren’t just random angry Poles. These are professionals. Officers trained by the Second Department of the Polish General Staff, which, if you know anything about interwar European intelligence services, was one of the most sophisticated operations on the continent. These people know how to recruit. They know how to build networks. They know how to fight in the shadows. They wrote the playbook on this stuff during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. They ran intelligence operations against the Soviets throughout the 1920s and 30s. They had networks that stretched from Berlin to Moscow to Paris. And now? Now they are kind of unemployed. Their state has ceased to exist. But their skills? Their skills are as sharp as ever.
And here’s where it gets really interesting. They find cover in the Red Cross. Now, the Red Cross, right? Universal symbol of humanitarianism, mercy, aid to the suffering, protected under international conventions. It’s perfect. If you’re building an underground resistance network, what better cover could you possibly have than a humanitarian organization that has access to refugees, that can move freely, that has international protection, that nobody wants to be seen harassing? It’s brilliant. In a deeply cynical way, it’s brilliant.
Lithuanian intelligence reports read like the opening chapters of a John le Carré novel. I mean, listen to this. There is an office on Mickiewicz Street, near the cathedral, a Red Cross sign on the door. On the surface, it serves refugees, prisoners, the displaced and desperate: people who need documentation, people who need food, people who need medicine. But in the shadows? In the shadows, there’s something else entirely.
Here’s what Lithuanian intelligence discovers, and I’m reading directly from their reports. Quote: “In the Red Cross they are secretly working to restore the Polish state and act against the enemies of Poland. Lithuania, too, is considered to be an enemy … Most officers have Red Cross member certificates and fictitious names. Some of those officers ride around villages, ostensibly to purchase food and clothes for the Red Cross. In fact, they are organizing partisans in villages who are hiding in their home areas.”
Now, picture this: vehicles with the Red Cross emblem, that universal symbol of neutrality and mercy, rolling through the Lithuanian countryside, stopping in villages, talking to locals, ostensibly gathering supplies for refugees. But actually, they are smuggling weapons, they are carrying orders, they are maintaining the arteries of a shadow army. They are identifying safe houses. They are recruiting. They are organizing.
It’s genius, really. Cynical? Absolutely. Dangerous? You bet. A violation of international humanitarian law? Almost certainly. But from a purely operational standpoint, it’s genius.
And so, under the ancient cobblestones of Vilnius, in the cafés and backrooms and temporary offices, in the churches and synagogues and basements, a war of phantoms begins. A war fought not with tanks and artillery, but with forged documents and whispered conversations and money changing hands in dark alleys.
So, by early 1940, Vilnius is this incredibly complex thing. It’s a city returned to Lithuania after 20 years of separation. It’s a refuge for the displaced. It’s a chessboard where great powers are moving pieces around. It’s a place where the rules are still being written, where authority is still being negotiated, where the future is completely uncertain.
But for the Polish loyalists, for the people who still believe in the old republic, who still carry its symbols in their hearts, it’s something else entirely. It’s a temporary occupation. Now that phrase, temporary occupation, tells you everything about the mindset here. Some of these people are literally whispering that Lithuanian rule will last only until Easter. Easter, can you imagine? This kind of almost mystical certainty that Poland will rise again, that the natural order will reassert itself, that history will somehow correct this terrible mistake.
A report from Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry gives us the numbers, and the numbers are stark. More than 75,000 Poles in the Vilnius district, not counting Jews, mind you. That’s 75,000 ethnic Poles, and of those 75,000, fewer than 1,000 register for work. Think about that. In a city where you need money to eat, to pay rent, to survive, fewer than 1 in 75 people are registering for legal employment. Why? Because they are convinced Vilnius will soon be back in Poland. Why put down roots? Why integrate? Why accept Lithuanian authority when it’s clearly just temporary?
Where does this confidence come from? Where does this certainty spring from? According to Lithuanian intelligence, and you will be surprised, from Britain. There is this British envoy in Kaunas named Preston, Thomas Preston. And the rumors, the allegations swirling around this man are that he is funneling support to Polish underground groups. Money, encouragement, diplomatic cover, that kind of thing.
Now, we have to be careful here, right? Because intelligence reports are interpretations; they are shaped by the biases and fears of the people writing them. They are not always accurate. But the pattern is clear. There is foreign involvement. Whether it’s as extensive as the reports suggest, whether Preston is actually this shadow puppet master, that’s harder to say.
But here is what we know for certain: the underground multiplies. Different groups, different names, different methodologies, different leaders with different visions of what Poland should become. But one shared conviction: Poland will rise again. You’ve got Wolni Polacy, the Free Poles. You’ve got Organizacja Walczącej Polski, the Organization of Fighting Poland. You’ve got Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, the Polish Military Organization. Names appearing in intelligence reports, then vanishing weeks later. Splintering, merging, reforming, operating under different covers. It’s like trying to fight smoke with your bare hands.
And then, in late 1939, something more serious arrives in Vilnius, something with real structure and real connections to the outside world: Służba Zwycięstwu Polski, the Polish Victory Service. Experienced officers, people with actual training and actual connections to the government in exile, bringing structure, bringing connections, bringing the seeds of something larger.
Now, there is this historian, Tomasz Strzembosz, who coined a term for what was happening here. He called it the underground Polish state. Think about that for a second. An underground state. A state without territory, without borders, without any of the usual trappings of sovereignty. No flag flying over the government buildings. No police force with the legal authority to arrest people. No courts with the power to enforce judgments. But with ministries: defense, law and order, even education. It’s a phantom republic, loyal to the government in exile, first in France, later in London, operating in the shadows, existing in the parallel reality of believers.
But here is the question that always haunts me about this stuff: was it real? I mean, what does “real” even mean in this context? If enough people believe in something, if they organize around it, create structures, follow orders from it, risk their lives for it, at what point does it become real, even if it exists only in the minds of believers?
It’s like that philosophical question about the tree falling in the forest, right? If a government exists only for the people who acknowledge its authority, if it has no territory, no physical presence, no ability to enforce its will except through the voluntary compliance of believers, is it still a government? Or is it something else? A movement? A conspiracy? A shared delusion?
For a Polish officer in Vilnius in 1939, it felt real enough. Real enough to risk your life for. Real enough to build networks around, real enough to plan operations for, real enough to maintain discipline and hierarchy and all the trappings of military organization. But for a Lithuanian administrator, or a Jewish refugee just trying to survive, it was a phantom, a shadow, a thing that created complications, a thing that drew attention, that created risk, that made life more dangerous for everyone around it.
And complications there were. Because these different factions within the underground had different approaches, right? Different philosophies, different tactical preferences, different visions of what resistance should look like. Some wanted dialogue; some wanted to work within the system, to cooperate with the Lithuanian authorities where possible, to preserve what could be preserved. And others? They leaned toward provocation, sabotage, confrontation, even terror.
January 1940. Lithuanian intelligence finally moves in force. They’ve been watching, they’ve been documenting, they’ve been building cases. And now they swoop. Arrests sweep across Vilnius; scores of underground activists are taken in, safe houses are raided, documents are seized, networks are rolled up, and the survivors scatter. Some go to the countryside, disappearing into the rural areas where Lithuanian authority is weaker. Some actually settle near the Soviet bases, hoping that proximity to the Red Army will somehow protect them from the Lithuanian authorities. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Talk about making calculations based on the lesser of evils.
But before they scattered, before they went to ground, they left behind something absolutely chilling. Among the seized documents, Lithuanian intelligence finds operational plans of Wolni Polacy, the Free Poles. And these plans reveal something about the desperation and moral calculus of underground resistance that’s just… it’s ugly. It’s the kind of thing that forces you to confront the reality that resistance movements aren’t always noble. That desperate people make desperate choices. That survival instinct can override moral considerations.
The strategy outlined in these documents is classic, cynical, lethal. Blame the Jews. Let me read this to you, a direct quote from the report: “They will blame the Jews for all the work. They will continue to work under the cover of the Jews, and the Jews will have to answer for everything they do, while they themselves will remain on the sidelines. For example, terrorist acts will be carried out under a Jewish pretense, and all types of proclamations will be edited in two languages and signed on behalf of Jewish organizations.”
You know, when you study the Holocaust, when you study the destruction of European Jewry, you see these layers, right? There is the industrial machinery of the German state: the camps, the gas chambers, the Einsatzgruppen death squads, the trains running on schedule, the systematic, bureaucratic, almost banal nature of it all. But then there is this other layer: local collaboration, opportunism, ancient prejudices being weaponized, neighbors turning on neighbors, and sometimes something like this, where one persecuted group tries to survive by deflecting violence onto another group.
It’s one of the darkest aspects of what happens when humans are put under extreme pressure. When survival itself becomes the only calculation that matters. When the moral universe shrinks down to us versus them, and we’ll do anything to make sure it’s them who suffer instead of us.
And these Wolni Polacy operatives, they are not creating antisemitism. That’s already there. That’s already woven into the fabric of Eastern European society. Centuries of it. What they are doing is weaponizing it. Cynically. Deliberately. Using it as a tool. The goal is chaos. Deflection. Create enough confusion, enough violence, enough outrage that the real perpetrators can remain in the shadows, that the Lithuanian authorities will be chasing the wrong people, that the underground can continue operating while someone else pays the price.
By the way, there is more. Another plan in these documents targeted the Red Army directly: “Proclamations on behalf of the Lithuanian government and of various Lithuanian organizations will be distributed, and when they reach Soviet hands, the provocation will be considered successful.”
So let me make sure you understand this. The plan is to create fake Lithuanian government documents and get them into Soviet hands, documents that say things that will enrage Moscow, that will make it look like Lithuania is hostile to Soviet interests. And then sit back and watch as the Soviets turn their paranoid fury on the Lithuanian administration.
This isn’t resistance. This is weaponized deception. This is trying to survive by setting your neighbors’ houses on fire, by creating chaos that you hope to slip through while everyone else is burning. And the people most exposed? The people already hunted across Europe, already facing discrimination and violence everywhere they go. The Jewish population is being set up as bait.
It’s one of those moments in history where you want to pause and say: OK, let’s have some moral clarity here. Let’s not lose sight of what we’re talking about. Because it’s very easy to romanticize resistance movements, right? The brave underground fighters, standing up to tyranny, the few against the many, the whole heroic narrative. But resistance can be ugly, it can be brutal, it can involve choices that are just morally horrifying, that betray other victims, that sacrifice the vulnerable to protect the strong.
So by late 1939, there is this recognition among the more sophisticated elements of the Polish underground that if they are going to matter, if they are going to be more than just a nuisance to the Lithuanians, more than just a thorn in their side, they need to consolidate. A swarm of little groups, all with different methods, different leaders, different ideological commitments, different levels of professionalism: it’s not sustainable, it’s not effective. You can’t coordinate, you can’t plan larger operations. You are constantly stepping on each other’s toes.
And so the consolidation begins. At the center, you’ve got Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, the POW, the Polish Military Organization. And quietly, deliberately, methodically, it starts absorbing the smaller organizations, like a corporate merger, but with guns and conspiracies instead of stock options.
Lithuanian intelligence watches this happen in real time. And what they see isn’t just a local phenomenon. It isn’t just some guys in Vilnius deciding to team up. Here is what they report: “This organization is neither local nor casual. It operates on the orders of the Commissariats scattered throughout the territory of the former Polish state by the Polish government in France. Such a Polish Commissariat exists in a much disguised way in Vilnius as well.”
A commissariat operating in disguise, reporting to the government in exile in France. This is statecraft being conducted in secret by people who technically don’t have a state anymore, but who are acting as if they do. Creating parallel structures, maintaining chains of command, preserving continuity.
The only major group that stays independent is Obóz Wielkiej Polski, the OWP, the Camp of Great Poland. Why? Maybe by design. Maybe to maintain plausible deniability. Maybe as camouflage, so that if one organization gets rolled up, the others survive. Maybe because they have different ideological commitments. Or just to keep everyone guessing about who’s actually in charge.
Now, if you wanted to measure the underground, to really quantify how big this thing was, how many people were involved, how much of a threat it actually posed, you’d run into a problem pretty quickly. Because the records we have are poisoned. On one hand, you’ve got Soviet NKGB files, and they are full of numbers: detailed breakdowns, arrests, seizures, organizations liquidated. The Soviet security apparatus was nothing if not thorough in its documentation. But these documents are warped. Warped by ideology, by the need to justify budgets and manpower, by torture producing unreliable confessions, by quotas that Soviet intelligence officers had to meet to prove they were doing their jobs. If an NKGB officer needed to arrest a hundred so-called enemies of the people this month, guess what? He is going to find a hundred enemies of the people. Whether they actually exist or not.
Still, even propaganda casts a shadow you can measure, right? Even distorted reflections tell you something about the object casting them. Based on archival documents, in Kaunas in 1940 the NKGB claims it liquidated 10 Polish underground organizations, disbanded 16 illegal groups, and made 549 arrests. Do we trust these numbers? Not blindly, and not without corroboration. Soviet paperwork is basically victory theater on official letterhead. Look how many enemies we’ve crushed. Look how effective we are. Give us more resources. But even accounting for exaggeration, even cutting those numbers in half, something real was there. Something substantial.
And then there is the question of international support, foreign backing, the money and diplomatic cover that can make the difference between a resistance movement that sputters out and one that actually survives. Lithuanian files are pretty thin on proof of foreign embassies directly bankrolling the underground. They suspect it. They believe it. But hard evidence? That’s scarce. Soviet records, though, paint a different picture. The British and French missions in Kaunas, even the Japanese consulate, they all appear in the margins of these clandestine operations. Meetings mentioned in passing. Money supposedly changing hands. Couriers using diplomatic pouches.
Early 1940. Lithuanian security sweeps across Vilnius in a coordinated operation. They arrest more than 100 underground members in a single week. The British envoy I’ve mentioned, Thomas Preston, is informed. And his reaction? It’s fascinating. He is almost amused. Listen to this: “albeit unpleasant, the effect was laughable. Apparently, only fragments of the forces were liquidated, and operations in general had not been harmed, merely interrupted.”
Let me give you a translation. We know how deep this goes. We are not worried. You got the small fish. The big fish are still swimming. Preston wasn’t just a diplomat doing diplomatic things. To many Poles he was a lifeline, a patron saint with a checkbook. Someone who could make things happen, who represented the possibility that they weren’t alone, that the Western democracies hadn’t completely abandoned Poland.
The French were involved too. Let me give you a vignette that illustrates how this whole system works. There is a rural manor near Suvalkų Kalvarija. Security gets intelligence that they might have found a Polish officer in hiding. They move in carefully, and they find not a combat officer, but Andrzej Janicki, a former clerk of the Second Department of the Polish General Staff. Which means he knows some things. He knows how intelligence networks operate. He knows procedures, codes, contacts.
As soon as he arrived in Lithuania, Janicki had contacted the French mission in Kaunas. A French official named Pichon told him to renew his ties with his former co-workers in Germany and to find people in Lithuania who could go into Germany and gather intelligence on the army and the general situation. And Pichon promised to provide the money.
This is diplomacy transforming into espionage right before our eyes. The line between supporting Polish refugees and running intelligence operations is completely blurred.
But even here, even with foreign support, even with money and diplomatic backing, trust is this incredibly fragile thing. A Polish operative named Sroczyński puts it perfectly: “although the Lithuanian police and intelligence forces are weak, but one needs to be very careful, because here meet the influences not only of the GPU, but also of the Gestapo.”
Think about that. Kaunas, this small, improbable capital of a country most people couldn’t find on the map, becomes a miniature Casablanca. Soviet agents working to identify and neutralize threats to Soviet interests. German watchers keeping tabs on Polish activity, maybe looking for recruits, maybe just gathering intelligence. British organizers trying to keep their networks alive. French fixers providing money and contacts. British funders playing the long game. And everybody is listening, everybody is watching, nobody is confessing to anything. It’s an intelligence professional’s nightmare and playground all at once.
And underneath it all, running through everything like a river, is the question that makes or breaks any resistance movement. Money. Where does it come from? Who controls it? Who decides how it’s spent? Soviet reports, flawed as they are, insist that Preston officially funded the Polish internees, and that in July 1940 he privately reassured underground contacts that the money would keep flowing, even after the Soviet occupation. The French legation chipped in too. Not huge amounts, probably, but enough to keep things moving, enough to pay couriers, enough to bribe border guards, enough to keep safe houses operating.
The underground wasn’t just alive. It was being fed, nurtured, sustained from the outside. By whom? To what end? With what ultimate goal? In Lithuania, in a country about to be swallowed whole by Soviet power, those questions were more than academic, more than theoretical. They were a countdown.
A cold evening in Kaunas, late 1939. The train platform is dusted with soot and coal ash. Steam rises in the frigid air. Passengers bundled against the cold, moving quickly, not making eye contact. A through train creaks into the station, Berlin to Moscow, via Virbalis, via Kaunas, via Vilnius. One of those trains that crosses borders, that moves through different zones of control, that represents the last threads of international connectivity in a world being carved into hostile blocs.
The door slides open. A Japanese man steps down. Dark coat, plain hat. Nothing remarkable about him. Just another traveler. Except for a small diamond-topped pin in his tie. He is not a diplomat in the ordinary sense. He is a courier.
A Polish agent waits near the tracks. The same pin. An armband. No words at first. Just a glance. A moment of recognition that says: we are both still alive; the network still functions. Then the code. He leans in close, speaks quietly: “Have you ever been to Kaunas?” The reply comes immediately, the agreed-upon response: “Yes, I have been to Kaunas.”
This isn’t fiction. This is documented. This is how messages actually moved between Polish leaders in Lithuania and their networks in Warsaw, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and later London: disguised as diplomatic mail, hidden in the slipstream of a neutral power, Japan.
At the center of this operation stands Chiune Sugihara, vice-consul in Kaunas. You might know his name from later: he became famous, Righteous Among the Nations, for issuing thousands of transit visas to Jewish refugees in the summer of 1940, saving lives on a massive scale. But in 1939 and early 1940, he is also facilitating this incredibly sophisticated courier network for the Polish underground. Whether he knew the full extent of what he was doing, whether he understood all the implications, that’s harder to say. But the system worked.
The route: Berlin, Virbalis, Kaunas, Vilnius, Moscow. Postcards would go ahead as signals. Pins would match. A code phrase would be spoken. No chatter. No bravado. No elaborate covers. Just a brush of shoulders, a briefcase changing hands, and two men disappearing into the cold and the crowd.
Did Lithuanian security see the outlines of this? Some of it, surely. You can’t run an operation like this without leaving traces, without creating patterns that watchful eyes might notice. Soviet NKGB files suggest the Lithuanians understood, at least in broad strokes, that they were standing at a crossroads of other people’s schemes, that their country was being used as a transit point, as neutral ground where people from different sides could meet.
And here is the remarkable thing: even after June 15, 1940, after the Soviet occupation, after Lithuanian independence effectively ends, after the NKGB starts running everything, attempts were made to renew these connections, to keep the network functioning under an even darker sky.
A report from that summer is just astonishing in its audacity. A meeting in Vilnius: Polish underground representatives, Colonel Kazys Grinius from the Lithuanian side, and a British emissary whose name does not appear in the documents. The agenda? A joint uprising against the Soviets.
Two nations with a century of friction, old enemies, border conflicts, ethnic tensions, the whole complicated, bloody history of Eastern Europe, sitting at one table because the Red Army has become the only math that matters. Because Soviet occupation threatens both of them. Because the enemy of my enemy is, if not my friend, then at least my temporary ally. Above them, silent patrons: Britain playing its great game, Japan pursuing its own interests in the region, both willing to support any resistance to Soviet power.
The decision they reach is audacious, almost insane when you think about the odds. A united leadership, an armed uprising, mobilizing disaffected Poles and Lithuanians together to create a combined force that might, just might, be able to challenge Soviet control.
It never happens, of course. By July 1940 the window has already closed. Soviet power is too entrenched. The NKGB has penetrated too many networks. The risk is too great. But the attempt, the willingness even to contemplate it, tells you something about the desperation of the moment. It’s the last flicker of independent action before the room goes completely dark.
Because by August 1940 Lithuania is no longer a sovereign state. The fiction of independence is over. The Soviet Union has annexed the Baltic states. And what comes next is predictable. The NKGB is no longer eavesdropping from the shadows. It’s governing. It’s running everything. It’s in control.
The Polish underground that grew in Vilnius and Kaunas, that found breathing room under Lithuanian rule, now faces a predator that was literally built for this exact hunt. The Soviet security apparatus, with all its resources, all its experience from the purges and collectivization, all its ruthlessness honed by decades of crushing dissent, all its paranoid thoroughness. This is what they do. This is their specialty: finding hidden networks, breaking them, making people disappear.
And yet even then, even facing that terrifying machinery, men still meet on platforms, exchange the phrase, trade the briefcase and vanish into the night. Because that’s what resistance is. Not the grand gestures, not the heroic battles, but the small acts of defiance, the persistence, the refusal to give up even when the odds are overwhelming.
Back to September 1939. Poland collapses. And I want you to really visualize this, really feel what this means on a human level. A country of 35 million people. A functioning modern state with an army of nearly a million men. A government, a parliament, universities, industry, railways, all the apparatus of 20th-century civilization. And in the space of weeks, less than a month, it just dissolves.
Germany from the west, with its mechanized warfare, its Stuka dive bombers, its Blitzkrieg. The Soviet Union from the east, with its masses of infantry, its cynical opportunism, its eagerness to grab its share of the spoils. The classic pincer movement. The nightmare scenario that Polish war planners had feared but hoped would never come.
And civilians flee. Of course they flee. You would too. Who wouldn’t? But not just civilians. Soldiers. Entire units, shattered battalions, loose companies, individual men in torn uniforms, all hunting for neutral ground. For someplace the Wehrmacht and the Red Army can’t follow. For thousands of them, tens of thousands, that ground is Lithuania.
Now, to Lithuanian officials, suddenly confronted with this human tide, these arriving soldiers are a riddle, a puzzle wrapped in international law and practical considerations. Are they refugees seeking humanitarian protection? Are they combatants still technically at war? Are they prisoners of war? But captured by whom? Lithuania isn’t at war with Poland.
International law did have a word for it: under the 1907 Hague Convention, a neutral state that receives fleeing troops must intern them. Lithuania applied that rule to a flood nobody had planned for.
They prepared for this in the most naïve way imaginable. On September 7, before the Soviet invasion, the Chief of Staff orders two camps established, one for Germans, one for Poles. Capacity? Five hundred men and fifty officers each. A plan built for a puddle as a tsunami comes rolling in.
September 17: the Red Army invades eastern Poland. That same day, Lithuanian military intelligence expects retreating Polish troops to head for the Lithuanian border. And they do. September 19: Prime Minister Jonas Černius orders the border opened. By morning two hundred soldiers have crossed at Vievis, with two hundred vehicles and two trains. Four thousand more near Širvintos, a thousand at Dūkštas. By nightfall it’s a flood. Lithuania isn’t watching the war anymore. It’s standing directly in the spillway.
Categories harden. Civilians become war refugees, soldiers become internees, and another group, those who never moved an inch, become aliens. The instant Vilnius is transferred to Lithuania, and that’s in October, by the way, the flag changes and their citizenship vanishes.
Over 10,000 Polish soldiers fall under Lithuanian custody. Not captured. Self-delivered into neutrality, hoping to fight against somebody someday, and meeting barbed wire instead. This is not just logistics. This is a geopolitical tripwire.
The tide of Polish soldiers turns planning into absolute farce. Two camps for a thousand men, useless by the end of the first week. On September 18, National Defense orders Camps 1 and 2 opened. Within days, Camps 3, 4, 5 and 6 are rushed into existence. There is no strategy, just scavenging: barracks, schools, sanatoriums, shuttered hotels. Anything with a roof becomes a camp. From seaside resorts to rural estates, interwar Lithuania gets re-skinned as a detention grid.
And these soldiers don’t arrive empty-handed. They bring what’s left of a country: cars, radios, horses, surgical kits, guns, even planes. The Lithuanian state meticulously counts it all. By year’s end, confiscated material tops 1.8 million litas. Neutrality with an invoice attached.
Brigadier General Juozas Barzda-Bradauskas gets the job nobody wants: hold thousands of armed, furious, displaced men in a neutral state under the Soviet shadow, and keep everyone alive.
By the way, that Soviet shadow is not subtle. September 19, remember, the same day Lithuania opens its arms to Polish soldiers, the Red Army enters Vilnius. A classified Lithuanian report describes their methods: “As they retreat, they take all movable property, both public and private. They take not only food, clothes, and footwear, but also furniture, barrack windows, and any other assets that can be carried on foot or by cart. They catch squires and take them into Russia, while regular people are executed on the spot even for minor transgressions.”
That’s not occupation. That’s pillage with paperwork. Stories leak across the border. Messy. Exaggerated. But true at the core. For those hesitating in the ruins of Poland, the choice clarifies: run. Hope has a name, however fragile. Lithuania.
You know what nobody talks about enough when discussing these refugee situations? Again, the money. Neutrality wasn’t free in 1939. It had a bill, itemized in litas, measured in calories and coal and clerks. Before January 1940, the Lithuanian treasury had spent over 5 million litas on Polish internees.
Let me give you some examples. Daily rations: 4 litas per private, just under 5 per officer. Now listen to this: civilians. In December a war refugee got 0.46 litas a day. In January, 0.64 litas a day. Barely enough to breathe. Market reality in Kaunas, just to compare the prices, December 1939: butter, 3.30 litas per kilogram. A chicken, up to 3 litas. Feeding one soldier cost almost as much as feeding a family. And the camps keep growing.
So Lithuania does what any small country would do in this situation. By the way, I think a big one would do the same. They knock on doors. Britain and France. The logic is simple: you are defending Poland, right? You declared support. You have promised to cover costs. We have been feeding thousands of Polish soldiers. Shouldn’t we be reimbursed?
In December 1939, a Lithuanian diplomat in London, Rabinavičius, approaches the British. London’s reply is ice: “the international custom obliges a neutral state to wait for the end of the war and then present the bill to whoever is responsible.” Short translation: good luck, don’t call us.
And in Western eyes Lithuania doesn’t look fully neutral anymore. That’s important. After the Mutual Assistance Treaty with Moscow, Red Army bases sit on Lithuanian soil. Lines are being drawn. Lithuania is no longer on the preferred side.
Inside the camps, the machinery grinds and sputters. A camp commandant writes in October: “how can we work if there is not a single clerk in the entire office who understands bookkeeping and food accountability in the scope of a regiment or the command post. Therefore, it is impossible to write orders or keep books in the camp.”
And it’s not incompetence. It’s talent starvation. Seven camps. Too few trained staff. And a language problem. Most internees spoke Polish; almost none spoke Lithuanian. And many guards and clerks spoke only Lithuanian. The commandant of the second camp summed it up with bureaucratic despair: “I ask you to appoint, in the future, primarily such officers who know Polish or at least Russian. Officers, clerks, and soldiers need to take quotas, read incoming requests, and have general professional conversations. Hence, if the official does not know the Polish language, it becomes difficult. Not one of the clerks understands Polish.”
These weren’t well-oiled instruments of control. They were holding zones, stitched together with good intentions, improvisation, and not enough of anything. Internment was active, expensive, messy, and it left Lithuania alone, broke, overburdened, squeezed between giants.
By the end of 1939, nearly 14,000 Polish servicemen were interned in Lithuania. And when I say servicemen, I need you to understand, this wasn’t just infantry. This was an entire state’s military ecosystem limping across the border. Just a couple of examples: infantry, 2,600; cavalry, 1,300; artillery, more than 700; aviation, over 250. Total: 13,955.
Officers often arrived with families. Some officers, under strict promises not to flee or agitate, were allowed to live in designated towns. Which creates a logistical nightmare. A defense ministry official, clearly overwhelmed: “It is not clear now how this responsibility will be realized, but providing apartments, fuel, and food is likely to fall on us. We will not be able to care for coverings, as we do not have women’s clothing.”
Who counted as a soldier? Lithuania answered with a blunt instrument. Wearing a uniform? Interned. Carrying discharge papers? Still interned. Police in uniform? Interned. A soldier became a uniform plus the potential for future military service.
And remember, pre-war Poland was multi-ethnic. Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians wore the same uniform. Harmony didn’t always cross the wire with them. I’ll just quote a Ukrainian appeal: “When they are in the same camps as the Poles, they are not free to perform their religious rites. Ukrainians have always been harassed, and even today in internment camps Poles mistreat Ukrainians.” It pained them, they wrote, to be forced to live with their persecutors. Internment wasn’t just logistics. It was a political and human puzzle.
Let me give you an example of the security of the camps. Kaunas, the Fifth Fort, in the early days of the camps’ existence: 500 internees guarded by one officer and three soldiers. That’s not security. That’s a prayer. Walks into the city were common; so were escapes. One week in late November, seven men walked out and never returned. None were caught.
Seventeen kilometers away, the resort of Kulautuva offered a different experiment. Villas, sanatoriums, holiday homes, all requisitioned. The resulting complaints are almost comical: “four new iron-wrapped doors; … twelve wooden benches … and thirty hammock pillars … total damage amounting to 446 litas and 50 cents. … I think that my belongings were stolen and burned by the interned Polish soldiers.” Another owner: “I ask the Commandant to recompense me 592 litas for missing furniture and dishes, because the premises were occupied without the villa owner’s or my knowledge or consent.”
The internal tone? Tired. Exasperated. Too many escapes. Guards drinking with internees. Officers fraternizing with locals. On paper it looked like failure. In practice? I think in practice it was a policy. A quiet understanding. Let them go.
By spring 1940 Lithuania began dismantling what it had built. Pressure mounted, resources bled out, the eastern horizon darkened. By the end of April 1940, 5,600 Polish internees had been officially released: 800 proven civilians, 360 Lithuanian citizens, 30 doctors, pharmacists and priests, 1,700 repatriated to the Soviet Union, 1,600 to Nazi Germany, 1,100 disabled. Another 3,000 simply escaped, and nobody tried too hard to stop them.
Orders went out to close four camps by July 1, 1940. But June 15 came first. The Soviet occupation began. About 4,000 Polish internees remained. Their fate moved from Lithuanian discretion to Soviet procedure.
In the next episode of History Shadows: Visas for Life, we turn to June 15, 1940. What really happened when the Red Army crossed the border? Who resisted? Who collaborated? Who disappeared? And what did the world do as one of Europe’s last democracies was erased in silence? And what about the refugees? What about the Jewish refugees? What about Sugihara and Zwartendijk? Everything will be in the next episode of Visas for Life. Thank you for listening. Stay with us.
Corrections
Several statements in the audio are corrected here. The audio says international law had no clear answer for soldiers fleeing into a neutral country; in fact the 1907 Hague Convention (V) obliged a neutral state to intern them. The Lithuanian diplomat who asked London to share the costs was H. Rabinavičius. The release figures for the internees (5,600 released, 3,000 escaped) cover the period up to the end of April 1940, not April alone. Colonel Kazys Grinius took part in the summer 1940 meeting from the Lithuanian side; the audio’s reference to military intelligence is withdrawn. Thomas Preston is not given the title “Sir”, which he did not hold in 1939–1940. Quotations from archival documents are given in the wording of the documents.
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