Polish interwar prime minister acquitted by Supreme Court 91 years after conviction

Poland’s Supreme Court has overturned a 1932 sentence issued against ten politicians – including one of the leading figures in Polish interwar politics, three-time prime minister Wincenty Witos – who had been accused of attempting a coup.

The ruling ends a long-running campaign to clear the name of Witos, who died in 1945, and his colleagues, whose convictions were part of repressive actions taken by Józef Pilsudski, Poland’s de facto leader at the time, against opposition figures.

“After 91 years, justice has been done,” declared Władysław Konsiniak-Kamysz, the current leader of the Polish People’s Party (PSL), which Witos led during the interwar period. “All those convicted are innocent. The disgrace has been erased.”

The ten politicians – from both PSL and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), who together formed part of the Centrolew opposition coalition – were arrested, in many cases brutally, on the night of 9-10 September 1930. The order to do so had come from Piłsudski himself.

They were imprisoned in Brest Fortress – then part of Poland but now in Belarus – where they were subjected to beatings and other forms of abuse. After a trial (pictured above) that ran from October 1931 to January 1932, the ten were found guilty and given prison sentences of between 1.5 and 3 years.

Half chose to remain in Poland and serve their time while the other five took up an offer to go into exile instead. The latter included Witos, who moved to Czechoslovakia, from where he continued his political activities. Previously, Witos had served as prime minister of Poland in 1920-21, 1923 and 1926.

Witos returned to Poland in March 1939 following the Nazi German annexation of Czech territory and then remained in occupied Poland throughout the war following Germany’s invasion in September of that year. Amid worsening health, he died in October 1945 aged 71.

Although Witos and his nine colleagues were pardoned under a presidential amnesty in October 1939, they were never acquitted of the crimes.

Over the last two decades, PSL politicians have made various legal efforts to have the convictions overturned. Finally, in 2020, Poland’s then-commissioner for human rights, Adam Bodnar, submitted an appeal to the Supreme Court.

As well as hoping to “restore the good name” of the ten politicians, Bodnar said that he also “wanted to signal that, regardless of who is in power, violating the law must be shown for what is is, even years later, and the threat of future temptations to use the law to achieve political goals must be minimised”.

The subsequent legal process was complex and time-consuming, notes the Polish Press Agency (PAP), involving recreating case files from the original 1930s trial, the originals of which were destroyed during World War Two.

The Supreme Court’s judges also had to decide if and how they could apply current legal rules to the different system that operated in interwar Poland.

Meanwhile, the National Prosecutors Office argued before the court that there was no necessity to revisit the case because there is no longer any social conflict around the convictions, which are now widely recognised as part of the political struggle of the 1930s.

However, PSL’s honourary president, Józef Zych, argued that “the harm caused by the unjust judgments [still] exists and cannot be a stain on the memory of our nation”.

The Supreme Court agreed to rule on the case, with judge Eugeniusz Wildowicz saying that Bodnar’s appeal was “justified and deserved to be considered”. Today, the court’s criminal chamber announced that it had overturned the convictions. A justification for the ruling has not yet been released.

Among those to welcome the decision was Jacek Dubois, today a prominent lawyer and who is also the grandson of Stanisław Dubois, an interwar PPS politician who was among those sentenced alongside Witos. “It turns out granddad wasn’t a criminal,” he tweeted.

Main image credit: NAC (under public domain)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.