Karol Siemaszko

The study of post-war crime is becoming more and more popular among Polish researchers. The basic source for conducting this kind of research is criminal files, primarily those of the regional courts operating in the years 1945–1950. The author calls attention to both statutory and actual restrictions on access to source materials. He also notes how using other, non-official sources or witness accounts in this type of research will not always be appropriate. He postulates that research on post-war crime in Poland should be designed primarily as research on crime in the juridical sense. The author also indicates that research on post-war crime has many points in common with the so-called historical criminology.

After World War II, a number of territories that had belonged to Germany before 1945 were incorpo­rated into those of the Polish state. The change of borders resulted in the need to build structures of the Polish judiciary and prosecutor’s offices in these territories. This article is devoted to describing the functioning of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Regional Court in Głogów with its seat in Nowa Sól. The history of this office is an example of how prosecutors’ offices operated in difficult post-war conditions in the recovered territories, as well as of relations between the prosecutors’ offices and other public authorities such as the Citizens’ Militia or the judiciary.

The Civic Court in London was brought into existence on the strength of a Presidential decree of 8 September 1950 concerning Civic Courts in Exile. It consisted of a General and a Civic Department. Its main objective was to adjudicate on matters relating to acts that were reprehensible from the point of view of the Polish political exiles, but at the same time indifferent in the light of the British law. The most active period in the operation of the Polish Civic Court in London occurred in the years 1951–1954, that is at a time when it was headed by Stanisław Krause. After the rupture within the Polish émigré circles, the London court remained a presidential organ, although a considerable number  of its judges moved to the faction grouped around the Polish Council of Three. This had led to the organizational decline of the court and ultimately to is practical liquidation in the first half of the sixties.