Ludwik Kalkstein

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kalkstein, Gestapo agent during Warsaw Uprising, Stalinist informant in postwar Poland

Ludwik Kalkstein, also Ludwik Kalkstein-Stoliński, nom de guerre "Hanka" (13 March 1920, Warsaw – 26 October 1994, Munich);[1] was one of the better known Gestapo agents during Warsaw Uprising as well as a Stalinist informant following the Soviet takeover of Poland. Along with his wife and brother-in-law (Blanka Kaczorowska "Sroka", and Eugeniusz Świerczewski "Genes"), they became the Armia Krajowa traitors under not just one, but two consecutive totalitarian regimes.[2] Kalkstein was responsible for the arrest and execution by the Nazis of at least 14 Polish underground officers including the legendary General Stefan Rowecki.

Arrested by the Gestapo in April 1942 and interrogated, Kalkstein and Kaczorowska had followed a path taken by other Nazi collaborators, as mentioned by Kenneth Koskodan in his No Greater Ally: The Untold Story of Poland's Forces in World War II.[3] After collaborating with the Germans, even fighting on their side against the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 (Kalkstein joined the SS as Paul Henchel),[2] they would later collaborate as informants with Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (a Polish version of the KGB between 1947 and 1956), after their internment in a Stalinist prison.[4]

See also

Notes and references

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.