Institute of National Remembrance - Activities - Research

Research

The research conducted by IPN from December 2000 falls into four main topical areas:

• Security Apparatus and Civil Resistance (with separate sub-projects devoted to Political Processes and Prisoners 1944-1956, Soviet Repressions and Crimes committed against Polish Citizens and Martial Law: a Glance after Twenty Years);
  • Functioning of the repression apparatus (state security and justice organs) - its organizational structure, cadres and relations with other state authority and party organs
  • Activities of the repression apparatus directed against particular selected social groups and organizations
  • Structure and methods of functioning of the People's Poland security apparatus
  • Security apparatus in the combat with political and military underground 1944-1956
  • Activities of the security apparatus against political emigreés
  • Security apparatus in combat with the Church and freedom of belief
  • Authorities vis-a-vis social crises and democratic opposition in the years 1956-1989 f) List of those repressed and sentenced to death
  • Bibliography of the conspiracy, resistance and repression 1944-1989
• War, Occupation and the Polish Underground;
  • deepening of knowledge about the structures and activities of the Polish Underground State
  • examination of the human fates in the territories occupied by the Soviet regime and of Poles displaced into the Soviet Union
  • assessment of sources on the life conditions under the Soviet and German Nazi occupations
  • evaluation of the state of research concerning the victims of the war activities and extermination policy of the Soviet and German Nazi occupiers
  • examining the Holocaust (Extermination of Jews) conducted by Nazis in the Polish territories
    • Response of the Polish Underground State to the extermination of Jewish population
    • The Polish Underground press and the Jewish question during the German Nazi occupation
• Poles and Other Nations in the Years 1939-1989 (with a part on Poles and Ukrainians);
  • Poles and Ukrainians
  • Poles and Lithuanians
  • Poles and Germans
  • Communist authorities - Belarusians - Underground
  • Fate of Jewish people in the People's Republic of Poland
  • Gypsies in Poland
• Peasants vis-a-vis People's Authority 1944-1989 (on the situation of peasants and the rural policy in the years 1944-1989)
  • inhabitants of the rural areas vis-a-vis the creation of the totalitarian regime in Poland;
  • peasants vis-a-vis the Sovietisation of Poland in the years 1948-1956;
  • attitudes of the inhabitants of rural areas towards the state-Church conflict in the years 1956-1970;
  • the role of peasants in the anti-Communist opposition of the 1970s and 1980s.

Among the most widely reported case investigated by the IPN thus far is the Jedwabne Pogrom, an infamous pogrom of Polish Jews "committed directly by Poles, but inspired by the Germans" in 1941. A selection of other cases include:

• Bloody Sunday (1939), an alleged massacre of ethnic Germans by Poles after the German invasion of Poland
• German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, the system of extermination, concentration, labor and POW camps operated by the German Nazis in occupied Poland
• Holocaust in Poland, persecution of the Jews by the German Nazi occupation government in Poland
• Katzmann Report, a detailed German report on extermination of Polish Jews
• Kielce pogrom, a post-war pogrom of Polish Jews by Poles
• Koniuchy massacre, a massacre carried out by Jewish and Soviet partisan
• Kraków pogrom.
• Massacre of Lwów professors, the mass execution of approximately 45 Polish professors of the University of Lwów
• Massacres of Poles in Volhynia, an ethnic cleansing conducted by Ukrainians in Volhynia during World War II
• Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against ethnic Poles by Nazi Germany during World War II
• NKVD prisoner massacres, a series of mass executions committed by Soviet NKVD against Polish prisoners
• Occupation of Poland (1939-1945) and treatment of Polish citizens by the occupants in that period
• Operation Vistula, the 1947 deportation of southeastern Poland's Ukrainian, Boyko and Lemko populations by the post-war Soviet installed communist government of Poland in cooperation with Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union to the Western territories attached to Poland from Germany after WWII, the so-called "Recovered Territories"
• Pawłokoma massacre, a massacre in 1945 of Ukrainian civilians by Polish partisans
• Ponary massacre, the mass-murder of about 100,000 people performed by Germans and Lithuanians on Poles and Jews
• Poznań 1956 protests, the first of several massive protests of the Polish people against the communist government of the People's Republic of Poland
• Przyszowice massacre committed by Red Army on Polish villagers of Poland and other Red Army atrocities in Poland
• Salomon Morel, a case of a Polish Jew running post-war camp were political prisoners were persecuted
• Special Courts, the underground courts organized by the Polish Government in Exile
• Wąsosz pogrom, a pogrom of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland
• Żegota, Polish underground organization with the purpose of aiding persecuted Jews in German occupied Poland.