Controversy Surrounding Counterfeit Files and Fake Police Reports
Former head of the State Protection Office (UOP), General Gromosław Czempiński and others, described the process in which counterfeit top secret files and fake police reports were produced by the Communist secret service in the People's Republic of Poland. Their purpose was to undermine the credibility of prominent opponents of the ruling Party and numerous others, mainly by attempting to ruin their good name as private individuals. Fałszywka (pl. fałszywki) used to contain forged revelations about opposition members working as alleged police informants under the Soviet system. Communist secret service used them frequently, said Czempiński, stating also that often the officers who signed them were created out of thin air. Writer Jerzy Urban noted, that (if available) signatures of alleged collaborators, from unrelated documents, were also Xeroxed and pasted into fałszywkas before reprints.
The presence of fałszywkas in the secret police archives makes the process of lustration extremely sensitive in Poland, leading to a number of highly publicized cases of slander. Numerous prominent politicians, such as the Minister Władysław Bartoszewski (former Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner), and Professor Jerzy Kłoczowski (member of the UNESCO Executive Board), have been noted among their targets. Kłoczowski was defended against slander based on an SB fałszywka, in a letter of protest published in Rzeczpospolita in 2004, and signed by a slew of Polish intellectuals including Prof. Jerzy Buzek, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, Prof. Władysław Bartoszewski, Prof. Andrzej Zoll, Józef Życiński, Andrzej Wajda, Prof. Barbara Skarga, Prof. Jan Miodek, Prof. Jerzy Zdrada, Aleksander Hall, Władysław Frasyniuk, Prof. Adam Galos, Krystyna Zachwatowicz and many others. The wide spread of fałszywkas in communist Poland was confirmed in the 2000 court case by a document written in 1985 by Major Adam Styliński during an internal investigation at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The document written by Styliński described how the fałszywkas were produced and disseminated by the department during the martial law in Poland. Notably, Lech Wałęsa was a target of fake police reports already in the early 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Lustration In Poland
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