Worse Than Nazis: Spy Who Turned Her Friends Over to the Gestapo JJ

1 September 1939 Poland. At dawn German armoured columns cross the Polish border and  push into the country from the north, west, and south simultaneously. In London and  Paris, governments that have guaranteed Polish sovereignty prepare ultimatums that will, within  two days, become declarations of war.

In Warsaw, civilians fill the streets and stare at the sky.  Across the country, men report to mobilisation points and women begin to pack what can be  carried. In the provincial city of Siedlce, east of Warsaw, a sixteen-year-old girl  hears the news with the rest of her country. She is the daughter of a military judge.

Within  two years she will join the Polish underground and be decorated for her courage by General  Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army, the largest resistance organization  in occupied Poland. Within three, she will hand him over to the Nazi secret police,  the Gestapo. Her name is Blanka Kaczorowska. Blanka Kaczorowska was born on 13 October 1922 in  the city of Brest-Litovsk, today Brest in Belarus, then part of the Polish Republic.

Her father  Jan Kaczorowski came from a noble family in the settlement of Husiatyn in the province  of Podolia. He had studied at the Polytechnic University in Saint Petersburg, volunteered for  the Russian army during the First World War, and after the war joined the newly independent  Polish state, working his way through the military legal system until, in 1931, he qualified as an  investigating judge.

Between 1934 and 1938 he headed the District Military Court in Siedlce,  east of Warsaw. The family was respectable, patriotic, and well connected within the  institutions of the pre-war Polish state. Blanka grew up in this environment. She attended  the school of the Military Family Association in Warsaw and then the Queen Jadwiga natural  sciences gymnasium and lyceum in Siedlce.

She was a member of the Polish Scouting Association,  which gave her an early formation in patriotic duty and organisational discipline. When the  Second World War began on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, she had not  yet completed her final school examinations – at that time she was only 16 years old.

The German occupation of Poland, which followed within weeks of the invasion, divided the country  into different administrative zones. Siedlce fell within the area of the General Government,  the German colonial administration established over central and southern occupied Poland. Under  occupation, underground resistance organisations formed rapidly, drawing on the structures  of pre-war civil society and the military.

As early as 1940, Kaczorowska was in contact with  the underground and enrolled in the structures of the Union of Armed Struggle, the predecessor  organisation of the Armia Krajowa, the Home Army. She worked in the kitchen of a German airfield and  then as a cleaner in a German military hospital, positions that offered potential access to  information of some intelligence value.

During this period, she attracted the attention  of a German officer in the Luftwaffe, the Air Force of Nazi Germany, named Johannes  Berent, and her resistance superiors encouraged her to cultivate this contact as a source. In November 1941 she was arrested by the Gestapo in Siedlce. Incriminating materials were  seized, including private letters from Berent.

She was released after a few days, explaining to the  resistance that she had convinced the Germans the materials had been picked up accidentally while  cleaning. In the underground, this explanation was accepted, and she was awarded the Cross of  Valour ironically on the order of General Rowecki, whom she would later betray and hand over to the  Gestapo.

At the ceremony where her decoration was confirmed, she met for the first time Ludwik  Kalkstein, the man who would destroy her. Kalkstein was a Home Army intelligence  officer commanding the so-called Group H, a network operating under the Home Army main  headquarters. He received his decoration at the same ceremony as Kaczorowska and at the  turn of 1941 and 1942, she was assigned to his group.

Ludwik Kalkstein was her superior in  the underground and quickly became close to her personally. In late March or early April 1942, he  was arrested by the Gestapo and was held at its headquarters on Szucha Avenue in Warsaw. He broke  during the interrogation and agreed to cooperate. Released in August 1942, he changed his appearance  and sought out Kaczorowska, whom he found after a month.

He told her openly that he had been freed  in exchange for agreeing to work for the Germans and she raised no objection to this information. On 14 November 1942, the couple married in a church in Radość, a suburb east of Warsaw. The  marriage was kept secret from the underground movement. Kaczorowska continued to operate in  resistance structures under her maiden name, maintaining a separate address from her  husband so that her connection to him would not be discovered.

At clandestine meetings with  Kalkstein, she told him everything: the names of people she had worked with, the tasks she had  been given, the identities of her organisational contacts. This information passed through  Kalkstein to the Gestapo, where she was registered as agent V-98. Kalkstein was V-97. A third member  of their network, Kalkstein’s brother-in-law Eugeniusz Świerczewski, operated as V-100.

The consequences for the Polish underground were catastrophic. Kaczorowska later admitted in  post-war testimony that she knew the information she passed to her husband was reaching the  Gestapo. In the summer of 1943, her ability to cause damage increased further when she was given  a position in the Home Army main headquarters. She used this position to obtain information for  the Gestapo and in December 1943, the information she provided led directly to the arrest of  at least fourteen people in the underground, of whom five were subsequently executed.  Among the dead was Jadwiga Krasicka, head of

the Propaganda and Morale section of the Studies  Bureau and Kaczorowska’s own immediate superior. But the most consequential act of betrayal had  already occurred months earlier. On 30 June 1943, General Stefan Rowecki, leader of the Home Army,  was arrested at his safehouse in Warsaw and later executed.

Home Army counter-intelligence,  after several months of investigation, concluded that three agents: Kalkstein, Kaczorowska, and  Świerczewski bore collective responsibility and according to some sources the underground military  court sentenced all three to death in absentia. The sentence on Świerczewski, identified as the  man who had directly located Rowecki in the street and informed the Germans, was carried out in June  1944.

A killing squad went looking for Kalkstein and Kaczorowska at their apartment on Śniegocka  Street in Warsaw, but they were not successful. Kaczorowska, by then pregnant, had been sheltered  by the Germans in a hospital. She gave birth to a son and in April 1944 was moved by Kalkstein to  the town of Piastów outside Warsaw. The marriage did not last, and the couple divorced shortly  after the birth of their son.

The sentence was not carried out and she survived the  following months under German protection. In January 1945, with the Soviet forces  approaching and the structures of the German occupation collapsing, Kaczorowska and Kalkstein  made their way to the newly liberated city of Łódź.

Most likely in February 1945, Kaczorowska  left Łódź for her last pre-war place of residence, Siedlce, in order to obtain legal documents.  At the local municipal office, she received the necessary document under her maiden name. At the  same time, she made no secret of the fact that she had been married. Her father Jan Kaczorowski, the  pre-war military judge, had by then been mobilised by the new communist authorities and appointed as  a judge of the Supreme Military Court, in Lublin.

This position, held by one of the most senior  judicial figures in the new state apparatus, provided Blanka with a degree of protection  that, in the chaotic first years of postwar Poland, she was able to exploit to the fullest. Settling in Łódź, she obtained a school-leaving certificate in July 1945, having completed her  interrupted education in an accelerated course.

On 31 October 1945, she enrolled in art history  at the University of Łódź. In her application she mentioned that she had been married but gave no  surname for her husband. At the university she was unremarkable as a student but caused no problems  and left with a straightforward assessment of good conduct.

She also entered a relationship  with Roman Vogel, known also as Roman Rawicz, a military judge who had served in the same  section of the Supreme Military Court as her father and who was a co-author with him of  a postwar commentary on the military penal code. She moved in with him and presented him as  her husband, though they did not formally marry. Through the late 1940s, Kaczorowska lived quietly  in Łódź and later Warsaw, completing her degree and in 1949 finding employment at the State  Institute for the Study of Folk Art in Warsaw.

She had, to all appearances, reinvented  herself entirely, but it was not to last. The political climate in Poland was changing. The  Stalinist tightening of communist control in the early 1950s brought with it an intensified  scrutiny of wartime records and a renewed interest in former Gestapo collaborators.

The  protective network around Kaczorowska was eroding: her father had been discharged from the  military justice system in April 1948, and her partner Vogel came under increasing  political pressure. In late December 1952, she was arrested, her apartment was  searched, and a formal investigation was opened against her.

She gave extensive testimony  describing her wartime activities in detail, while attempting to minimise her personal  culpability: arguing that she had trusted Kalkstein and she denied her direct collaboration  with the Gestapo and insisted that she had merely talked with her husband about her work. On 12 June 1953, she was tried before the Warsaw Provincial Court.

The charge was  collaboration with the Nazi occupier under the decree of 31 August 1944 on punishment for  fascist-Hitlerite criminals. The court found her guilty and sentenced her to life imprisonment  and permanent loss of her civil rights. On appeal, the Supreme Court reduced the sentence to fifteen  years, with a loss of civil rights for ten years. An amnesty reduced this to twelve years.

She  served her sentence at the women’s prison in Fordon, near Bydgoszcz in northern Poland,  and was released on parole in July 1958, five and a half years after her arrest. In prison, she became an informer for the communist security apparatus, denouncing  fellow inmates. After her release, she continued this role, working as a secret  agent under the codename Katarzyna.

In 1968 she left Poland legally for Paris, where she  worked initially on minor art history projects, then as a caregiver and hotel receptionist. Her former husband, Ludwik Kalkstein, was arrested after the war and sentenced to prison for  his wartime collaboration. Following his release, he left Poland and eventually moved to France,  where their son was living.

Under an assumed identity, he spent the remainder of his  life in Western Europe and died in 1994. In 1983 Kaczorowska was admitted to a Polish  charitable care home in Lailly-en-Val in the Loire valley, which had since 1957 provided for  veterans of the Polish armed forces in the West and political refugees.

She was recognised there  by accident when a Polish woman working in the administration came across Kaczorowska’s French  residency card, which described her as a victim of a political trial in communist Poland. Her  wartime past was soon uncovered. She lost her job and, and after reaching retirement  age, Kaczorowska was moved to a French care home in Beaugency in north-central France,  where she remained for the rest of her life.

Blanka Kaczorowska, a woman who was perhaps even  worse than the Nazis because she betrayed her country twice, died on 25 August 2002 at the age  of 79 in a hospital run by the Camillian Fathers in Bry-sur-Marne, in the eastern suburbs of Paris.  She was buried in the local municipal cemetery. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel.

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