P.O.W. (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa) Lietuvoje

Tarpukaris

Interwar Republic · 1920–1940

Published in 1936 during the Interwar Republic period.

What It Is

This pamphlet is a remarkable artifact of interwar Lithuanian institutional infrastructure at its most defensive and self-assertive. Published by Spaudos Fondas — a press institution closely aligned with the Lithuanian nationalist state project — it represents the official Lithuanian narrative on Polish subversion at precisely the moment when the Vilnius question and Klaipėda crisis dominated public discourse. The text's reliance on Army Tribunal documents signals an attempt to ground nationalist political argument in juridical legitimacy, reflecting the interwar Lithuanian state's effort to project modernity and rule-of-law values while conducting a propaganda campaign. The inclusion of a 'Post Scriptum' in which the Poles themselves allegedly confirm P.O.W. liquidation in Lithuania is a rhetorical strategy that reveals how deeply the Lithuanian press-state nexus worked to shape public consciousness around existential territorial threats. As a cultural survival text, the pamphlet operates on multiple levels: it asserts Lithuanian sovereignty over contested territories through historical and legal argument, it mobilizes anti-Polish sentiment as a cohesive national identity mechanism, and it frames Lithuanian independence as perpetually under siege — a narrative that would prove tragically prescient given the 1940 Soviet occupation. The detailed enumeration of Polish organizations (P.O.W., O.S.N., Organizacja Strzelców Nadniemeńskich, Kauno Apygardos XIII obvodas) and named agents (Leon Wasilewski, Dunin-Wasowicz, Valerija Slaveka) provides an extraordinary snapshot of how Lithuanian security discourse constructed the Polish 'other' as an existential threat. For diaspora communities after 1944, texts like this one formed part of the intellectual-historical bedrock from which émigrés understood Lithuanian statehood, Polish relations, and the meaning of independence. The Spaudos Fondas imprint and Varpas printing house connection anchor this work firmly in the Kaunas cultural-institutional world that diaspora intellectuals mourned and mythologized. Understanding this pamphlet helps explain the intensity of Lithuanian-Polish historical grievances that persisted in diaspora communities for decades after the war.

Why It Matters

Culturally and historically, this pamphlet is a primary document of the interwar Lithuanian state at the height of its confrontation with Polish expansionism. Published the same year as the Klaipėda crisis intensified and as Europe slid toward the conflicts that would destroy Lithuanian independence, it captures the official Lithuanian voice arguing — in its own language, through its own institutional press — for the legitimacy of its sovereignty and the threat posed by organized Polish subversion. The P.O.W. (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa) was a real historical organization founded by Piłsudski during WWI, and its alleged activities in Lithuania generated genuine security concern. This text is one of the very few Lithuanian-language primary sources that documents these concerns from the Lithuanian state's internal perspective, based on actual tribunal documents. For any serious historical understanding of Lithuanian-Polish relations, the Vilnius dispute, and the internal politics of interwar Kaunas, this pamphlet is indispensable.