On 30 June 1943, the Germans struck at the very heart of the Polish resistance. In a safe house in Warsaw, they seized General Stefan Rowecki, the commander of the Home Army, the largest underground organization in occupied Poland. He was later executed. For the Polish underground, the question was not only how the Gestapo had found him, but who had led them there.
The counterintelligence investigation that followed took months, and when it concluded, it identified three agents as jointly responsible. One of them was a young woman the general himself had decorated for bravery only a short time before. Her name was Blanka Kaczorowska. She was born on 13 October 1922 in Brześć Litewski, today Brest in Belarus, then part of the Polish Republic.
Her father, Jan Kaczorowski, came from a noble family with roots in Podolia. He had studied at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic, volunteered in the Russian army during the First World War, and after the war joined the newly independent Polish state, rising through the military judicial system until he qualified as an investigating judge in 1931. From 1934 to 1938, he presided over the local military court in Siedlce, east of Warsaw.
The family was respectable, patriotic, and well-connected in prewar Polish state institutions. Blanka grew up in that environment, attended the Military Family Association school in Warsaw and Queen Jadwiga Secondary School in Siedlce, and joined the Polish scouting movement, which instilled in her early the values of patriotism and organizational discipline. When the Second World War broke out on 1 September 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, she had not yet finished her final school examinations. She was sixteen years old.
The German occupation that followed split Poland into different administrative zones. Siedlce fell under the General Government, the German colonial administration set up over central and southern occupied Poland. Underground resistance organizations formed quickly, drawing on prewar civic and military structures. Early in 1940, Kaczorowska came into contact with the underground and joined the structures of the Union of Armed Struggle, the precursor to the Home Army.
She worked in the kitchen of a German airfield and as a cleaner in a German military hospital, jobs that gave her access to information of intelligence value. During this period, she attracted the attention of a German air force officer named Johannes Barandt. Her resistance superiors encouraged her to exploit this connection as a source of information. In November 1941, the Gestapo arrested her in Siedlce.
They confiscated incriminating material, including private letters from Barandt. She was released after a few days, explaining to the resistance that she had convinced the Germans the material had been found by accident while she was cleaning. The underground accepted this explanation, and she was awarded the Cross of Valour, ironically on the orders of General Rowecki, the man she would later betray. At the ceremony where the award was confirmed, she met Ludwik Kalkstein for the first time.
He was an intelligence officer in the Home Army commanding a network known as Group H, and he received his own decoration at the same ceremony. In early 1941 and 1942, she joined his group. Kalkstein became her superior in the underground, and the relationship between them quickly grew close. In late March or early April 1942, the Gestapo arrested Kalkstein and held him at their headquarters on Szucha Avenue in Warsaw.
He broke down under interrogation and agreed to cooperate. After his release in August 1942, he changed his appearance and searched for Kaczorowska, finding her a month later. He told her plainly that he had been set free in exchange for agreeing to work for the Germans. She raised no objection.
On 14 November 1942, the two married in a church in Radość, a suburb east of Warsaw. The marriage was kept secret from the resistance. Kaczorowska continued working in the underground under her maiden name and kept a separate address from her husband so their connection would not be discovered. In secret meetings with Kalkstein, she told him everything: the names of the people she worked with, the tasks she had been assigned, the identities of her organizational contacts.
That information passed through Kalkstein to the Gestapo, where she was registered as agent V-98. Kalkstein himself was V-97. The third member of the network was Kalkstein’s brother-in-law, Eugeniusz Świerczewski, registered as V-100. The consequences for the Polish resistance were severe.
Kaczorowska later admitted in her postwar testimony that she knew the information she passed to her husband reached the Gestapo. In the summer of 1943, her capacity for damage increased when she was assigned to the main headquarters of the Home Army. She exploited this position to obtain information for the Gestapo, and in December 1943, information she provided directly led to the arrest of at least fourteen resistance members, five of whom were later executed. Among the dead was Jadwiga Karaśiewiczówna, head of the propaganda and morale section within the Bureau of Studies, and Kaczorowska’s own direct superior.
But the most damaging act of betrayal had come months earlier. After the arrest of General Rowecki in June 1943, the Home Army’s counterintelligence concluded that Kalkstein, Kaczorowska, and Świerczewski bore collective responsibility for his capture. According to some sources, a secret military court sentenced all three to death in absentia. The sentence was carried out on Świerczewski in June 1944, after he was identified as the man who had spotted Rowecki in the street and alerted the Germans.
An assassination team went looking for Kalkstein and Kaczorowska at their apartment on Śniadeckich Street in Warsaw, but failed. Kaczorowska, by then pregnant, had taken refuge in a hospital under German protection. She gave birth to a son, and in April 1944, Kalkstein moved her to the town of Piastów outside Warsaw. The marriage did not last, and the couple separated shortly after the birth of their son.
The death sentence was never carried out, and Kaczorowska survived the following months under German protection. In January 1945, with Soviet forces approaching and the structures of German occupation collapsing, Kaczorowska and Kalkstein made their way to the newly liberated city of Łódź. Around February 1945, Kaczorowska left Łódź for Siedlce, her last prewar residence, to obtain official documents. At the municipal office, she acquired the necessary document under her maiden name, though she did not hide the fact of her marriage.
Her father, the prewar military judge, had by then been drafted by the new communist authorities and appointed to the Supreme Military Court in Lublin. That position gave Blanka a measure of protection, which she exploited fully in the turbulent early postwar years. She settled in Łódź, completed her secondary education in July 1945 through an intensive course, and in October of that year enrolled in the art history department at the University of Łódź. On her application, she stated that she was married but did not give her husband’s family name.
She was not a distinguished student, caused no trouble, and graduated with a clear record of good conduct. She also entered into a relationship with Roman Vogel, also known as Roman Rawicz, a military judge who served in the same section of the Supreme Military Court as her father and co-authored a postwar commentary on military criminal law. She moved in with him and presented him as her husband, though they never formally married. Through the late 1940s, she lived quietly in Łódź and then Warsaw, completing her university studies, and in 1949 found work at the state institute for the study of folk art in Warsaw.
On the surface, she had reinvented herself completely. It did not last. The political climate in Poland was changing. The Stalinist tightening of communist control in the early 1950s brought intense scrutiny of wartime records and renewed interest in former Gestapo collaborators.
The protective network around Kaczorowska began to erode. Her father was discharged from military service in April 1948, and her partner Vogel came under increasing political pressure. In late December 1952, she was arrested. Her apartment was searched, and an official investigation was opened against her.
She gave a lengthy testimony describing her wartime activities in detail, attempting to minimize her personal responsibility. She claimed she had trusted Kalkstein, denied direct collaboration with the Gestapo, and insisted she had only spoken to her husband about her work. On 12 June 1953, she was tried before the Warsaw Regional Court. The charge was collaboration with the Nazi occupation under the decree of 31 August 1944 on the punishment of fascist-Hitlerite criminals.
The court convicted her and sentenced her to life imprisonment with permanent loss of civil rights. On appeal, the Supreme Court reduced the sentence to fifteen years with ten years’ loss of civil rights. A judicial amnesty then reduced this to twelve years. She served her sentence in the women’s prison at Fordon, near Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, and was released on parole in July 1958, after five and a half years.
In prison, she became an informer for the communist security apparatus, reporting on her fellow inmates. After release, she continued that role, working as a secret agent under the codename Katarzyna. In 1968, she left Poland legally for Paris, where she first worked on small projects in art history, then as a caregiver and hotel receptionist. Her former husband, Ludwik Kalkstein, was arrested after the war and sentenced for his collaboration.
After release, he left Poland and eventually moved to France, where their son was living. Under a false identity, he spent the rest of his life in Western Europe and died in 1994. In 1983, Kaczorowska was admitted to a Polish charitable care home in La Haye-en-Val in the Loire Valley, which since 1957 had looked after veterans of the Polish armed forces in the West and political refugees. She was identified there by chance when a Polish woman working in the administration came across her French residence card, which described her as a victim of a political trial in communist Poland.
Her wartime past quickly came to light. She lost her job, and after reaching retirement age, she was moved to a French care home in Bogenice in north-central France, where she remained for the rest of her life. Blanka Kaczorowska died on 25 August 2002 at the age of seventy-nine, in a hospital run by the Camillian fathers in Brie-sur-Marne, a suburb east of Paris. She was buried in the local municipal cemetery.
A woman who betrayed her country twice, she had served the Gestapo during the war and the communist secret police after it, and died in obscurity, her wartime actions finally known.