Władysław Filipkowski

Who was Władysław Filipkowski?

Władysław Filipkowski was a Polish military commander and a professional officer of the Polish Army. During World War II he was the commanding officer of the Armia Krajowa units in the inspectorate of Lwów and the commander of the Lwów Uprising. For his merits he was promoted to the titular rank of generał brygady.

Władysław Jakub Filipkowski was born May 1, 1892 in the village of Filipów near Suwałki, then in the Privislinsky Krai of the Russian Empire. In 1909 he graduated from a local gymnasium in Suwałki and then left for Galicia, the only part of partitioned Poland where teaching in Polish language was permitted. There he started studying at the law faculty of the Lviv University. Simultaneously he also studied at the machine engineering faculty of the Lviv University of Technology, where he became a member of the Związek Strzelecki paramilitary organization. However, he did not finish his studies at the latter university due to the outbreak of the Great War.

On August 1, 1914 he joined the Polish Legions, where he held a number of posts. He fought in the Carpathians, Bukovina and Volhynia, serving as a commander of a single piece of artillery, of an infantry platoon and as an adjutant of a battalion of heavy howitzers. Following the Oath Crisis of 1917 he was interned by the Germans. Released from the prisoner camp on November 1, 1918, he moved to Warsaw, where he joined the newly-born Polish Army immediately after its creation. Initially a clerk in the Inspectorate of Artillery, on November 29 he became an adjutant to the Polish commander-in-chief, General Józef Piłsudski. During the early stage of the Polish-Bolshevik War, in November 1919 he was dispatched to Lwów, where he served as the commander of the local cell of the II Detachment of the Headquarters, that is the intelligence and counter-intelligence service. He held that post until the signing of the peace of Riga.