Joseph Kozielski

Unknown

11 June 1946 L/Cpl Joseph Kozielski died of acute bronchial pneumonia caused by chronic pulmonary tuberculosis in Lincoln Military hospital, buried Newark Cemetery. From Wilchwy, Rybnik, Silesia, death certificate states Polish POW B10471 German Army.

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, many former citizens of the Second Polish Republic from across the Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany were forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht army in Upper Silesia and in Pomerania. They were declared citizens of the Third Reich by law and therefore subject to drumhead court-martial in case of draft evasion. 90% of the inhabitants of these two westernmost regions of prewar Poland were ordered to register on the Nazi Deutsche Volksliste by the invader regardless of will. The number of the conscripts is not known. The data does not exist beyond 1943. In June 1946 the British Secretary of State for War reported to parliament that among the citizens of interwar Poland who served in the Wehrmacht as foreign conscripts, a total of 68,693 men were captured by the Allies in north-west Europe. The overwhelming majority of them, 53,630, enlisted into the Polish Army under the British Command, and served in the Polish Armed Forces in the West against the Germans until the end of World War II.