POLISH POLAND STARZYNSKI SIEGE OF WARSAW 1939 DEFENSE WAR MEDAL

Description

LIMITED EDITION MINTED
ONLY 300!!! MEDALS minted
- see reference catalogue by Orest Paszkowycz, page 250, #80/90
This medal has been issued  in  1990 year to commemorative the 1939 president of Warsaw Stefan Starzynski
Medal design
by A. Nowakowski plastic of artist, famous Polish artist.
diameter – 70mm
metal –
bronze  metal
weight about 120gr. (about 4.24 oz.)
Stefan Starzyński (August 19, 1893 - c. October 17, 1943[1]) was a Polish politician, economist, writer and statesman, President of Warsaw before and during the Siege of Warsaw in 1939.
Defense of Warsaw
After the start of Polish Defensive War of 1939 Starzyński, refused to leave Warsaw together with other state authorities and diplomats on September 4, 1939. Instead he joined the army as a major of infantry. The Minister of War shortly before his departure created the Command of the Defense of the Capital with general Walerian Czuma as its commander. On September 7, the forces of 4th German Panzer Division managed to break the Polish lines near Częstochowa and started their march towards Warsaw. Most of the city authorities withdrew together with a large part of the police forces, fire fighters and military garrison. Warsaw was left with only four battalions of infantry and one battery of artillery. The Headquarters of general Czuma had barely any forces to organize the defense of the city. Also, the spokesman of the garrison of Warsaw issued a communique in which he ordered all young men to leave the city.
To counter the panic that started in Warsaw, general Czuma appointed Stefan Starzyński as the Civilian Commissar of Warsaw. Starzyński started to organize the Civil Guard to replace the evacuated police forces. He also ordered all members of the city's administration to retake their posts. In his daily radio releases he asked all civilians to construct barricades and anti-tank barriers at the outskirts of Warsaw. According to many sources from the epoch his daily speeches were a crucial factor in keeping the morale of both the soldiers and the civilians high during the Siege of Warsaw. Starzyński commanded the distribution of food, water and supplies as well as fire fighting brigades. He also managed to organise shelter for almost all civilian refugees from other parts of Poland and houses destroyed by German aerial bombardment. Before the Siege ended he became the symbol of the defence of Warsaw in 1939.
On September 27 the commanders of the besieging German forces demanded that Starzyński be present during the signing of the capitulation of Warsaw. Before the capitulation he was offered to leave the city several times. The pilot of the prototype PZL.46 Sum plane that managed to escape from internment in Romania and landed safely in besieged Warsaw offered himself to evacuate Starzyński to Lithuania. He was also proposed to go underground and receive plastic surgery in order to escape the city. He refused.
After the Germans entered the city on September 28, 1939, Starzyński was allowed to continue his service as the president of Warsaw. He was active in organisation of life in the occupied city as well as its reconstruction after the German terror bombing campaign. At the same time he became one of the organizers of Służba Zwycięstwu Polski, the first underground organisation in occupied Poland that eventually became the Armia Krajowa. Among other things he provided it with thousands of clean forms of ID cards, birth registry forms and passports. Those documents were later used in validation of false identities of many members of the resistance.
On October 5, he was arrested by the Gestapo and, together with several other prominent inhabitants of Warsaw, held hostage as a warrant of safety of Adolf Hitler during a parade of victory held in Warsaw. The following day all of them were released. On October 27, 1939 he was again arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. In December he was yet again offered to escape, but he again refused claiming that it would be too costly to those involved in his escape. His fate remains unknown. According to the most probable version he was transferred to Moabit prison in Berlin and then to Dachau concentration camp where he died. However, several accounts assume that he was either transferred to a potash mine in Baelberge or that he was held hostage in Warsaw until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. The most probable date of his death is October 17, 1943 (shot to death in the Dachau concentration camp), although other versions mention August 1944 (Warsaw), 1944 (Baelberge), 1943 (Spandau prison) or January 1940 (Dachau).
In 1957, a memorial was erected to his memory in the Powązki cemetery in Warsaw.
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