Władysław Sikorski's death controversy
[1] On 4 July 1943, while returning from the Middle East, Sikorski perished, together with his daughter Zofia, his Chief of Staff, Tadeusz Klimecki, and seven others, when his aircraft, a Consolidated Liberator II, serial number AL523, crashed into the sea 16 seconds after takeoff from Gibraltar Airport at 23:07 hours.
[1] The 11 passengers killed were: A British Court of Inquiry convened on 7 July that year investigated the crash of Sikorski's Liberator II serial AL 523, but was unable to determine the cause, finding only that it was an accident and "due to jamming of elevator controls", noting that "it has not been possible to determine how the jamming occurred but it has been established that there was no sabotage.
[11] The political context of the event, coupled with a variety of circumstances, immediately gave rise to much speculation that Sikorski's death had been no accident, and may have been the direct result of a German, Soviet, British, or even Polish conspiracy.
[18][19][20][21] In 2013 one of the IPN historians, Maciej Korkuć [pl], has stated that "many facts suggest an assassination", although another, Andrzej Chwalba, notes that there is insufficient evidence to support this claim.
[24] However, in 1998, the Public Record Office officially informed the Polish government that they had no knowledge of any classified British documents older than 30 years concerning Sikorski's death.
[32][33][35] Among the rumoured kidnap victims, a prominent role is given to Sikorski's daughter, Zofia Leśniowska, who was reported in 1945 to have been spotted in a Soviet Gulag by a member of the elite Polish commandos (Cichociemni), Tadeusz Kobyliński [pl].
[2] Other conspiracy theories point to the British, the German Abwehr intelligence agency or the Poles themselves, some of whom (especially under the command of Anders) had shown animosity toward Sikorski for, at least from their point of view, his policy of "colluding" with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, which reached new heights by the Germans' April 1943 discovery of mass graves filled with thousands of Polish prisoners of war murdered by the Soviets at Katyn Forest in 1940.
[38] Irving's book highlighted what he believed were two other suspicious occasions where assassination attempts may have been made on Silorski during aerial flight, including a crash-landing in Montreal in 1942, where sabotage was a suspected cause.
[40] In his book Disasters in the Air, former KLM pilot and one-time IFALPA president Jan Bartelski, of Polish origin, suggests that the crash of the Liberator that carried Sikorski was caused by a half-empty mail bag jammed between the horizontal stabilizer and the elevator, thus "freezing" the controls and preventing Prchal from gaining altitude after takeoff.
The mail bag was in the cargo compartment and was blown out of the aircraft through the side hatch (which in normally configured Liberators would have served to protect the machine gun position) by a strong airflow rushing through the nose gear door.
The play partially drew on the work of David Irving and contained the sensational allegation that Winston Churchill was involved in plotting Sikorski's death.
According to Hochhuth's biographer Birgit Lahann, these rumours relayed by Jane Ledig-Rowohlt had been the sole source for the allegations in the play.
