“Virtual Museum of the 1st Armored Division” is the second stage of the multi-year educational project “Virtual Museum of the Polish Armed Forces in the West”, initiated in 2021 on the initiative of the World Polonia Council (Rada Polonii Świata) and Mrs. Teresa Berezowska from Canada, implemented in partnership with the Polska360 Foundation from Warsaw, which since year 2015 has been implementing a number of projects documenting the fate of soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces. In the first stage (2021-2022), the “Virtual Museum of the 2nd Corps” (www.2korpus.org) was implemented with the help of Poles from Poland and around the world. Currently, we present to you the history of the soldiers of the 1st Armored Division of General Stanisław Maczek, which fought alongside the Allies in 1944-1945 in Western Europe, liberating Normandy, Belgium and the Netherlands and ending the battle trail in Germany.
Our goal is to present, in particular, the post-war fate of the soldiers of the 1st Polish Armored Division (as we did in the case of the 2nd Corps). Their emigration fate and the difficult fate of those who returned to communist Poland deserve to be widely known.
We encourage you to learn about:
– the wartime fate of the 1st Armored Division of General Maczek
– the post-war fate of its soldiers in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland
– biographies of individual veterans distinguished in social and veteran activities
The project partner is Orliński Polish-Canadian Veterans Museum (Orliński Museum), Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
We also cordially invite other Polish museums and organizations, as well as families of veterans of the 1st Armored Division and people with information about them, to join our project. Let us recall together their fate and post-war activities in every corner of the world, wherever the veterans of the 1st Armored Division found themselves. Let’s get to know and spread their fate together. In 2024, it will be the 80th anniversary of the great victories of General Maczek’s 1st Armored Division in the liberation of Europe.
We invite you to view our Virtual Museum.