Is it true that the grandfather of Polish President Andrzej Duda was a fascist punisher?

In June 2022, Prosecutor General of Belarus Andrei Shved announced that his department was studying the biography of the grandfather of the Polish president, who allegedly distinguished himself with particular cruelty as part of the Ukrainian punitive battalion. We have checked whether this statement corresponds to the actual facts.

June 15, 2022 Belarusian state news agency "Belta" spoke about the speech of the country's Prosecutor General Andrei Shved at the plenary session of the international parliamentary conference “Historical Memory: The Great Victory Achieved by Unity.” The official, in particular, said: “We know the names of some living criminals, and they, using the protection of foreign states, are hiding on their territory. Despite this, we will seek to bring them to criminal responsibility. Currently, we have information about the locations of at least 400 such individuals. <...> Now we are actively documenting the activities of the grandfather of the Polish President Andrzej Duda, who was part of the Ukrainian punitive battalion and distinguished himself with particular cruelty, primarily in the Minsk and Vitebsk regions. And the thesis about the genetic connection of Nazi criminals and their descendants is confirmed by indisputable evidence and facts.”

This information was also disseminated "RIA Novosti", Sputnik, "Moskovsky Komsomolets", News.ru, TV channel "Tsargrad", Moreover, in Facebook Since May, a photograph of a certain Mikhail Ivanovich Duda, presented as the grandfather of the Polish president, has been actively spreading. It is reported that Mikhail studied sabotage and terrorism with Roman Shukhevych, was friends with Stepan Bandera and was awarded the Cross of Military Merit three times, the highest award of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

First, let's look at the personality of Mikhail (Mikhailo) Duda. Such a person really existed, and from him biographies on the website of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory you can find out that Mikhailo Ivanovich Duda (pseudonym Gromenko) was born in 1921 in the Lviv region, in 1937 he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and underwent sabotage training, and since 1943 he was a member of the UPA. Having gained considerable authority among his comrades, he died on July 7, 1950 during a landing on the territory of Ukraine, where he was supposed to collect the remnants of the defeated army units and take them abroad. In the book “Ukrainian Partisan War 1942–1960” TBCthat Duda committed suicide after being surrounded as a result of an unsuccessful parachute landing. Confirming his participation in the punitive battalion is a more difficult task, however, Duda’s already active role in the UPA speaks for itself, given the tragic history of this organization’s activities against the Poles in the 1940s and, in particular, Volyn massacre. Thus, the replicated certificate about Mikhailo Duda does not greatly contradict the real facts, even the photograph with it is real.

Andrzej Duda was elected President of Poland in May 2015, but a few months before that, rumors about his nationalist grandfather spread across the World Wide Web. It all started with Polish sites and social networks, and soon on Western Ukrainian resources it became possible to read about the biography and “military merits” of the grandfather of the 16th President of Poland. Of course, in the first case, the context of the news was negative (the information could have been planted by Duda’s political opponents), but in the second, it was presented as a reason to be proud of a heroic compatriot. Nevertheless, back in February 2015, commenting on one of the tweets on this topic, Andrzej Duda wrote: “Total crap. My grandfather Aloysius Duda lived in Stary Sacz, was a furrier and died on July 1, 1992.”

Can this be considered a full-fledged refutation? Not really, because a person usually has two grandfathers, and relying only on the words of a politician during an election campaign is not a good idea. The answer regarding the second grandfather can be obtained from the official biographies Duda. Firstly, it is extremely rare for both of a person’s grandfathers to have the same last name. According to the biography, Andrzej Duda’s maternal grandfather was a certain Nikodim Milewski, a participant in the Soviet-Polish war. The president’s great-uncle Viktor and his uncle Lech were Polish partisans, that is, they fought against the Nazis. Lech took part in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. In general, the history of Duda’s ancestors on both the paternal and maternal lines is almost inextricably linked with Poland and has no relation to the current territory of Ukraine. Moreover, in the Polish press one can find photos young Andrzej Duda along with his elderly grandfather - obviously, he could not be a rebel who died 22 years before the birth of the future president. On top of that, in the same book “Ukrainian Partisan War 1942–1960” with reference to one of the main experts on the history of the OUN and UPA, Yuri Kirichuk reportedthat Mihailo Duda was impotent and could not have children. Note that the surname Duda is quite popular both in Poland and Ukraine.

Thus, all available sources indicate that Mihailo Duda was not the grandfather of Polish President Andrzej Duda. Despite this, after the start of hostilities on the territory of Ukraine, the fake experienced a rebirth and was once again refuted fact checkers of the Polish publication Demagog. They noticed that this is the second myth about the origin of Duda. First declared him a Jew named Aaron Feigenbaum, which was also an obvious attack on the rating of a politician in whose homeland it was traditional high level anti-Semitic sentiments. We can put Andrzej Duda on a par with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his fictional SS grandfather.

Cover image: RUSINT telegram channel

Fake

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