World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseMichal Vituska was born in the city of Nieswiez (Nesvizh) in the Byelorussian region of the Russian Empire. He studied in gymnasiums in Kletsk, Byelorussia and Vilnius, Poland (now capital of Lithuania, followed by university degrees from an university in Prague, Czechoslovakia and the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland. An anti-communist, he found himself a supporter of the German-sponsored puppet government of Byelorussian Central Rada, although secretly he was also involved with the nationalist Belarusian Independence Party that opposed both German and Russian occupation. In 1944, he became the leader of a 30-strong commando unit Czorny Kot ("Black Cat") that was trained by the Germans to fight the Soviets as guerrilla fighters; Vituska and the rest of the Czorny Kot were parachuted behind Soviet lines. In 1945, he was awarded the rank of general by the Belarusian National Republic, one of the governments-in-exile that that laid claim to Byelorussia, and he found himself coordinating various resistance groups well past the end of WW2. By the mid-1950s, most of the anti-Soviet resistance groups were destroyed, and Vituska fled to Western Europe. He successfully evaded Soviet agents who were dispatched to locate him, and saw the fall of the Soviet Union. He passed away in Munich, Germany in 2006.

Michal Vituska Timeline