JULY 12 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

JULY 12

1704

Stanislaw Leszcynski was King of part of Poland:  When Augustus died in 1733, Stanisław sought to regain the Polish throne with the help of French support for his candidacy. After traveling to Warsaw in disguise, he was elected King of Poland by an overwhelming majority of the Diet. However, before his coronation, Russia and Austria, fearing Stanisław would unite Poland in the Swedish-French alliance, invaded the country to annul his election. Stanisław was once more deposed, and, under Russian pressure, a small minority in the Diet elected the Saxon elector Frederick Augustus II to the Polish throne as Augustus III. Stanisław retreated to the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) to wait for French assistance, which did not come. Fleeing before the city fell to its Russian besiegers, he then journeyed to Königsberg in Prussia, where he directed guerrilla warfare against the new king and his Russian supporters. The Peace of Vienna in 1738 recognized Augustus III as king of Poland but allowed Stanisław to keep his royal titles while granting him the provinces of Lorraine and Bar for life.

1945

The British Army honored the Soviet military in a ceremony under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Acting as a representative of King George VI, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery awarded Georgy Zhukov with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. Konstantin Rokossovsky was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath while Vasily Sokolovsky and Mikhail Malinin were made Knight Commanders of the Order of the British Empire.

1993

Polish Spy Michael Goleniewski died on July 12, 1993 having spent the last years of his life in Queens, New York. Goleniewski was an officer at the notorious Ministry of Public Security in the People's Republic of Poland as well as the head of military counterintelligence GZI WP, later head of the technical and scientific section of the Polish intelligence.  In 1959, Goleniewski became a triple-agent, giving Polish and Soviet secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency. His intel resulted in the exposure of George Blake and Harry Houghton.  Goleniewski defected to the United States in 1961.  (Note: Blake was also a former British spy who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union. He became a Communist and decided to work for the KGB while a prisoner during the Korean War. Discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the USSR.  Note:  Houghton was a spy for the People's Republic of Poland and the USSR during the Cold War. He was a member of the Portland Spy Ring. He and his accomplice Gee were discovered and on March 22, 1961 they were both sentenced to fifteen years in prison.