The Polish Combatants' Association (pl. Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantów w Stanach Zjednoczonych, SPK), organized in 1952, formally founded a year later, and terminated in 2012, was a Polish-American association for veterans of the Polish Armed Forces in the West during World War II. It was a member of the World Federation of Polish Combatants Association, an umbrella organization that included similar associations from other countries. The Association's President Janusz Krzyżanowski currently serves as the chairman of its liquidation committee, working to create a scholarly source of information about the SPK. History and activity The Association was created during a November 1952 convention, but scattered groups of Polish combatants in the United States existed prior to the date. Most of the future members of the SPK arrived in the U.S. after the U.S. Congress passed a 1948 law, amended in 1950, which allowed the immigration of Polish soldiers who were demobilized in Great Britain. The bulk of the SPK members were combatants of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, which formed from the so-called "soldiers' emigration" following the September Campaign of 1939. The SPK, however, did not refer to its members as "immigrants." Some had left Poland to fight alongside the French and then, after the fall of France, the British. Others were arrested by the NKVD, miraculously avoided being murdered in the Katyn Massacre and were drafted into the Anders Army created on Soviet soil. Others still came from the First Polish Mechanized Division fighting in Germany, Nazi concentration camps and the Home Army. According to some estimates, the Polish Armed Forces in the West counted quarter of a million troops and were the third largest Allied contingent in West by the end of the war, after those of the U.S. and the U.K. Most of the Polish combatants from the eastern borderlands of Poland, lost to the Soviet Union in 1945, decided to not return home after the hostilities had ended. Many were also wary of the communist regime installed in Warsaw after the treaty of Yalta and its persecution of Home Army soldiers. They decided to stay in the West and continue the fight for free Poland if only by their presence and words. One of the accomplishments of the SPK was influencing the American Congress to pass the Polish Veterans Rights Legislation, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1976, which gave Polish veterans the privilege