Kazimierz Odrobny

In the 1960s Kazimierz Odrobny still had a decisive influence on the personnel policy of the ZPU. Unfortunately, this weakened the organisation despite the number of people who enjoyed his confidence. In this respect, Odrobny had to face a serious crisis that erupted in the ZPU in 1967 and 1968 and which forced him to fight against the threatened collapse of the organization, following the departure of a group of functionaries around the chairman of the Second District, Dominik Marcol. Marcol and his followers turned against the board of the ZPU, especially against the policy of the association's chairman. Odrobny was faced with a dilemma that highlighted his worries about the future of the association. He had to decide either to tolerate the breakaway and the subsequent decline of the ZPU, or to maintain the organisational structures subsidised by the Bonn government and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In the end Odrobny won this fight for the status quo of the association: but he was to pay a very high price for it, since the state of North Rhine-Westphalia withdrew its donations to the Polish school system supported by the organisation. In the years that followed, Kazimierz Odrobny was no longer able to restore the association's strength, despite his efforts to do so. Although he retained his authority in front of officials and members of the association, the split caused by Dominik Marcol's faction weakened his credibility in government circles in Bonn. Nonetheless, the crisis of the association did not diminish his ambitions and he continued to deal with war reparations for former concentration camp prisoners in Germany. Here, together with the lawyer Mieczysław Chmielewski, he succeeded in securing a decision to set up a large and a small compensation fund with the High Commissioner for Refugees. In this context, he also encouraged former inmates living in Poland to submit applications. In all this, he was not opposed to contacts with the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR), the Polish United Workers' Party.

As the ZPU chairman, Kazimierz Odrobny was well aware that it could not function after the crisis without financial support for its work. In order to survive this difficult period, in the early 1970s he initiated a conference with the participation of the Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantów (Association of Polish Combatants), the ZPU and Związek Polaków w Niemczech “Rodło” (Association of Poles in Germany). Despite this trilateral cooperation, however, the Alliance failed to produce quantifiable results. To this end, ZPU officials pointed out the organizational shortcomings to their chairman. However, despite some support from the secretariat in Velbert, he was not personally in a position to fulfil all the tasks of the board. As a result some tasks were pushed to one side and others not even tackled. This led to growing backlogs that he could no longer cope with at the end of the 1970s. Against this background, since the end of the 1960s he had no longer convened any regular meetings of the Council at which assocation delegates might have been able to elect a new leadership. The official reason for this was the lack of funds to finance the meetings. In order to rescue the situation and continue the work of the board, Kazimierz Odrobny himself paid out a lot of money to publish the ZPU bulletin that was read in Polish refugee circles.

The 1970s presented new challenges, including the generational change of his closest employees. People like Czesław Brunner, Leopold Sanicki, Dr. Tadeusz Zgaiński, Dr. Henryk Bogdański, Jan Feldt and many other active members of the SN and ZPU who had previously supported Kazimierz Odrobny's policies resigned, while there were no candidates for succession to the vacant positions. In this situation the Chairman sought to maintain control of the organization by appointing younger members of the assocation and thier followers who shared his views. But despite his informal staff policy, he was unable to prevent members from travelling to the People's Republic of Poland. Throughout his presidency, he personally felt that political refugees from Poland should not travel to the country from which they had fled or to which they did not want to return. This rigid view may have been due to his own convictions, since he did not travel to Poland at all after the end of the war. Even when, during a visit to Velbert, one of his brothers tried to persuade him to return, he stayed true to his original decision. He certainly considered the option of returning to Poland, although he was doubtlessly influenced by the rumours in West Germany of kidnappings of people returning to the People's Republic of Poland. Irrespective of this he was always happy to welcome his family and friends who wanted to visit him. Until his death he maintained very close contact with Izabela Zięba, the sister of Zofia Odrobna, with whom he had corresponded since the early 1980s.