In Communist Poland after the war, Pilecki continued working for Polish military intelligence and collected evidence of Soviet atrocities. In May 1947, the Ministry of Public Security arrested and charged him with crimes including espionage, illegal border crossing, use of forged documents, and planned assassinations of ministry members. He pled guilty to all except the assassination plans and espionage, though he admitted to passing information to the Second Polish Corps; he considered himself an officer of the corps and claimed he wasn’t breaking any laws. He was tortured, and some reports claim he said that his time in Soviet custody was worse than his time at Auschwitz. Following a show trial, Pilecki was sentenced to execution and was shot in the back of the head in Mokotów Prison on May 8, 1948, at the age of forty-seven, leaving behind his wife and two children.

In September 1990, Witold Pilecki and others sentenced in the show trial were rehabilitated. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1995 and the Order of the White Eagle in 2006, the highest Polish decoration. On September 6, 2013, he was promoted to colonel by the Minister of National Defense.

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