Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City

There were always at least 50,000 SS and police on hand to control the despised inhabitants, and as a result nowhere was safe. Local officials in tiny villages and towns could be targeted, or held hostage to be killed later, if a German was attacked. Life in Warsaw became particularly dangerous after September 1943, when Governor Hans Frank decided to hold random round-ups and public executions on the streets. His sole aim was to increase the terror in the hope of intimidating the ‘bandits’ of the Home Army.

When one walks the streets of Warsaw today, particularly the lovely area around Nowy Świat, with its charming buildings and luxury shops, one comes across grey concrete plaques every few hundred metres or so. Each commemorates thirty or forty people killed by the Germans. In photographs of these random round-ups one can see groups of well-dressed men and women, on their way home from work or off to see friends, cordoned off from the rest of the crowd. They would be put up against a nearby wall, and shot. At first the victims were simply executed, but as the Poles had the annoying habit of yelling patriotic phrases as they died, the Germans took to sealing their mouths with plaster of Paris, or pushing narcotic-soaked rags down their throats to keep them quiet.

As the war dragged on and clothing became more scarce, the condemned were forced to strip before they were killed; their bodies were then burned in the ghetto ruins. After evening curfew the names of those who had died were read out over the tinny loudspeakers that hung from posts throughout the city; people listened from their homes, dreading to hear the name of a friend or a loved one.

The Italian journalist Alceo Valcini, who lived in Warsaw for most of the war, remembered round-ups as late as July 1944. ‘I met an old lady on a street who said, “Go away quickly! Round-ups!” With a beating heart and with my Polish friends I found shelter in the nearest gate. We walked upstairs and strangers opened doors, offering us hospitality for a few hours. Another time after one hour of waiting the concierge came and said that the Germans had gone. I was very touched by the solidarity.’

In total the Germans rounded up and killed 40,000 ethnic Poles in Warsaw in this way between June 1941 and September 1944. Erich von dem Bach admitted at Nuremberg that any officer with the rank of captain or higher had the authority to kill fifty to a hundred Poles for every German killed without referring the matter to a higher authority.

The ethnic Poles and the Jews of Warsaw were targeted by the Germans in different ways and at different times, but it gives the Nazis a kind of victory to describe the deaths of the two groups as if they were entirely removed from one another. The murder of the Jews was unique in its extent and barbarism, but the whole of Warsaw was terrorized and destroyed, and its people murdered, throughout the war, albeit to different degrees. Five hundred years of Jewish culture were simply erased from the city centre in an enormous ‘Grossaktion’ that is hard to fathom in its sheer scale. The total death toll in Warsaw, including Jews and non-Jewish Poles, amounted to 685,000 human beings. In 1939 Warsaw had had the second-largest Jewish population in the world after New York. Only 11,500 of them survived the war. What was done in the Polish capital was, as the historian Gunnar Paulsson has put it, ‘the greatest slaughter of a single city in history’. For Warsaw, the deaths of so many of its citizens was a tragedy from which it will never truly recover; the end of so much life and the elimination of an entire culture completely and forever changed the character of the metropolis on the Vistula.

It was precisely this rule of terror that instilled such deep longing for freedom in Warsaw, which is why, in the summer of 1944, the atmosphere in the city changed so radically. The citizens could hear the echo of Soviet guns in the distant suburbs of Wawer, Otwock and Zielonka. They knew that a German officer had very nearly succeeded in killing Hitler on 20 July; they knew about the Normandy landings, and were excitedly following the progress of the Allied troops in France via illegal radio broadcasts and underground newspapers. And above all, everywhere they could see the physical evidence of a defeated German army for themselves.

The German Retreat

The amazing success of Bagration had an enormous impact on Warsaw, not least because it turned the city into a mêlée of retreating German soldiers racing westward in their attempt to escape the hammer blows of the Red Army. Alceo Valcini watched from his tiny room in the Venice Hotel as groups of fleeing Germans made their way across Poniatowski Bridge and Jerusalem Avenue, and down Senatorska and Chłodna Streets. ‘They weren’t soldiers any more. They were remains of human beings, tired, frightened, passive, in a state of visible physical and moral depression. They were sweating, starving, covered in mud from head to foot, sitting on equipment pulled by horses or battered cars or peasant wagons with cows and dogs alongside. They had long beards and gazed with dimmed eyes … a shapeless mass of beaten soldiers.’

These were the stragglers who had escaped the encirclements and massacres in Byelorussia, and were desperately trying to get across the Vistula before the Soviets attacked again. These Rückkämpfer, the survivors of Minsk and Grodno and Vitebsk, limped through Warsaw in their ragged grey-green uniforms and cracked boots, their faces unshaven and their steps faltering. Gas masks and mess tins swung from leather belts, dented camouflage helmets shielded gaunt faces. A lucky few still had grenades in their belts, or submachine guns or anti-tank rockets over their shoulders, but some were barefoot, with no equipment at all, and a great many were covered in bloody bandages. It was like a medieval horde.

Confusion and collapse of discipline and order became the rule. ‘We didn’t attend to our dead. We didn’t bury them either,’ one soldier recalled of the flight. Sometimes the soldiers encountered officers fresh from Germany who clearly had no idea of the magnitude of the defeat. One infantrymanwho had walked for three days without rest was hauled up at a crossroads by a prim Oberst who yelled at him for his ‘disgraceful’ appearance. When the soldier tried to explain what had happened to his regiment, the officer made him use a piece of grass to point at the map so he did not touch it with his filthy hands. ‘I found myself resisting the urge to toss the table and the map at him.’ Gallows humour abounded among the completely demoralized soldiers: ‘We are, with every step, capturing ground to the west,’ they joked. They made fun of Hitler, too, referring to him as ‘Grofaz’, an abbreviation of the title ‘Grösster Feldherr Aller Zeiten’ – the greatest commander in history – that Keitel had invented for the Führer in all seriousness after the collapse of France.

Even those at the top began to doubt whether the Führer really could win the war – Rochus Misch, Hitler’s bodyguard, said that he ‘no longer believed in a final victory’.

Misch did not, of course, voice his doubts, but by now the men of Army Group Centre were daring to say the unthinkable out loud. Drunken German soldiers could be seen staggering arm in arm down Marszałkowska Street in the heart of Warsaw: ‘They paid no attention to discipline and were shouting at the tops of their voices: “I am sick of this war!” Officers who saw them turned pale, but looked away.’

For their part, Warsawians were both shocked and elated by the sight of the bedraggled army. Could this really be the mighty Wehrmacht that had defeated them so easily in 1939? Poles quietly lined up along Jerusalem Avenue and Wolska Street to watch them file past. A few girls waved handkerchiefs and called out in mock sadness, ‘Goodbye, goodbye, we will never see you again!’ The gesture would have been unthinkable a month before. Given the sheer numbers plodding through the city, the retreat of the German soldiers was quite calm. The exodus of German civilians, however, was another matter.

There is little that compares with the corruption and the utterly venal attitude of the German colonizers in the east, and Warsaw was no exception. These men and women, often of low standing at home, took postings to far-off capitals where suddenly they found they could ‘be somebody’. They were detested by those forced into subservience; this was particularly true of Warsaw, which before the war had a very large Jewish and non-Jewish professional class, a thriving university, a sophisticated cultural life and tens of thousands of highly educated men and women who looked on their new German ‘superiors’ with nothing but contempt.

Having murdered most of Warsaw’s Jewish population the Germans had, by default, become the second-largest ethnic group in the city, with more than 16,000 Reichsdeutsche (‘pure’ Germans) and around 14,700 Volksdeutsche and Stammdeutsche (ethnic Germans). This did not include the hated SS and police units stationed there.

These German civilians were part of the advance party of Generalplan Ost, the new elite that was to create the foundation for the thoroughly Germanized city that was to rise from the ashes of the old Warsaw. Far from the prying eyes of Berlin and away from their own upright Nazi peers they quickly became drunk on privilege and absolute power, lording it over the citizens of Warsaw at every opportunity. Apartments and houses were seized at will, and entire German quarters created of this stolen property. Furniture, paintings, jewellery and other belongings were taken; unlike for the infantry, this was not considered looting. Trams, restaurants and parks were given signs reading ‘Nur für Deutsche’(Germans only), ‘Kein Zutritt für Polen’ (No entry for Poles) or ‘Spielplatz nur für Deutsche Kinder’ (Playground for German children only). The Germans ran everything that mattered, from government organizations to cultural institutions, from banks to businesses requisitioned from Poles, which were used for the German war effort – Warsaw was an important centre of manufacturing, from armaments and heavy industry to chemicals and electrical technology to foodstuffs. The Germans had enjoyed their status enormously. But suddenly, thanks to Bagration, it was all in imminent danger of collapse.

The German civilian authority managed to maintain order until early July, in part by restricting information about the actual situation at the front, but when news came that army support units on the eastern side of the Vistula were starting to withdraw, the cry of ‘full retreat’ went up. The sound of Soviet artillery was drawing closer, and the Germans in Warsaw, knowing full well what had happened to their counterparts trapped in Minsk and Vitebsk, simply panicked. Everybody wanted to get out.

The streets were soon impassable. Cars and wagons, filled to bursting with all manner of goods, clogged the German district. Factories were hurriedly dismantled to be sent to the Reich, and institutions were prepared for evacuation. Heavy transport cars were loaded with the archives of the German Red Cross, the Police Presidium and the SS.

Relocation companies were overwhelmed by the number of German apartments they were expected to empty. Trunks, packing cases and other huge boxes of loot were loaded onto wagons and sent to Poznań, Łódź, Vienna and Dresden, where it was thought the risk of bombardment was less. German officers appealed for calm, but civil servants acted as if ‘they were all about to have heart attacks’.

Stanisław Aronson, by now working for the AK, noted that these Germans ‘bore little resemblance to the master race’. Furthermore, the inhabitants of Warsaw ‘were convinced that the German occupation was over’.

‘No one would have been surprised if the next day he heard that Hitler had committed suicide and Russia, England and America had accepted German capitulation.’

The panic reached fever pitch when the Nazi-appointed Governor Ludwig Fischer and Mayor Ludwig Leist abandoned Warsaw on 23 July.

Stanisław Ruskowski, a Polish engineer who worked at the water board, was amazed when his boss, Director Elhart Ellenbach, and his colleague Engineer Jung announced that they were going to try to escape through their own lines to get home to Germany; they even ordered that he kill and prepare three pigs for the journey. Larysa Zajączkowska, an AK operative who worked undercover at a German office, noted: ‘Documents had been taken out, destroyed or burned so there literally was nothing to work on. I was running from one office to another with mail as there were no Germans left to move it.’ In one embarrassing incident, Goebbels’ entire propaganda department secretly abandoned Warsaw, with the result that when the uprising broke out, the minister had no informers, and was forced to rely on short army reports until he could locate his errant employees and order them back to the city. One Gestapo chief who had delayed his departure to make sure his stolen goods were safely on their way to Germany was killed by the AK just as he was about to leave.

There were small acts of mercy, too, as when the German President of the Warsaw court ordered the release from Mokotów prison of more than one hundred German and four hundred Polish short-term prisoners before packing up to leave.

Cars waited with engines running as the remaining Germans said goodbye, giving huge tips to their concierges as they left for the last time. ‘I met some at Piusa Street,’ remembered Stefan Chaskielewicz, ‘going down the stairs with suitcases, fur coats, anything they could carry, telling me, “We have no time to lose, tomorrow in the morning the Bolsheviks will be in Warsaw.” They left their apartments filled with furniture, pictures, carpets – sometimes they even left the doors open.’ Dr Jerzy Dreyza, who worked at the Maltese hospital, watched as SS guards forced thirty Jews in striped camp uniforms to empty the basement of the house next door, which had been used as a store room. ‘Lorry after lorry was filled with food and vodka and wine’ for the journey west.

Eugeniusz Szermentowski remembered ‘lorries and carriages with heavy horses loaded up to the sky with cases, suitcases and furniture all going down Jerusalem Avenue and Wolska Street. The Germans are quiet, and not dragging Jews out of apartments any more.’

That evening the roads leading west were completely blocked by German cars. An evacuation train was supposed to be leaving for Łódź, but then information arrived that the Russians were already in Radzymin. New columns of lorries appeared at the railway stations and in front of the big institutions as Germans looked for other ways out.

The evacuation affected non-German foreigners, too. They were told that they would be allowed to evacuate only on Tuesday, 25 July. ‘The tiny corridor of the police office in Aleja Ujazdowskie was filled with people from all over Europe – Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, French workers, Belgians and especially White Russian émigrés trying to get papers before the Soviets arrived and arrested them. The German functionaries giving out passes were so tired they could hardly stand up.’

The railway stations were no better. Sister Tosia Hoffman saw ‘piles of luggage left at the mail stations by German Volksdeutsche, but the trains to Łódź and Kielce have already been cancelled’. Poles were now forbidden to board any train leaving Warsaw. ‘In some places Poles broke into now abandoned German warehouses, as on Długa Street where they stole clothes, or in Miodowa Street, where they took salt and flour. White powder lay all over the road.’ Sister Hoffman was given bolts of stolen red and white cloth from which to sew armbands for the AK for the coming uprising.

Soviet reconnaissance planes and bombers began to appear over the city, lighting up the evening sky with rockets. Warsawians watched these so-called ‘chandeliers’, and broke into song.

The sudden, chaotic departure of the Germans was a boon for the AK, as it allowed them to prepare for the uprising with little fear of harassment. Stanisław Jankowski, one of the SOE-trained ‘Cichociemni’ (‘silent and dark’) agents parachuted into Poland from England, was amazed at the sudden change in atmosphere in those hot July days. ‘The city was full of “Kałmucy” or “Hilfswillige” – Russians who had worked for the Germans. For them the war was over. They sat with open uniforms drinking beer, their shirts undone, their belts and guns sitting in the corner. They spoke a language we didn’t understand, but they knew enough to negotiate. We got their guns with five clips for 2,000 zloty.’ Jankowski even managed to buy weapons from the departing German police at Dworkowa Street, including machine guns with eight full magazines. ‘With the right password and some money you could get anything.’

An AK soldier who had been working for a company based in the Prudential building, Warsaw’s only ‘skyscraper’, managed to steal a car from the fleet, as there were no Germans left to stop him. Teams of boy scouts moved around Warsaw distributing leaflets and carrying out reconnaissance, making detailed notes about German patrols and the fortifications around important buildings. At Okopowa Street they hung a string of white eagles from the tram cables as a defiant symbol of Polish national identity. To their surprise, the German police did nothing.

By 26 July the atmosphere in Warsaw was one of intense anticipation and excitement. Dr Zbigniew Woźniewski put benches in the lower corridors of the Wolski hospital so that patients could sit in comfort during the anticipated Soviet attack. Warsawians watched as German Pioneers prepared the Vistula River bridges for demolition. People laughed openly at posters announcing registration for the German school year 1944–45, or advertising a concert to be given by the SS Orchestra on 1 August. By 29 July Soviet radio had begun to call on the Poles to rise up against the Germans, and Warsawians joked nervously: ‘Tomorrow we will have Russian guests here.’ Many bars and shops with fruit and cool drinks remained closed, despite the sweltering heat. Blinds were drawn. People waited.

The obvious German panic and the sound of the approaching Red Army had convinced most in the AK that the Third Reich was in imminent danger of collapse, and that it was just a matter of days before Warsaw would be taken by the Soviets. They were wrong. In the final week of July, just days it seemed before the Red Army would be in their midst, something suddenly changed.

It was, at first, barely perceptible. But for those willing to look it became clear that the Germans had stopped running away. The loot-filled cars and lorries returned, along with their German occupants. The Nazis started to resume their jobs as if they had never been away.

The army, too, ceased to panic. The bedraggled soldiers were replaced by well-fed men in new uniforms. These fresh troops were not running from the east; on the contrary, they came from the west, and were marching towards Russia. An order was issued to 9th Army that ‘All units which detrain in Warsaw will march eastwards in perfect military order through the city, and should preferably use the main streets. Their bearing should destroy all rumours among the local populace that we do not intend to defend the city.’

The Hermann Göring Division, likewise, arriving from Italy, was told to march smartly through the streets in an ‘impressive’ way before heading to the other side of the Vistula. Most Warsawians ignored these signs, although some were angry that the Germans seemed to be coming back. Eugeniusz Szermentowski complained that ‘Every day we expect a call for the uprising and nothing happens … a week ago the Germans were running away and now they come back full of superiority and arrogance.’

There was another discovery too. The AK operative Larysa Zajączkowska had deliberately befriended the German director of the transport company where she was working undercover. Her boss knew a great deal about all goods and troops being moved in and around Warsaw, and when the Germans were fleeing en masse he had told her how many lorries and trains were leaving every day. Now, he said, all that had changed: ‘They are planning to stop the Soviets to the north of the city. They have just concentrated two divisions there … One of these,’ he added in an excited tone, ‘is the Hermann Göring Division, which is secretly detraining in the forests on the outskirts of town.’ Larysa passed this information on to her AK contact as quickly as she could. It was imperative that the AK understand, she said. The Germans were no longer retreating. They were going to turn and fight the Russians at the gates of Warsaw.

Her information reached the AK leadership, but it was not taken seriously. The die had been cast, and the AK was about to call for an uprising at the worst possible moment. Most tragically of all, they had been warned.

4 (#ulink_db4c413c-0a2b-5c63-b468-21ca27d24b26)

RESISTANCE (#ulink_db4c413c-0a2b-5c63-b468-21ca27d24b26)

One of the senators asked the ambassadors why they did not condemn their officers at the beginning of the war instead of waiting till they were beaten. (Chapter XI)

The Creation of the Home Army

That there would be an uprising against the Germans was a foregone conclusion in wartime Poland. Resistance against the Nazi tyranny was visceral. The country, painstakingly recreated after the First World War, had been invaded in 1939 and unceremoniously carved up between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Warsaw had been mercilessly bombed, with 20 per cent of its buildings destroyed or badly damaged and over 25,000 people killed. After the city’s surrender the Soviets and the Nazis had rounded up thousands of innocent people and imprisoned or killed them, making the Poles simultaneously victims of two of the most vile dictatorships in history. There was no alternative but to fight back. The need, the desire, for action was to exact a heavy price, but it would have been unthinkable for most young Warsawians to have turned their back on the fight. The patriotism and the fervour to act led, rightly or wrongly, to the terrible events of August 1944.

The Armia Krajowa, or AK, was officially formed in February 1942, born of the shock of the German invasion and Blitzkrieg victory over Poland in 1939, and reinforced by the Soviet invasion that followed. Warsaw capitulated to Hitler on 27 September. On that tragic day seven Polish army officers gathered secretly in an apartment in the city and started the group (then called the SZP, or Polish Victory Service) that would become the AK. It was headed by General Michał Tokarzewski, with General Stefan Rowecki as second in command. The group contacted General Władysław Sikorski, commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces and Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, who was already in Paris, and were quickly established as the government-in-exile’s Polish-based military wing.

General Bór-Komorowski was preparing to escape to France too. ‘Looking over Kraków, I saw the swastika flying from the Wawel, for centuries the residence of Polish kings. The walls of the houses were covered with German notices and orders. A couple of phrases seemed to recur in all of them insistently; one was “strictly forbidden” and the other “penalty of death”.’ Just before he left, Bór met Tadeusz Surzycki, a respected member of the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe), one of Poland’s dozen pre-war political parties, who convinced him to stay in Poland. ‘One can hardly envisage the possibility of everyone going to France … We must fight in this country,’ he said. He asked Bór to help set up a military wing of the National Party, but Bór refused. ‘As a regular army officer, I recognised only one authority – my commander-in-chief General Sikorski, in Paris. I maintained that there should be only one military organization, common to all and independent of political opinion.’ Equipped with false papers that listed him as a dealer in wood for making coffins, Bór set about creating an underground army in south-west Poland. Even in those early, desperate days he felt that the entire nation stood behind him: ‘A country, completely overrun by two invaders and torn in half, had decided to fight. No dictator, no leader, no party and no class had inspired this decision. The nation had made it spontaneously and unanimously.’

General Tokarzewski went to the Soviet zone of occupation to determine whether or not resistance could be organized there, but he was arrested by the NKVD, and Rowecki (known as ‘Grot’) was placed in charge of the fledgling AK. Recruitment began immediately. The idea behind the underground army was that it should be all-inclusive. Every Pole who wanted to contribute would be included in the fight. The AK was to represent the entire nation.

The first members were largely army officers, but before long the net was cast far wider: doctors, workmen, engineers, teachers, farmers – in short, people from all walks of life joined the fight against the common enemy. Rowecki and Bór also recruited through pre-war political parties, so that, with the exception of fanatical right-wing nationalists and Communists, virtually all political points of view were represented, ‘every class and profession’.

The AK was unique in its broad appeal to virtually every Pole, irrespective of background. The entire country was to join the fight.