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

Osmecki was shocked. When he asked why, Bór said simply: ‘Monter brought information that Soviet tanks made the breakthrough in the German bridgehead in Praga. He said if we don’t start immediately we will be late. Therefore I gave the order.’

Osmecki later found out what had happened. The meeting had started earlier than planned, with only Bór, Pełczyński, Okulicki and Major Karasiówna in attendance. The atmosphere was relaxed, and they discussed Mikołajczyk’s visit to Moscow. Then Monter appeared. He had ‘information that Soviet Panzer units had entered the German bridgehead and that Radość, Miłosna, Okuniew, Wołomin and Radzymin are in Russian hands’. Monter insisted on the immediate launch of the uprising, otherwise ‘it might be too late’. Bór, who had rejected the idea only hours before, suddenly changed his mind. ‘After a short discussion I came to the conclusion that it was the right moment to begin the fight. The Russian attack could be expected from one hour to the next,’ he said. Jankowski was summoned, and Bór demanded that the operations begin in Warsaw immediately. This would ‘transform the German defeat in Praga into a complete rout, make reinforcement of the German troops fighting on the eastern bank of the Vistula impossible, and in this way would speed up Soviet encircling movements which had started to the east, north-east and north of Warsaw’. Jankowski asked a few questions, and then said, ‘Very well, begin.’ Bór turned to Monter. ‘Tomorrow at 1700 hours precisely you will start Operation “Burza” in Warsaw.’

The problem was that Monter’s information had been wrong. The Soviets were not in Warsaw at all.

Osmecki approached Bór in the hallway. ‘General, you have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘Monter’s information is imprecise. I have the latest dispatches from my people on the ground. There is no doubt that the Praga bridgehead has not been broken. Conversely, they confirm everything I said in the morning. The Germans are preparing a counter-attack.’

In reality, the Germans had started the first counter-offensive of the summer, which stopped Bagration in its tracks. The Soviet offensive had finally been halted, at the very edge of Warsaw.

Bór collapsed on a chair, wiping his forehead. ‘Are you absolutely sure that Monter’s information is incorrect?’ he asked.

Osmecki told him that a few Russian tanks may have moved into Praga, but that the German bridgehead had not been broken.

Bór asked what he should do. Osmecki suggested he send a courier to Monter immediately to revoke the order.

‘Do we have to revoke it again? Revoke the order?’ Bór asked.

‘Yes. You have chosen the exact wrong moment. You have to revoke the order.’ Bór looked at his watch.

‘At that moment Szostak came in. He looked at both of us, Bór in his hat and coat and me standing. When he heard what had happened he was furious that neither he nor Osmecki had been consulted. “This is madness,” he said. “We will let ourselves all be massacred. You have to immediately revoke that order.”’

Bór said only, ‘Too late. We cannot do anything.’ He sat helplessly, exhausted, with a pitiful look on his bloodless face. ‘We cannot do anything more,’ he said for the third time, with what appeared a combination of relief and tiredness. Then he stood up and left.

A few moments later Pluta-Czachowski arrived, and ran into Bór on the stairs. ‘He knew immediately, and looked at us with silent questions and fears. I said: “It’s done, we cannot do anything. Let’s do all we can to reduce the losses. From this moment on every moment counts.” I went to the door and Pluta said in a matter-of-fact voice: “Apropos – the German counter-attack has just begun.”’

Most Poles who had been listening to the sounds of artillery approaching Warsaw believed that they meant certain and imminent Soviet victory over the Germans. But, for the first time since the launch of Bagration, the opposite was true. The Germans were fighting back. General Walter Model had just begun Army Group Centre’s only major counter-offensive of the summer of 1944. The Battle of Wołomin is virtually unknown in World War II history, but it was hugely significant, as it halted Bagration and ended the rout of the Germans in Byelorussia and Poland. It was the largest tank battle on Polish soil in the entire war, with 450 German Panther and Tiger tanks wading into over seven hundred Soviet T-34s. The Germans had air superiority, but still the region between Wołomin and Radzymin was caught in a seesaw of attacks and counter-thrusts; the villages in the area were reduced to rubble, and the Soviets lost over two hundred tanks. The battle also helped determine the fate of the Warsaw Uprising. The German counter-attack made it impossible for the Red Army to take Warsaw in the first days of August; later it would provide Stalin with an excuse not to help the beleaguered city when he could easily have done so. The battle was therefore a pivotal moment in the history of the Second World War.

It is often said the AK leadership’s lack of understanding of Stalin was their biggest mistake, but equally important was their ignorance of the German position at this crucial moment. Bór could not conceive that the Nazis would be able to turn around and fight back. He did not understand that the Germans on the Eastern Front were not going to lay down their arms with the Soviets rolling towards Berlin. In fact surrender was not an option for the average German soldier, and even those who now doubted Hitler fervently believed that the Red Army had to be stopped at any cost. Many German soldiers secretly believed that they would soon be joining forces with the Western Allies to wage war against the Russians.

But for now the feverish desire to protect Germany from the ravages of the Red Army would see the prolongation of the war in Europe for another nine bloody months.

The decision to start the uprising under such circumstances has long been a source of controversy, not least because of post-war politics. Even before the end of the war the Soviets began arresting, imprisoning and murdering thousands of members of the AK, and anyone else who might hinder Stalin’s plan to rule Poland. After the war, mention of the Warsaw Uprising and the AK was forbidden. Former AK members and combatants were arrested and killed, and the official line was that a group of irresponsible bandits had started an ‘adventure’ in Warsaw which had been brutally suppressed by the Nazis. Decades later, after the collapse of Communism, the pendulum would swing the other way, and the AK would be bathed in a heroic light in which these valiant fighters for freedom could do no wrong. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in between.

The Poles were in an impossible situation in August 1944, caught between two of the most brutal and murderous regimes in history. Despite having been stalwart supporters of the Western Allies since the beginning of the war, they were marginalized and treated as a nuisance for standing up for the very freedoms that the West claimed had inspired the fight against Hitler. They were excluded from the Tehran Conference, and had not been told that their country would become the de facto property of the Soviet Union after the war. Roosevelt would do nothing to endanger his ‘special relationship’ with Stalin, while Churchill was too weak to influence the outcome, despite his pangs of conscience about Britain’s loyal ally. And so this freedom-loving and independent nation was condemned by geography, by power and by politics to the mercy of Hitler and Stalin. The novelist Maria Dąbrowska watched, torn, as the Germans attacked the Red Army in August 1944: ‘It is like 1941 all over again – all are going eastward. The Germans have apparently moved ten divisions to the Warsaw front. It is tragic to have to say that we hear of this with some relief, as the thought of a Bolshevik invasion is our utter nightmare.’ It is precisely the hopelessness of the situation that makes the uprising so controversial. The heroism of the fighters and the civilians is not in doubt. But it is clear that many grave mistakes were made.

The greatest problem was that it was first and foremost a political and not a military operation. General Bór’s claim that he had to call for an uprising because Warsaw was in danger of becoming ‘a battlefield between Germans and Russians, and the city would be turned into rubble’ is not borne out by the evidence. Ever since Stalingrad, and indeed in all the battles for cities during the Bagration offensive, including Vitebsk, Orsha, Minsk, Kiev and Lwów, the Soviets did not attack the cities head on, but encircled them, trapping the Germans in giant ‘pockets’ and finishing them off later. There may have been heavy street fighting, as in Vitebsk, but for the most part the civilians and the infrastructure were spared. There is no reason to think that ‘Fortress Warsaw’ would have been any different, particularly as it was so weakly defended.

The AK also misunderstood the Soviet plan of attack, believing that the Russians would take the east-bank suburb of Praga and then launch a frontal assault across the bridges into Warsaw proper, but this had never been Stavka’s intention. Rather than worrying about when the Soviets would enter Praga and begin crossing the Vistula, the AK should have waited for the moment when the northern and southern Soviet pincers to the west of the city snapped shut, cutting off the Germans trapped within.

The AK, however, could not verify Stavka’s plans, because they had no contact with the Soviets. ‘We had to run the great risk of undertaking open action without any coordination with the Red Army command,’ Bór said.

Any links between the AK and the Soviets had ended in the murder or imprisonment of the Poles. It had become clear after Soviet treachery at Wilno, Lwów and Lublin that Stalin wanted nothing less than to annihilate the AK and to put his own puppet government in place. He would destroy anyone who stood in his way. It was a measure of the AK’s desperate plight that in July 1944 General Okulicki argued that if they did take over Warsaw before the Soviets entered the city, Stalin would have no choice but either to recognize AK authority in liberated Warsaw, or to liquidate the AK using military force. Okulicki’s view was that the Soviets might indeed murder the AK fighters, but that it would be impossible for Stalin to hide this crime from the international community. Such an act, he said, would shake the moral conscience of the world. What none of them seemed to realize was that, at the time, the world was just not interested. The Soviets had committed mass murder at Katyń, yet the Western Allies had deliberately perpetrated the lie that it had been a Nazi crime. The Nazis had murdered millions of Jews and others in the occupied territories, but despite the best efforts of Jan Karski, Szmul Zygelbojm and others to expose these crimes, and at the very least to bomb the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz, little was done. The response was always the same: the war must be won, and only then would Nazi crimes be stopped.