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

In Poland the artificial vow of silence imposed on the uprising changed dramatically with the collapse of Communism in 1990. It was as if, having been forced to be silent for so long, a great geyser of memory was unleashed, and the history of the uprising became a focal point of Warsaw life. Statues, monuments and street names commemorating every battalion and leader of the AK sprang up like mushrooms; histories and memoirs abounded; the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising was opened on the sixtieth anniversary of the conflict; re-enactments of famous battles became commonplace on the streets; and there was even a board game to teach children as they played. It was right that the people of the battered city should finally be able to commemorate the history of this terrible period; the annual wreath-laying to the dead of Warsaw on 1 August, and the ensuing minute of silence, during which the whole city stops, is very moving. But the pendulum swung so far that many accounts of the uprising read like hagiographies, in which the AK and its soldiers could do no wrong, and the only things that failed in the uprising were the Western Allies and Stalin. Strangely, in all these accounts there is very little information about the suffering of Warsaw’s civilians, and even less about the activities of the occupying Germans. This book is an attempt to redress the balance.

It is not intended to be a complete history of the Warsaw Uprising. The fundamental questions which inform the whole are why, at the end of July 1944, when the Germans had virtually abandoned the city, did they suddenly decide to return to it; and why, when the uprising began, did they crush it with such viciousness? This is not a book about what ‘should’ have happened, or what ‘might’ have happened, or what Stalin or the Western Allies ‘could’ have done – it is a story of what actually did happen in the summer of 1944, in particular between the Germans and the Poles. My aim has been to synthesize many different elements of the uprising into a single narrative. I begin with a framework of military and political history in order to put the uprising in context, not only of the relationships between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, but also in relation to the war on the Eastern Front, including the Soviet summer offensive Operation ‘Bagration’, to Hitler’s racial war of extermination, and to the coming Cold War. It is impossible to avoid ‘top-down’ history when writing about an event so dom-inated by Hitler and Himmler. These men wielded such enormous power that any order they issued was followed unquestioningly by every level of the Nazi hierarchy; when the order went out in early August to destroy Warsaw and kill all its inhabitants, everyone from Guderian to von Vormann, Reinefarth and von dem Bach fell into line, despite the fact that the policy made no military sense. The behaviour, likewise, of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt is also crucial to understanding the uprising in a broader context.

But such conventional political and military history alone contains almost no information on the ordinary people whose lives were so affected by these men and their policies. The solution was to weave ‘grassroots’ history into the narrative, adding dozens of personal testimonies and accounts by combatants and civilians alike to show what it was actually like to live through this ordeal. The Nazis practised the deliberate dehumanization of their victims, referring to them as ‘pieces’ and burning their bodies on pyres on the streets of Warsaw to remove the evidence of their violent deaths. I have tried to pay homage to at least some of these people by attempting to bring their stories to life. Because I ask why Hitler and Himmler decided to crush the Polish capital with such irrational brutality, I have also concentrated on the ‘interface’ between Germans and Poles in Warsaw; as a result I looked for testimonies not just from the Poles themselves, but also from others who found themselves in Warsaw that summer, from foreign journalists to SS men guarding the prisoners of the ‘Cremation Commando’, and from Wehrmacht soldiers who longed to get out of the ‘second Stalingrad’ to the troops of the Soviet-led Berling’s Army, who crossed the Vistula only to die in their hundreds under German fire.

Traditionally, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and the Warsaw Uprising have been treated as two entirely separate events. This is understandable, as the liquidation of the ghetto and the murder of its inhabitants is a unique and terrible crime in history. Even so, the story of Warsaw’s Jewish population did not begin or entirely end with the destruction of the ghetto. It is often forgotten that many Jews were also killed in the bombing of 1939, and that many of those who survived the horrors of the ghetto would die in the 1944 uprising or its aftermath. Throughout, I have tried to trace the fate of some who did manage to survive – Władysław Szpilman and Stanisław Aronson amongst others – in an attempt to show the uniquely perilous existence they led in the wartorn city. I have also tried to show that the Jewish tragedy was also a tragedy for the city of Warsaw in its entirety, and also affected the uprising of 1944. As Gunnar Paulsson put it, ‘Ninety-eight per cent of the Jewish population of Warsaw perished in the Second World War, together with one-quarter of the Polish population: in all, some 720,000 souls … undoubtedly the greatest slaughter perpetrated within a single city in human history’.

My references to Carthage are a deliberate attempt to emphasize the epic scale of the tragedy of this city.

1 (#ulink_681c1c87-6413-55c9-8e20-96a5c994876c)

BYELORUSSIAN PRELUDE (#ulink_681c1c87-6413-55c9-8e20-96a5c994876c)

Scipio finding no sort of discipline or order in the army, which Piso had habituated to idleness, avarice, and rapine, and a multitude of hucksters mingled with them, who followed the camp for the sake of booty, and accompanied the bolder ones when they made expeditions for plunder without permission. (Chapter XVII)

The Bandit Wars

‘Before battle,’ the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote, ‘there is a period of great stillness – nowhere is there such a stillness as in war.’ In the spring of 1944 Germany waited, knowing that the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were both planning their summer offensives, but not knowing when or where they would come. The tension was palpable.

In Warsaw, too, people were waiting. Life under Nazi occupation, with the constant fear of an early-morning knock at the door by the Gestapo or the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst – the intelligence service), had led to the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Underground Army, becoming the largest of its kind in occupied Europe. Sheer Nazi brutality and racially motivated crimes – against the Polish Jews above all, but also the hated Slavs – had ruled out the kind of cooperation between occupier and occupied experienced by other peoples deemed ‘racially acceptable’ by the Germans. The AK had spent much of the war attacking and sabotaging the German war effort and planning for further action, and as the tide turned against the Germans after Stalingrad the number of assassinations of German officials on the streets of Warsaw rose steadily. One of the AK’s plans, the most ambitious of all, was code-named ‘Burza’, or Tempest. It called for an uprising to be held when the Red Army entered pre-war Polish territory. It was to be a military uprising, in that Polish soldiers would help the Soviets push the Nazi occupiers out of their country, but it was also to have a political element. By participating in the fight to liberate their own country, the insurgents hoped to establish the right to the restoration of a free independent state when the hostilities were over. The Poles watched and waited in the spring of 1944, ready to act as soon as the Red Army moved in.

Despite the impending downfall of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler was in a surprisingly buoyant mood that spring, not least because of the injections of glucose and, soon, cocaine administered by his trusted but utterly incompetent doctor, Theodor Morell. The Führer was increasingly losing touch with reality. When the Luftwaffe ace Günter Rall saw him in early 1944 he said, ‘This was a very different Hitler. He was no longer talking about tangible facts. He was talking about: “I see the deep valley. I see the strip on the horizon,” and it was all nonsense … It was clear to me that this man was a little out of his mind. He did not have a truly clear, serious concept of the situation.’

Hitler was enjoying cosy domestic life ‘at home’ in the Berghof in the Bavarian mountains, far from the desperate privations of the Eastern Front, and his gloomy Prussian headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) at Rastenburg, where the forced labourers of Organization Todt were pouring seven metres of concrete as a protective layer against Soviet bombs. Bunkers had been dug on ‘The Mountain’ too, and camouflage netting shrouded the buildings, but Hitler lived as if the war was no more than a distant, irrelevant skirmish. He spent mornings in bed, rising late for his vegetarian Bircher-Benner breakfast prepared in the cavernous kitchen by his dietician Constanze Manziarly. Then he would relax in the company of the Berghof ‘regulars’ – SS General Sepp Dietrich, Armaments Minister Albert Speer, the grossly obese Dr Morell, his close friend Walther Hewel, and his personal secretary, Martin Bormann. Other guests came and went, joining in the customary afternoon stroll to the ‘little tea house’ on the Mooslahner Kopf, where Hitler had his customary cocoa and apple pie. Eva Braun and the other ‘girls’, Margaret Speer, Anni Brandt and Eva’s sisters Ilse and Gretl, would lounge on the terrace, play in the bowling alley or watch the latest films in the projection room, commenting on fashion trends and the hairstyles of the stars.

As the clouds of the Allied invasion of Europe loomed, Hitler, perversely, seemed to grow more confident. On 3 June he threw a lavish party to celebrate the wedding of Eva Braun’s sister Gretl. The groom was Hermann Fegelein, who would play a key role in the Warsaw Uprising.

Fegelein was a suave playboy, a charmer and a mass murderer rolled into one. He had risen to power thanks to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who treated the witty and sleek young man almost like a son. It was Himmler who had plucked the young Hermann out of obscurity to make him Commander of the new SS Main Riding School in Munich, before promoting him through the ranks to become SS Gruppenführer with the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer, a unit which was particularly ruthless in the fight against partisans in the east under Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. When Fegelein was wounded on the Russian Front for the third time, Himmler brought his favourite home and appointed him Waffen SS Liaison Officer at Führer headquarters. This not only got Fegelein away from the front, but also gave Himmler even more access to and power over Hitler. It was an inspired choice.

Fegelein’s influence on the uprising came about in part because of his skill as a horseman. Before the war he had competed in a number of events on the international circuit, and had even created the equestrian facilities for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. One of his long-time competitors, and a man he admired, was a Polish cavalry officer named Count Tadeusz Komorowski, who trained the Polish eventing team which won a silver medal at the Olympics. What Fegelein did not know was that Brigadier-General Bór-Komorowski, as he was now known (‘Bór’ being his wartime code-name), had, a few months before the lavish wedding party, been appointed commander of the Polish Home Army based in Warsaw. Even as the SS cavalry officer was quaffing champagne and flirting with Eva Braun, General Bór was planning the uprising that would link the two men once again.

The day after the wedding, on 4 June 1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, on his way to his holiday home, talked to Hitler about the expected Allied invasion of France. Rommel agreed with Hitler that the Allies were most likely to strike at the Pas de Calais, and reminded him that the most important thing was that they must not be allowed to establish a bridgehead on the coast. Hitler was confident that any invasion in the heavily fortified and well-defended area could be easily repulsed. Which is why, when German sentries looked out over the grey waters of the English Channel two days later, they could hardly believe their eyes. The first of 1,200 warships were slowly coming towards them, but they were not heading to the Pas de Calais. They were on their way to Normandy.

Hitler, as was his custom, had taken a cocktail of sleeping pills the previous night, and did not wake up until midday. ‘The Führer always gets the latest news after he has had his breakfast,’ the duty adjutant snapped at an impatient Albert Speer. When he finally emerged, Hitler, still in his dressing gown, listened calmly as Rear Admiral Karl-Jesco von Puttkamer told him that a number of major landings had taken place between Cherbourg and Le Havre; more were expected. Hitler sent for the head of the armed forces, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and his deputy Colonel General Alfred Jodl, but all three agreed that this was a diversion, and nothing more than an Allied trick. Hitler opted to do nothing.

Colonel Hans von Luck, head of Kampfgruppe von Luck, was in the thick of the fighting on the coast, and desperately trying to inform his superiors that he was witnessing an invasion on an unimaginable scale. ‘We were dismayed and angry that we had not been believed by the highest authority. And even by evening the Panzer divisions and reserve units stationed in the Pas de Calais were not to be withdrawn, on express orders from Hitler.’ At 4.55 p.m. Hitler revealed his complete lack of understanding of the situation by giving the extraordinary order that the Allies’ bridgehead was ‘to be annihilated by the evening’. Perversely, he seemed almost relieved by the invasion: ‘When they were in Britain we could not get at them. Now we have them where we can destroy them.’ Later, Keitel admitted his mistake: ‘If we had fully believed our radio intelligence interception we would not only have had the date of the invasion, we would even have had the exact time.’ When Hitler and his generals finally realized their error it was, as von Luck put it, ‘too late, much too late!’

A furious Rommel met Hitler on 17 June in the gigantic concrete bunker near Soissons, in northern France, that had been designated the Führer’s western HQ. By now over 600,000 Allied troops had landed in Normandy. Rommel was critical of Hitler’s tactics, complaining, ‘The battle is hopeless!’ ‘Just take care of your invasion front,’ Hitler snarled in reply. ‘I shall take care of the future of the war.’ Thereafter, Rommel began to criticize Hitler openly, and lent his support to the 20 July plotters who were planning to assassinate the Führer. When Hitler discovered his treachery, Rommel, who was idolized by the German people, was given the opportunity to commit suicide rather than face a public show trial that would have resulted not only in his own death but also in the persecution of his family. Rommel chose suicide. Keitel revealed the truth about Rommel’s supposed ‘heart attack’ only after the war.

The Normandy landings shocked the Germans, but the news was received with jubilation in occupied Europe. Warsaw was abuzz with rumour and speculation. The success of the western attack meant, quite simply, that the war was coming to an end. The landings also came as a great relief to Stalin. Germany was now forced to fight on two fronts, and would have to divert resources away from the east. But, as ever, Stalin’s reasons were not purely military. The pathologically suspicious dictator had feared that, despite Roosevelt and Churchill’s assurances at the Tehran Conference in November 1943, they might actually invade Europe through the Balkans rather than France. Now he could remain true to the promise he had made to the British and American leaders: ‘The summer offensive of the Soviet troops to be launched in keeping with the agreement reached at the Tehran Conference will begin in mid-June in one of the vital sectors of the Front,’ he wrote. Stalin was careful not to mention exactly where the attack would take place, but he had already chosen his target. The Red Army was going to attack the German Army Group Centre, in Byelorussia.

Practising Murder

When Oskar Dirlewanger, the leader of one of the most notorious SS units in the war, was asked why he was behaving in such a brutal fashion in Warsaw in August 1944, he laughed. ‘This is nothing,’ he said proudly. ‘You should have seen what we did in Byelorussia!’

He was right: the people of Byelorussia endured one of the most cruel and murderous occupations of the Second World War. The number of victims, particularly helpless civilians, is staggering. Nine million people lived in Soviet Byelorussia when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, and two million of them, at the very least, were killed – by shooting, gassing, hanging, burning, drowning. A further two million were deported to the Reich as forced labour. Although there were exceptions, most were treated little better than livestock. On 21 August 1942 Hitler told the Nazi racial theorist Achim Gercke: ‘[Fritz] Sauckel [head of the deployment of forced and slave labour] told me a very curious fact. All the girls whom we bring back from the eastern territories are medically examined, and 25 per cent of them are found to be virgins.’

The Germans killed civilians in 5,295 different locations in Soviet Byelorussia, with many villages being burned to the ground. The victims included around 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews and 320,000 ‘partisans’ or ‘bandits’, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians. The Germans deliberately mixed these groups together, killing Jews under the guise of the ‘anti-bandit’ war, or murdering peasants accused of ‘helping Jews and partisans’. One German commander admitted that ‘the bandits and Jews burned in houses and bunkers were not counted’. The victims were slaughtered with pitiless cruelty, and those not murdered outright often died as the result of cold, disease or starvation brought about by the German scorched-earth policy and the creation of ‘dead zones’, in which all living things, including people, were to be destroyed on sight.

The men who directed and oversaw the mass murder in Byelorussia included Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronisław Kaminski. Although they subsequently became best-known for their roles in the Warsaw Uprising, they learned their skills long before the summer of 1944. Indeed, in order to understand what happened in Warsaw one has first to look at the history of the killing fields of Byelorussia. It was precisely because Operation ‘Bagration’, the Soviet invasion of Byelorussia, was so rapid and successful in the summer of 1944 that so many of these hardened murderers were uprooted and suddenly available when Hitler and Himmler decided to put down the ‘Schweinerei’ in the Polish capital. In that sense the Warsaw Uprising became an extension of the policies that had been carried out in Byelorussia between 1941 and the summer of 1944. The personnel and the methods were the same; only the location had changed.

The sheer idiocy of German racial policy from a purely strategic point of view was never more clear than in Byelorussia and Ukraine. When they first arrived in the summer of 1941, the Germans were seen as liberators. Local people lined the dusty village tracks offering them bread and salt and boiled eggs, and winding flowers around the barrels of the advancing tanks. ‘Women often came out of their houses with an icon held before their breast, crying, “We are still Christians. Free us from Stalin who has destroyed our churches.”’ The inhabitants were relieved to be rid of Stalin, of the NKVD, of engineered famine and forced collectivization. Life under the Germans simply had to be better. Hans Fritzsche, who worked in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, was able to drive through villages near Kiev and Kharkov in German military uniform, ‘alone, unguarded … I slept peacefully in farmhouses and was fed by the population … Yet three-fourths of a year later, that whole country through which I had travelled was full of partisans – villages were burned, people shot, hostages taken, and general terror ensued.’

Ukrainian Archbishop Count Andrij Scheptycky wrote to Pope Pius XII on 29 August 1942: ‘When the German army first appeared to liberate us from the Bolshevik yoke, we experienced at first a feeling of some relief. But that lasted no more than one or two months. Step by step, the Germans introduced their regime of terrible cruelty and corruption … It simply appears that a band of madmen, or of rabid dogs, have descended upon the poor population.’

It is a testament to the brutality and barbarity of the Nazis’ policy that they were able to turn entire populations against them in such a short time. But this racial element could not be tempered; it was the very basis of the Nazi ideology.

Hitler was obsessed by the idea of ‘Lebensraum’, and the need to conquer huge territories in the east for the resettlement of the German people. In ‘Generalplan Ost’ Himmler described how the conquered lands were to be ‘Germanized’. The local inhabitants were to be either killed, transported to western Siberia, or kept as slaves. The Jewish population was to be completely annihilated – or, in Nazi terminology, given ‘special treatment’ – and the Slavic population was, according to von dem Bach at the Nuremberg Trials, to be reduced by around thirty million human beings. The conquered land was to be settled by Germans in new, romantic, medieval-style villages and towns, with officials set up in local palaces and ex-soldiers and deserving families given their own farmsteads in which to live out the pastoral idyll of Nazi mythology. There was no room for human empathy or compassion towards the victims of this massive undertaking.

Both Hitler and Himmler believed that cruelty and domination was a better way to control the east than any kind of benign rule: collective punishment and mass murder would intimidate the local populations, and the instilling of terror would make the conquered people malleable and submissive.

In a secret speech of 30 March 1941, recorded in his diary by Army Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder, Hitler told his officers to forget old notions of honour and decency in the east. ‘The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion,’ he said. ‘This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness.’ In the terrible ‘Commissar Order’ of 6 June 1941, Hitler stated that Jews, Soviet officials and Red Army political commissars were to be executed on sight. Enemy civilians would not be protected by law, guerrillas were to be ‘relentlessly liquidated’, and all attacks by ‘enemy civilians’ were to be suppressed at once by the military ‘using the most extreme methods’. The Barbarossa Decree outlined by Hitler during a meeting with military officials on 30 March 1941, and officially issued by Field Marshal Keitel, had called for a war of extermination of the political and intellectual elites of Russia. All normal codes of war were to be forgotten when it came to the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe. German officers were entitled to order the execution without trial or any formalities of any person suspected of ‘having a hostile attitude’ towards the Germans, ‘collective responsibility’ could be applied to the residents of an area where an attack had occurred, and German soldiers were to be ‘exempted from criminal responsibility’ even if their acts contravened German law. It was, in effect, a licence to commit murder. A Wehrmacht officer wrote: ‘Today we had to take all of [the males] from the village that were left behind last time … You can imagine the wailing of the women as even the children were taken from them … Three houses in a village were set on fire by us, and a woman burned to death as a result. So it will be uniformly along the front in all the villages … It was a fantastic sight for the eye to behold, as far as you could see, only burning villages.’

Of all those involved in creating the terrible ‘landscape of horror and death’, one of Hitler’s most willing and enthusiastic disciples was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.

‘Skunk!’ Hermann Göring would scream from the dock, to the surprise of all in the courtroom at Nuremberg. ‘Swine!’ Göring would erupt in a fury after listening to the testimony of his erstwhile colleague von dem Bach, who had turned witness for the prosecution. ‘He is the bloodiest murderer in the whole damn setup!’ Göring screamed again, waving his fist. Von dem Bach said nothing. ‘He is selling his soul to save his stinking neck,’ Göring went on, getting louder and louder. Jodl, equally angry, chimed in: ‘Ask the witness if he knows that Hitler held him up to us as a model partisan-fighter. Ask the dirty pig that!’ As von dem Bach stepped down, it seemed as if Göring was about to have a heart attack. His face was red and he could barely breathe. ‘Schweinhund!’ he screamed. ‘Verräter!’

Göring, though not one to talk, had a point. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski became a master at rounding up civilians and killing them, and later, when labour was needed back at home, at sending selected people off as forced labour in the Reich. Byelorussia taught him how to control large civilian populations, a lesson he would put to devastating use in Warsaw. It is testimony to his ability to lie, to deceive and to appear respectable that he managed to convince the Allies to allow him to act as a witness at Nuremberg. This saved his life, although he had earned a place in the dock alongside Göring, Frank, Kaltenbrunner and the rest.

The chubby, jovial, bespectacled Erich von Zelewski, with his impish smile and dimpled chin, was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania in 1899. His mother was of Polish descent, a fact von dem Bach tried to hide in the Nazi years, and his father, Otto von Zelewski, was from a poor Junker family. His father died young, and the uncle who was meant to bring the boy up was in turn killed in the First World War; the young man himself joined up in 1915, becoming one of the youngest recruits in the German army. When the war ended he spent some years fighting against Polish nationalists in Silesia, and distanced himself from his Polish roots by changing his name in 1925 to the more Germanic-sounding ‘von dem Bach-Zelewski’. He would, tellingly, change his name twice more: in 1940, when as one of Himmler’s favourites he rid himself of the hated ‘Zelewski’ altogether; and again in 1946 in Nuremberg, when in his attempts to paint himself as a pro-Polish activist and the ‘saviour’ of Warsaw, his name returned to von dem Bach-Zelewski.

Changing his name to suit the circumstances was typical of von dem Bach. He was a pathological liar, adept at ingratiating himself with those in power, whether Himmler or the prosecutors after the war. Walter Schellenberg, head of SS military intelligence, said of him, ‘He has the kind of personality that can’t differentiate between the truth and lies. He gets himself so much into the whole thing he can’t differentiate … Originally it was not the truth, but he so convinces himself – he’s ready to die for it.’

Bach joined the SS in 1930, and quickly became friendly with powerful colleagues including Kurt Daluege, Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich. On 7 November 1939 Himmler made him Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom in Silesia, where his duties included mass deportations of Poles to make room for ethnic Germans being resettled in the east. In order to deal with the large number of now homeless ethnic Poles in his area, he proposed to Himmler that a concentration camp be built for the non-German inhabitants of the region. Obergruppenführer Arpad Wigand proposed a place called Auschwitz, and the camp was duly created in May 1940, initially for Polish Catholic prisoners. Von dem Bach visited the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss there shortly afterwards, dispensing advice on how many prisoners should be shot in reprisal for attempted escapes. After the war von dem Bach claimed that Auschwitz had been nothing more than a ‘troop training centre’ at the time; in reality he had been one of its creators, and was fully aware of what was done there.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler made von dem Bach HSSPF – ‘Higher SS and Police Leader’ – in the region of Army Group Centre, which was pushing east through Byelorussia. It was an amazing elevation. Had the Germans conquered Moscow, as von dem Bach fully expected them to do, he would have reached the lofty heights of being HSSPF in the Russian capital itself. Vain, ambitious and anxious to keep in with Himmler, he embarked on an exhaustive series of journeys to execution sites throughout Central Europe in order to prove his worth. By August 1941 he had travelled from Minsk to Mogilev to Starobin – a total of nine sites at which mass killings took place.

He travelled even more the following year, doggedly going to the ravines and pits and trenches in which the innocent were shot in cold blood; men, women and children. He competed with his fellow HSSPFs to ‘win’ the ‘killing score’ in his region: in 1941 he proudly wrote to Berlin that he had ‘passed the figure of 30,000 in my area’. On 28 July that year, after a meeting with Himmler, von dem Bach mounted an operation to comb the Pripyat marshes for ‘partisans’. Himmler’s oral instructions had left no doubt: ‘All Jews must be shot. Drive the females into the swamps.’ This Aktion lasted from 2 to 12 August, with 15,878 people killed and 830 prisoners captured. One of the most vicious and efficient officers in the Aktion was Himmler’s protégé and Bach’s friend Hermann Fegelein, who worked closely with von dem Bach throughout. His cavalry brigade were ruthless when it came to rounding up and shooting civilians: they reported killing 699 Red Army soldiers, 1,100 partisans and 14,178 Jews in one sweep alone. The women and children who did not drown in the shallow waters of the marshes were shot. At Nuremberg Bach claimed that he had ‘personally saved … 10,000 Jewish lives by telling them to hide in the Pripyat marshes’. The reality had been quite different.

Von dem Bach saw Himmler in Byelorussia on 15 August 1941. Film footage of this visit gives a hint of the power that Himmler must have felt in those heady, victorious days. He and von dem Bach were joined by Karl Wolff, chief of his personal staff, Otto Bradfisch, leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B, and Hermann Fegelein. Himmler, tanned and relaxed, processed through the streets of Minsk in an open Mercedes like a famous film star, every inch the conquering hero. On his arrival at the tall, white, modernist SS headquarters, with its enormous flag curling over the roof, he waved to the adoring employees who had lined up, cheering and smiling, on the balconies to greet their boss.

Von dem Bach took Himmler to a Soviet PoW camp on the outskirts of Minsk. Some of the emaciated prisoners tried to catch a glimpse of Himmler, while others lay on the ground, unable or unwilling to move. The Reichsführer SS started a conversation through the wire with a tall, handsome young man, but then, as if suddenly realizing that he was talking to a ‘sub-human’, turned quickly away, rubbing his nose with the back of his gloved hand.

The brutal treatment of Soviet PoWs is one of the least-known, and most terrible, crimes of the Second World War. Once captured, the prisoners were marched or forced to run to gathering points, or were transported in open freight wagons, 150 at a time; the wounded who could not keep up were shot immediately. ‘What do you do with 90,000 prisoners?’ asked one Wehrmacht soldier who filmed such a group. ‘The majority were badly wounded, in a bad state, half-dead with thirst, resigned to their fate. Worst was the lack of water … Many many soldiers, what became of them? I don’t know and it is better not to know.’

His amateur footage shows column after column of men, most of whom were destined to die of starvation or disease, trudging in columns stretching for kilometres in the hot, dusty landscape. ‘Many of those without caps wore wisps of straw or rags tied to their close-cropped heads as protection against the burning sun, and some were barefooted and half-dressed … a long column of misery,’ remembered one Wehrmacht soldier.

Upon arrival the prisoners were herded into barbed-wire enclosures like the one Himmler visited with von dem Bach, perhaps with a few wooden huts or old barns as shelter from the extreme heat and cold. Sometimes, as in Stalag 352 near Minsk, they were crushed together so tightly that they simply could not move. There were no latrines, so they had to scoop up their own excrement and put it into barrels. Over 100,000 died there, their bodies dumped into pits. The Dulags, Stalags and Oflags of Byelorussia were centres of slow, agonizing death for hundreds of thousands of human beings who were essentially left in the open with no medical care, no protection and hardly any food. At Dulag 131 at Bobruisk, thousands of prisoners burned to death when one of the outbuildings caught fire; those who tried to escape were mown down. The guards tortured and humiliated the men, sometimes beating and shooting them for fun. At times they would throw a dead dog into the compound: ‘Yelling like mad the Russians would fall on the animal and tear it to pieces with their bare hands. The intestines they’d stuff in their pockets – a sort of iron ration.’

Often fed only the entrails of horses, the starving men ate grass down to the earth, and chewed on wood. Some were reduced to ‘lyudoedstvo’ – cannibalism. One German soldier wrote that the Russians ‘whined and grovelled before us. They were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human.’ But dehumanizing the victims was, of course, the point.

After the PoW camp Himmler was taken to see an Aktion for himself. Einsatzgruppe B commander Artur Nebe had organized a small execution of ninety-eight men and two women for Himmler’s personal viewing. An open grave had been prepared, and the victims were forced to lie in it in rows. When one group had been shot, the next had to climb down on top of those already killed. Von dem Bach recalled Himmler asking to talk to one of the prisoners, ‘a young Jewish boy of twenty who had a Nordic appearance, with blue eyes and blond hair. Himmler called that boy aside from the pit where he was to be shot and asked him if he were Jewish.’ When it became clear that the boy’s entire family was Jewish, Himmler said, ‘In that case I cannot help you.’ The boy was executed along with the others. ‘You could see,’ von dem Bach added, ‘how Himmler tried to save the boy’s life … he was undoubtedly soft and cowardly.’

Karl Wolff would claim that Himmler had been spattered by the brains of one of the victims of this Aktion, and had nearly fainted, but von dem Bach later denied this story. Even so, Himmler, having spent so much time in the distant luxury of Berlin, was clearly shaken by this encounter with actual killing. Von dem Bach pointed out to him that he had witnessed a ‘mere hundred people’ die, and that he had to try to imagine the pressures on those who had to kill thousands. When Himmler had collected himself he gave a speech to the executioners, praising their courage and appealing to their sense of patriotism in carrying out the hard tasks required of them. Although he had been touched by what he had seen, the action had been ‘necessary’ for Germany’s future. The men should turn to the natural world for their model. Bedbugs and rats were living creatures, after all, but human beings had the right to defend themselves against such ‘vermin’. The metaphor was obvious.

Von dem Bach was right to fear for the mental health of his murderers: he himself would have to undergo treatment for the psychological trauma he suffered after witnessing so much killing. In Byelorussia the extermination of the Jews was done in broad daylight, and often in sight of the local population. In one of many reports, a District Commissar in Slutsk described how a police battalion had ‘fetched and carted off all the Jews … With indescribable brutality on the part of the German policemen as well as Lithuanian partisans (under the SS) the Jewish people, including Byelorussians, too, were brought together from their apartments. There was shooting all over town, and corpses of dead Jews piled up in several streets.’ People had been ‘buried alive’, and the police had looted the town. ‘The Byelorussian people, who had gained confidence in us, have been stupefied.’ The SD complained that the Byelorussians were ‘passive and stupid’, so that it was ‘virtually impossible’ to persuade them ‘to stage pogroms against the Jews’. In Minsk in 1942, Einsatzgruppe B decided to give Hitler a present by killing all the Jews in the city by his birthday, 20 April. The plan was stymied by the civilian occupation authorities under Wilhelm Kube, who wanted to save some Jews to be used as forced labour. On 1 March the Germans ordered the Judenrat – one of the councils which Jews were forced to set up in the occupied territories – to provide a quota of 5,000 Jews by the following day; when they did not, the Germans stabbed the children in the Jewish orphanage to death.

Gerhard Bast, a member of Sonderkommando B, took part in the murder of Jews in and around Minsk. One eyewitness testified after the war how Bast’s group had brought a group of Jews and gypsies in lorries and unloaded them near a freshly dug trench. ‘It was mainly women and children who were shot, some of them with babies.’ He could still picture the women ‘nursing their children on the way to the pit to calm them down. At the pit the children were torn from their mothers and were generally shot first, in front of their mothers. Very small children were held up by one arm by the SD men, shot in the head, and then carelessly tossed into the pit like a log.’