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

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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.’37 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

       RESISTANCE

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      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.1

      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.’2

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

      Because of the need for absolute secrecy in the face of the Gestapo, people were recruited into small groups by friends or colleagues, and were not told about the work of other underground members. Stefan Korboński, who was soon to become the AK’s Chief of Civil Resistance in Warsaw, had escaped from a Russian PoW convoy, and returned to Warsaw unsure what to do with himself. ‘The idea of waiting passively until the end of the war did not appeal to me,’ he said. ‘I was, of course, like thousands of others at that time, thinking about some kind of underground activity against the Germans.’ A friend, the former Speaker of the Polish Parliament Maciej Rataj, told him that a resistance organization was

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