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stopped the massive random street round-ups, although many Poles were still shot in the ruins of the ghetto and elsewhere. Wehrmacht soldiers were ordered not to walk on the streets alone, and the Germans became obsessed with secrecy around their top officials. Geibel’s identity and movements were kept hidden from the Poles, and other top Nazis stationed in Warsaw stayed in the heavily guarded German areas as much as possible. Franz Grassler, a young attorney and deputy to Dr Heinz Auerswald, Commissioner for the Warsaw ghetto, complained that it was difficult even for Germans to contact their superiors, so conscious were they of rank and security: ‘Auerswald was in his apartment and we were … housed in barracks … in the German House,^fn2’ he said. When important matters had to be discussed it sometimes took days for a meeting to be arranged. It is not surprising that few Poles had ever seen the faces or knew the names of the high-ranking SS officials in their midst.²⁸

      Even so, the AK was effective at gleaning information about the top officials governing their lives. As part of her duties working undercover in a German-run office, Larysa Zajączkowska sometimes delivered mail to the glorious rococo Brühl Palace, now the headquarters of the police, the SS and the Governor of Warsaw Ludwig Fischer. It was one of the most closely guarded buildings in the city, but ‘with the help of a few bars of chocolate, a few bottles of slivovitz and a packet of coffee I befriended Governor Fischer’s secretary’, Zajączkowska recalled. ‘She had very simple tastes, and the greedy Fräulein could not imagine where I sent all the information she let slip out. For example, nobody knew who had replaced Kutschera after his death … It was a strict secret and the name was not even known to the Germans. Then one day a slim, balding officer was in the room and I whispered to Freda, “Who is he?” adding that I liked the look of him very much. She whispered, “That is General Geibel, Kutschera’s successor.” I reported this immediately.’

      The AK asked Larysa to find out which cars Geibel used, with a view to another assassination, but this was extremely difficult, as after Kutschera’s death the top Nazis changed their cars several times a day. When she finally obtained the information she was told that Geibel would not, after all, be assassinated, as ‘the war is ending and the guilty will be judged by international tribunals’. Sadly, this was not to be. Although Geibel himself would die in a Polish prison, many of the worst criminals active in Warsaw – from Bach to Reinefarth, from Ludwig Hahn to Wilhelm Koppe and Heinz Auerswald, escaped punishment for the crimes they committed there.

      AK attacks against Germans in Warsaw became more frequent as the Soviets drew ever closer to the city. In the fifteen months before the uprising, Aronson’s Kedyw unit carried out more than sixty operations, many of them executions of Germans or collaborators; nearly half of his unit was lost in the process. Between November 1943 and May 1944 the AK killed 704 Germans; by the time of the uprising they were assassinating around ten people every day.

      The Germans continued to fight the AK as best they could. One of their most successful operations was the betrayal of Stefan Rowecki to the Gestapo. He was taken to Germany on Himmler’s orders, but despite being tortured, never disclosed any information about the AK. Himmler had him executed in Sachsenhausen when he heard about the outbreak of the uprising on 1 August 1944.

      Rowecki’s female colleagues routinely displayed similar courage. One of the most extraordinary groups, also part of ‘Kedyw’, was the all-female sapper unit under Major Zofia Franio. In 1940 Franio was given permission to recruit five instructors from the PWK. All the women, who included Antonina Mijal, had ‘military knowledge, the psychological disposition and physical prowess to carry out the tasks’. Franio organized officers from the sapper corps to teach her recruits about explosives and incendiary devices, and in the autumn of 1940 three of the five instructors started their own sub-units, all of which became part of ‘Kedyw’.²⁹

      One of these recruits was Antonina Mijal (‘Tosia’), who soon became Franio’s second in command. A beautiful young woman with jet-black hair and dark eyes – her great-grandfather’s family had come to Poland from Spain with Napoleon’s Grande Armée – she was recruited by Franio in October 1940. Mijal took part in numerous sabotage operations, particularly blowing up rail lines. She would leave town on the last tram, carrying the concealed bombs; on one occasion she transported them in stuffed toy monkeys. Her friend Irena Hahn remembered blowing up a train with her one evening and having to ‘sneak back to Warsaw, which was very dangerous as the roads were already swarming with Germans lighting up the area’. On another evening they were walking home after training at Franio’s apartment when they were stopped by a police patrol: ‘The men searched Tosia’s sack but didn’t pay attention to the box under her arm. They let us walk away with Tosia still carrying the sample explosives. A few minutes later we had to stop; we couldn’t speak.’ Had the box been opened, both women would have been shot. Another time they were caught in a street round-up, and although Tosia managed to walk through the cordon Irena was stopped. ‘Tosia came back for me, took my hand and snatched it from the policeman as if she was offended that he had grabbed me. He stood there rather confused but his colleague started to laugh at him and so we managed to slip away.’

      Franio and Mijal ran twenty storage facilities and arms factories in and around Warsaw, not only overseeing production, but also moving arms to where they were needed, constantly risking arrest and imprisonment. According to Rybicki, ‘there were no men involved, and there were never any complaints about technical standards or delivery’.³⁰

      Unfortunately, ‘Kedyw’ operatives were not representative of the entire AK. Stanisław Aronson, who served in the Israeli army after the war, said: ‘People today think that the Home Army was a kind of military power, but it was not at all like that. It was an organization with a few hundred thousand members, however there were actually only small operational fighting units. In the Warsaw area there were probably around 1,000 soldiers who participated in diversionary actions.’ At the beginning of the uprising the Warsaw AK counted 40,000 members, but only a few thousand were properly armed and trained.³¹ Most of the others were young people frustrated by almost five years of German occupation, but with scant practical knowledge or experience. They were desperate to ‘do something’, but they had had little or no training, and very few had weapons. This would prove to be a serious problem during the Warsaw Uprising.

       Operation ‘Tempest’

      The first concrete plan for an uprising was released in September 1942, and was to be ordered by the Commander-in-Chief in London when German defeat was imminent. At first the Poles had hoped that victory would come from the west, and that British and American troops would overrun Germany and push into Poland, but as Soviet victories mounted after Stalingrad and the Western Allies delayed the invasion of France, it became clear that they would in fact be ‘liberated’ by Soviet troops from the east. The Poles were rightly wary of Soviet intentions, and much time was put into discussing the potential threat of the Red Army. In February 1943 Stefan Rowecki, whose mantra was that the Soviets ‘will always be our enemy’, drafted a new plan called ‘Burza’, or Tempest, which would unfold in three stages: an armed rising in the eastern cities of Lwów and Wilno, an armed attack in the area east of the Vistula, and finally a national uprising throughout the country. The idea was to harass the German retreat, to prevent reprisals against civilians, and to secure important cities for the émigré government before the Russians could take over. Rowecki’s fears about the Soviets increased when Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile over the murder of 4,410 Polish officers at Katyń – and more than 17,000 elsewhere – by far the largest massacre of PoWs during the war. The graves had been discovered by the Germans in April 1943, and when the Soviets denied that they had committed the murders the Poles, knowing the truth, demanded a Red Cross inquiry. On 26 April Stalin used this ‘insult’ to break off relations with Sikorski’s government, in mock fury at the Polish accusations. Rowecki decided that the Soviet threat to the AK was too great for an open uprising, and that Polish forces should conduct sabotage operations against retreating Germans, but remain under cover.

      When General Bór took over command of the AK after Rowecki’s arrest by the Germans in 1943 he reversed this order, deciding that the Poles should reveal themselves, in order to prove that

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