Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Warsaw was said to have two special treasures – its mayor and its poets. The mayor, Stefan S., a former soldier in Pilsudski’s Legions, was young, energetic, eloquent, and widely respected.
8
He made his name in
the crisis of September 1939, rousing the populace in daily broadcasts to defend the city, denouncing Nazi barbarism, inspiring his underlings, fortifying the firefighters, rousing the rescue squads, and comforting the victims. The poets and balladeers, who sang his virtues and those of his city, were fulsome in their praise:
And he, when the city was just a raw, red mass,
Said: ‘I do not surrender.’ Let the houses burn!
Let my proud achievements be bombed into dust.
So what, if a graveyard grows from my dreams?
For you, who may come here, someday recall
That some things are dearer than the finest city wall.
9
That lost Capital was to be recalled with deep affection:
O dearest Warsaw of my youth,
Which encompassed the whole of my world!
If only for a moment and in the dark
I wish to catch a glimpse
Of the ashes and the flowers
Of that good past.
10
Adolf Hitler hated Poland with a will. For Poland lay at the heart of the Nazis’
Lebensraum
, the ideological ‘living space’ into which Germany was raring to expand. It was inhabited moreover by a mixture of Slavs and Jews, both of which were classed in the Nazi handbooks as
Untermenschen
, or ‘subhumans’. Hitler’s priorities were shifting. In
Mein Kampf
(1925), he had poured much of his opprobrium on the Czechs. Yet when his prejudices were put to the test, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was treated far less severely. It seems that the Poles, by putting up a fight in 1939, earned themselves a special place in his demonology.
11
From the very start, therefore, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 had a much nastier flavour than the events of 1915–18. Hitler specifically ordered his minions to act with great cruelty. And he was fully aware of the opportunities for genocide. Briefing his generals at Obersalzburg on the eve of the invasion, he revealed his plans for the Polish nation:
Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees him only as a great state-builder
. . . I have sent my Death’s Head units to the East with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the
Lebensraum
that we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
12
Hitler’s state of mind at that juncture may be judged from the fact that on the day his armies moved into Poland, he ordered a decree condemning all incurably ill persons to death.
13
One crime was to cover another.
Warsaw, as the enemy capital, attracted the Wehrmacht’s special fury. It was mercilessly attacked by shrieking Stuka dive-bombers from the dawn of the very first day. And since it lay dangerously close to the frontier with East Prussia, it was immediately exposed to a German drive from the north. It was surrounded on all sides from the second week of the campaign; and on 15 September it was (wrongly) said by Berlin Radio to have fallen. This is sometimes thought to have prompted Stalin’s order to invade Poland from the east, which happened two days later. Yet Warsaw fought bravely on, vainly hoping that the Western powers would honour their pledge and would bring relief by launching an offensive against western Germany. Inspired by the Mayor, who had been appointed Civilian Commissioner, the citizens threw themselves into the defence, fighting the fires, supplying the defenders, tending the homeless, and burying the dead. Capitulation only came on 28 September, by which time all water and power supplies had been cut. 50,000 citizens were dead, and 15 per cent of the urban fabric, including the Royal Castle, destroyed. In Germany, Hitler ordered all the church bells of the Reich to be rung in celebration for a week, every day between noon and one o’clock.
14
Warsaw’s defiant stand attracted many admiring descriptions:
By September 14, Wehrmacht armor and infantry had surrounded Warsaw, and the Germans under a flag of truce delivered a demand to the Poles for unconditional surrender. But instead of giving up, the people of Warsaw began to fortify the city.
Men, women and children worked into the night digging trenches in parks, playgrounds and vacant lots. Wealthy Warsaw aristocrats were chauffeured to defense sites where they toiled alongside office workers. Trolley cars were thrown across thoroughfares; barricades of cars and furniture were erected in narrow streets.
When the German tanks jumped off for the attack, instead of
blitzing through as they had [done] on the Polish plains, they were stopped dead – in many cases by civilians who dashed boldly into the street to toss burning rags under the vehicles, causing them to catch fire and explode. German infantrymen, who had mopped up the Polish Army in open country, were pinned down by snipers, who seemed to have turned every house into a pillbox. Warsaw Radio helped carry on the battle in its own way. Every 30 seconds, it transmitted portions of [a Chopin Polonaise] to tell the world that the capital was still in Polish hands.Angered by the unexpected setback, the German High Command decided to pound the stubborn citadel into submission. In round-the-clock raids, bombers knocked out flourmills, gasworks, power plants and reservoirs, then sowed the residential areas with incendiaries. One witness, passing scenes of carnage, enumerated the horrors: ‘Everywhere corpses, wounded humans, dead horses . . . and hastily-dug graves.’ . . .
Finally food ran out, and famished Poles, as one man put it, ‘cut off flesh as soon as a horse fell, leaving only the skeleton.’ On September 28, Warsaw Radio replaced the polonaise with a funeral dirge.
15
On 5 October 1939, the
Führer
visited Warsaw for the only time in his life. Standing on a podium beside one of the broad tree-lined boulevards, he took the salute of his victorious Eighth Army. After the two-hour march-past, he visited the Belvedere Palace before hurrying back to Berlin.
In his diary entry for 10 October, after a word of appreciation for Lloyd George and a note about ‘having to wait for Chamberlain’, Joseph Goebbels summed up the mood of the Nazi leadership:
The
Führers
verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive, stupid and amorphous. And a ruling class that is the unsatisfactory result of mingling between the lower order and an Aryan master race. The Poles’ dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgement is absolutely nil . . .
16
The military’s control of conquered Poland lasted until 25 October. In that short time, according to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out,
and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot.
17
Other sources put the death-toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come.
The German administration of occupied Poland bore little resemblance to the occupation regimes in Western Europe, and is not to be compared to the far milder conditions in Vichy France, Denmark, or the Netherlands. The western districts annexed to the Reich were immediately cleansed of vast numbers of ‘undesirables’. The central parts, adjacent to the Soviet Zone, were set up as a separate General Government, entirely subordinated to SS control, and run by Hitler’s former legal expert, Hans Frank. The General Government was a police-run mini-state, where all existing laws and most institutions were abolished and where regular German administrative and judicial systems were
not
introduced. It was the lawless laboratory of Nazi racial ideology. In due course, it became the base both for the main Nazi concentration camps – Auschwitz, Maidanek, Plaschau – and of the dedicated death camps such as Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Its mission, according to Frank’s précis of the
Führer’s
orders, was ‘to finish off the Poles at all cost’.
18
Its nicknames included ‘Gestapoland’, ‘the Gangster Gau’, ‘the Vandal Gau’, and ‘Frank-Reich’.
Governor Frank was a complex character, who was much more intelligent than most of his fellow Nazis, yet incapable of resisting the temptations of his post. He was one of the few close followers of Hitler to analyse his own thoughts and actions, and left a diary of thirty-eight volumes. In reflective mood, he could be remarkably honest. He admitted being two people – ‘me myself, and the other Frank, the Nazi leader.’ ‘This one looks at the other’, he would confess, ‘and says “What a louse you are!” ’ During his trial at Nuremberg, it was Frank who declared ‘Not a thousand years will cleanse Germany of its guilt.’ But in office, he always gave way to his lower instincts. ‘Humanity’, he wrote in his diary in June 1942, ‘is a word that one dares not use.’ Or again, ‘The power and the certainty of being able to use force without any resistance are the sweetest and most noxious poison that can be introduced into any Government.’ Hence, when in time his policies did provoke resistance, he was one of the few Nazis to propose concessions. Himmler thought such weakness intolerable. ‘Frank’, he ranted in one outburst, ‘is a traitor to the Fatherland, who is hand in glove with the Poles.’
19
This may be compared to one of Frank’s own outbursts. Asked by a journalist for a comparison between the General Government and the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia, he waxed lyrical. ‘In Prague,’ he said, ‘big red posters were put up on which one could read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself, “If I had to put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper.” ’
20
Governor Ludwig Fischer, Doctor of Jurisprudence and
SA-Gruppenführer
, ruled Warsaw for Frank from 24 October 1939 until January 1945. He had joined the NSDAP when a young law student at Heidelberg, and he was already a member of the party’s ‘Storm Detachments’ before he had completed his PhD. As a result, he embodied two of the Nazis’ worst characteristics – the zeal for administrative engineering and the acceptance of violence. Yet he appears to have been more of a compliant bureaucrat than a fanatical monster. And he does not seem to have relished the idea that the city of his charge was slated for downgrading. Talking to Hans Frank in February 1940, he complained that the population of Warsaw was not subservient and that ‘it was proving impossible to play one class off against another.’ He was then told, perhaps as a reassurance, that
Reichsmarschall
Goring (unlike Himmler) was opposed to Warsaw’s Germanization and that the
Führer
would permit a Polish community to remain. After two years of occupation, in October 1941, Fischer claimed that Warsaw had won its ‘right to existence’, especially as its tax revenue was as high as that of Cracow, Radom, and Lublin combined. The trouble was that the Varsovians could not be made to love the New Order, and in later discussions with the top brass of the General Government, Fischer found himself on the defensive. At a meeting in the Belvedere Palace on 24 January 1943 he complained about public health, about the black market, and about the problem of coping with 23,000
Reichsdeutsch
and
Volksdeutsch
who had presumably swamped the German quarter. He listened to an argument between the proponents and opponents of intensified police methods. Eight months later, on 24 September 1943, he heard an SS officer named Bierkamp describe the security situation in Warsaw as deplorable. According to the officer, 25,000 former Polish officers and 30,000 Jews were hiding in the city, were not registering for work, were operating against German interests, and ought to be shot.
21
On close analysis, one can see that Fischer’s moderation was purely tactical. He never shrank from the most inhumane aspects of creating the
Lebensraum.
He built the Warsaw Ghetto, and presided over its destruction. He transformed the Varsovians into third-rate citizens in their own town, and supervised the increasingly murderous attempts to contain them. His chilling report of 15 October 1942 says it all:
The Jewish settlement area is essentially empty . . . It is not yet possible to say what the economic effects of decreasing Warsaw’s population by about 400,000 are going to be. These economic disadvantages must be accepted however, because the extinction of Jewry is unconditionally required for political reasons.
22
The municipal administration over which Fischer presided was run entirely by imported German officials. One may presume that some of the incoming bureaucrats were there simply for the job and the money. But the General Government seems to have attracted more than its share of sadists, degenerates, adventurers, and committed Nazis, who willingly participated in ‘the experiment in the east’. These monsters naturally gravitated to the various branches of the German police service, but they were often found in one of the more harmless-sounding resorts, like the Accommodation Office or the Labour Department, where the opportunities for excess and corruption were ubiquitous.
The police service of the Warsaw District, 1940–45, consisted of five main departments. Departments I and II dealt with administration and finance, and training. Department III (
Sicherheitsdienst
, or Security), under
SS-Stbf.
Ernst Kah, poked its fingers into all aspects of city life, and had its own police, the
Sicherheitspolizei
, or
Sipo
, whose agents often operated incognito. Department IV (
Gegner und Abwehr
, literally Opponent and Defence), under
SS-Hstuf.
Walter Stamm, linked counterintelligence and the suppression of undesirables. Its ‘ASection’ (
SS-Hstuf.
Gottlieb Höhmann) was the largest in the whole service, and was directed against the Underground. Its subsections were each assigned to specific targets: