Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
One of the very few splinter groups in which the Germans saw some potential was the ‘Sword and Plough’ organization. Formed in 1940 by a Catholic priest from Pomerania, it had close links with the ONR. Its activities were initially confined to clandestine propaganda that called for Poland’s restoration and revival. For this its founder was quickly arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw, and killed in Auschwitz. But then its interests shifted. As its name suggested, it was willing to take a hand both with Underground work and with armed rebellion. Its manifesto of 1942 talked of a Pan-Slavic Empire ‘from sea to sea’; and its members played a distinguished role in the intelligence operations that revealed, among other things, the test sites of the V1 rockets.
The Soviet victory at Stalingrad inspired a further twist. By that time, the ‘Sword and Plough’ was in the hands of some extremely radical leaders. One was associated with White Russian émigrés in Warsaw; another was a professional intelligence agent who had worked in his time for various security services, possibly for the British and probably for the
Abwehr
(German military intelligence). These two were now principally driven by fear of the USSR. In April 1943, they used the Japanese Embassy in Berlin as a conduit for a memorandum addressed to Hitler in person. They presented a scheme for Polish-German cooperation in fighting the Red Army, the Polish resistance, and the ‘Jewish menace’. Berlin was unimpressed. Governor Frank advised the
Führer’s
office that ‘Sword and Plough’ had no significant support in Polish society. So, too, did Kaltenbrunner, head of the
Sipo.
More to the point, perhaps, when some rank-and-file members of the organization caught wind of the scheme, they called in their Underground partners. Three leaders of ‘Sword and Plough’ were condemned to death for treason by an Underground court. On 18 September 1943, in Warsaw, they were shot by a firing squad composed of the ‘Sword and Plough’’s own members.
The only level at which some degree of consistent collaboration took place was the local one. Some village mayors collaborated with the Germans in order to sell produce and to avoid the fearful reprisals meted out to non-cooperators. Their example could not be easily followed in the city, where the controls and the resentments were more intense.
Cultural collaboration was strictly limited. The Nazis ran a Polish-language ‘reptile press’ in Warsaw, they permitted a few highly controlled ‘non-German’ cinemas and theatres, and they did not close the lowest category of music halls and cafes, where they encouraged prostitution and pornography. For many years after the war, it was said that all these institutions were totally boycotted. Recent research shows otherwise. Yet many of those who worked for German institutions were simply going through the motions to keep themselves alive. One young man, who was ultimately destined to win a Nobel Prize, for example, has described his wartime work as a porter for the German Library Service in Warsaw. Like many intellectuals, he had no taste for insurrection. But his
marxisant
politics precluded any sympathy either for the Nazis or for the Soviets. On the face of it, his employment by a Nazi cultural enterprise might conceivably have been seen as unpatriotic. It was nothing of the sort:
I owed my chance to become a porter to the new director of libraries, a tiny German Slavicist who had decided to protect himself at all costs from going to the front until the end of the war. With this in mind he and his adviser, a Pole, had elaborated a gigantic plan, requiring at least ten years to accomplish, that made both of them indispensable.
With unshakable logic, the plan envisaged the rearrangement of the book collections from Warsaw’s three largest libraries and the transport of millions of volumes by horse-drawn cart so that one library would contain Polish works only: the second, foreign works only; and the third, works on music, theater, and art. It was an undertaking to match moving the Alps, and in its
systematisch
approach faithfully duplicated the whole General Government – except that its madness was bloodless.
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The sphere of economic collaboration was equally ambiguous. Warsaw possessed probably the largest black market in Europe, yet it served both the oppressed and the oppressors. The same young man mentioned above had a second job working for ‘the Firm’. It was engaged, among other things, in supplying the Wehrmacht:
The Firm had two branches: one in Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia, and the other in Warsaw. Granted proper Nazi authorization on the ground of being ‘useful for the Army,’ the outfit was supplied with all sorts of passes and permits and allegedly traded in goods. In fact it dealt in the black-market purchase and sale of currency. The greater part, if not all, of the truck shipments consisted of weapons for partisan detachments. In this, the founder’s talent for high diplomacy nearly reached the level of genius, because his trucks moved unharrassed through the forests of Byelorussia, which were controlled by partisans of varying colors. As a financial power The Firm secured privileges for itself from the Germans through bribery, paying out a regular bonus to a few dignitaries; it also maintained its own workshop for making false documents, and ran an effective rescue operation for those threatened with arrest – especially Jews, many of whom owe their lives to it. The Firm often transported them, carefully packaged, from city to city . . .
The Firm’s headquarters in Warsaw, where the major activity had shifted as the front moved gradually westward, did not look much like a commercial enterprise. In a large room, amid the disorder of tires, crates, engine parts, and drums of gasoline, truck drivers slouched with their feet up on sofas, chatting lazily in a Vilno dialect and smoking cigarettes. This brigade, composed of ‘my boys’ from the Vilno suburbs, knew the complex organization inside and out. It was a team of completely trustworthy men who were treated by
their boss as equals. In the second room, the boss’s partner hung on the telephone. He was a fat Latvian Jew with a black moustache, armed with Aryan birth certificates to the tenth generation.
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From the autumn of 1939 to the spring of 1943, Germany’s
Polenpolitik
was entirely in the hands of the Nazi leadership. The
Führer
had stated his wishes. The
Reichsführer-SS
took charge. And the plans drawn up by the RSHA were implemented by the SS and their minions. Other organs of German Government were excluded. The military in particular, preoccupied with the war further to the east, did not intervene. After Stalingrad, however, the political climate began to change. Questions were asked. Alternatives were considered. Adjustments were made. Feelers were extended. As the Eastern Front recoiled inexorably back towards the heart of Poland, intelligent Germans cast around for Poles who might help them.
In February 1943, none other than Governor-General Frank advocated a change of course. He was reacting to a directive from Goebbels to all regional Gauleiters, telling them ‘to stop everything that endangers the necessary cooperation of all European peoples in [the cause of] victory.’
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He may have been crude and brutal, but he wasn’t stupid. A year earlier he had mocked the policy of his superiors who were ‘slaughtering the cow which they wanted to milk’.
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So he now proposed a raft of concessions including an increase in food supplies, the re-establishment of secondary education, the restoration of Polish property rights, and the wider employment of Poles in the administration. This was not a change of heart but a tactical shift, dictated by Germany’s waning fortunes. ‘When we have finally won the war,’ he noted optimistically in his diary, ‘you can make mincemeat of the Poles and the Ukrainians and all the others as far as I’m concerned . . . But what is crucial at the moment is the maintenance of order, discipline, and diligence among a hostile population.’
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He suggested that differentiated regimes could be introduced – a harsher one in hotbeds of resistance like Warsaw, and a milder one in the District of Galicia, where some Nazis, like Rosenberg, viewed the Ukrainians as a counterweight to the inveterate hostility of the Poles. In June 1943, for instance, Frank permitted the re-establishment of the
Polnische Haupthilfsausschuss
, a welfare organization, which was allocated a payment from the annual budget and which, exceptionally, possessed a board of Polish directors. Less successfully, in February 1944, he tried to set up a Polish
Anti-Bolshevik League. In those same months he pressed Berlin with ideas about education, property rights, and military recruitment. At the same time, potential political partners should be sounded out, and the possibility explored of forming Polish military units, on the lines of the
SS-Galizien
. Frank even pressed for ‘a statement of the future role of the Polish people in the New Europe.’
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This last proposal came dangerously close to a categorical repudiation of the
Generalplan-Ost
.
None of Frank’s proposals prospered, however. Himmler decisively overruled the idea of raising Polish military units. The Resistance put an end to the idea of political cooperation when it executed the leaders of the ‘Sword and Plough’ group. As reported, when representatives of the National Democrats were approached, their reply was staunchly negative: ‘We regret that the German authorities have made cooperation against Bolshevism impossible for us. Now, it is too late. It should have been thought of four years ago, before millions of mistakes had been made.’
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Frank too was unrepentant. In the light of his failure to effect a change of course, he saw fit to issue a warning. He submitted a report in which he suggested that current methods would provoke a Rising, and if such a Rising broke out, that there were no longer sufficient troops in reserve to suppress it.
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It may have been cynical. But at least it indicated a different approach from the moronic intransigence that Himmler was always advocating. The result was a series of limited concessions, which were put into effect, and of more far-reaching proposals, which Berlin blocked.
Meanwhile, in April 1943, Goebbels played his masterstroke. He had known for many months about the NKVD’s massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, but he had waited until the information could be used to maximum effect. By demonstrating that Stalin was a mass murderer, he had high hopes of blowing the Grand Alliance apart. In the event, having told so many offensive lies in the past, he was not widely believed in Britain or America, even when he told the truth. But he caused trouble enough. The German communiqué about Katyn, from April 1943, could not be ignored by the Polish Government in London. Stalin took the opportunity to sever diplomatic relations. Though they kept their close alliance with Great Britain, the Poles had lost their formal link to the Soviet Union, whose armies were heading for Warsaw.
German-run cinemas ran a grisly documentary film showing the reopened gravesite at Katyn. It was screened on the same day that
SS-Brig.Fhr
. Jürgen Stroop launched the final assault on the Ghetto: and it
attracted packed houses. Varsovians had proof of what they, unlike Western audiences, had long suspected. In some cases, they saw flickering pictures of the corpses and skulls of their loved ones, each with a telltale bullet hole. But they did not react as Goebbels had wished. Their sense of desolation increased. They were not unduly impressed by one gang of murderers exposing the crimes of another. They were simply confirmed in their long-standing belief in the ‘doctrine of two enemies’.
About this time, American intelligence agents picked up rumours that the German High Command was trying to enlist Polish support for the war against Russia. They had heard that a Gen. von Mannheim – probably Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who was of Polish origin – had been sent on a mission to Warsaw with a view to contacting potential partners. The rumours, almost certainly, were false. But they were indicative of the plots and possibilities which events on the Eastern Front in 1943-44 were creating.
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In the summer of 1944, all the vacillations in the German camp were terminated. In June, the Western powers succeeded in landing a major force in Normandy, thereby creating the war on two fronts. Then, on 20 July, the crucial Bomb Plot at the
Führer’s
field HQ in East Prussia failed. Hitler survived the explosion. The conspirators were smoked out and killed. The SS reasserted its supremacy. The Wehrmacht ceased to have ideas of its own. The Reich was going to fight to the death.
German intelligence was well aware that the Soviet advance into Poland was likely to spark a Rising.
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They had no illusions about the ubiquitous activities of the Polish Resistance and they had great respect for its daring. Yet despite several key arrests they never obtained detailed inside knowledge. They knew neither the scale of the intended insurrection, nor its changing strategy, nor the points of its concentration. The German Command could not do more than to prepare contingency plans, to hold security forces in reserve, and to wait.
News of the Bomb Plot was widely circulated in Warsaw. The
Führer’s
field HQ was barely 160km (a hundred miles) away from Warsaw and the German garrison there was not in an enviable position. Morale was brittle. The Soviet onslaught was approaching fast. The defence of the Vistula would be left to frontline Wehrmacht formations, and the hostility of the local population was manifest. All thoughts of a political option had been
dropped. The defenders of ‘Warschau’ were to face the fury of the Slavs with no hope of Soviet mercy and no chance of Polish assistance.
When the Soviet Army approached the Vistula, the German garrison in Warsaw prepared for the worst. There were ‘Ivans’ to the left of them, moving to storm the conjunction of the Vistula and the Narev. There were ‘Ivans’ massing in front of them. There were ‘Ivans’ to the right of them, aiming to create two southern bridgeheads. As a result, the order was given for partial evacuation. From 22 July, scores of trains ferried German civilians from the Central Station. Palls of smoke rose skywards as German administrators burned their files. Lines of trucks rolled out of the city carrying stores and wounded soldiers westwards. The roads were packed with retreating refugees, reserve units, and herds of livestock, which the Germans had taken in contributions.