Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
That same evening, another member of Sadovski’s ‘Stag’ Group died of her wounds in a field hospital. The thirty-year-old nurse nr. 1108, ‘Danuta’, had been shot when she rushed out to tend a wounded soldier during the attack on the Press House. A singer and composer, she was the author of the Rising’s most popular song, ‘Fix bayonets, lads’. She had also been the model for Warsaw’s famous Siren Statue, which the Germans carried off.
3
The Home Army Command had been relocated in the Kammler furniture factory in Vola. That night, evaluating reports, they learned that many key objectives had
not
been won. The insurgents had met with little success in Castle Square, in the Police District, and at the airport, where they had suffered heavy losses. Above all, they had not been able to seize control either of the western or the eastern ends of the two main bridges across the river. They already knew that they could be in for a very long fight.
On 2 August, AK Command re-established the radio link with London that they had lost during the move to the Kammler factory. The message sent improperly
en clair
the previous day was repeated properly in code. ‘The struggle for Warsaw has begun’.
4
On each of the following days, Gen. Boor begged London time and again for airdrops, ammunition, and the despatch of the Parachute Brigade, whose release from British command he still clearly expected.
On the first full day of fighting, paperboys appeared on the streets, openly distributing the Home Army’s
Information Bulletin
. The underground press carried declarations from the military and the political authorities, and severe instructions from the Civilian Commissioner:
- All the dead, both German and Polish, are to be given temporary burial, and all personal documents preserved.
- All self-appointed courts are banned.
- All enemies of the Polish nation, Germans, or
Volksdeutsche
are to be protected pending trial.- All property belonging to German citizens or to the German state is to be guarded and inventarized . . .
5
On 3 August, the insurgents not only captured their first German tank, they repaired it and drove it into action against its former owners. An
early target was the SS ‘Goose Farm’ concentration camp. Their resourcefulness revealed some of the unforeseen difficulties which the Germans were already facing, despite their deployment of special units.
During the night of 4/5 August, the first RAF bombers appeared in the skies over Warsaw, having flown from Italy. They made successful drops over Krashinski Square and Vola. The insurgents could not know how many other planes had taken off and had been lost. But they took heart. They were not totally forgotten. There were part of a coalition.
On 5 August,
SS-Ogruf.
Erich von dem Bach reached Warsaw, to take charge of all anti-insurgent operations. His arrival coincided with the news of mass murders of civilians, the flight of refugees, and heavy bombardments.
Sunday 6 August was the sixth day of the Rising. The insurgents had intended to hold out ideally for forty-eight hours and at the most for five to six days. The limit had now been reached. But there was no sign whatsoever of a resolution. They had taken control of much of the capital, but they had not driven the Germans out. They had always understood that German counterattacks to the east of the Vistula might upset their calculations, but they had no means of telling how the renewed armoured clashes between Germans and Soviets were faring. They held high hopes for their Premier’s mission to Moscow, but they were not yet aware of an outcome. They had sent off their appeals to the Western Allies, but as yet they had not received a clear response. They had no choice but to fight on. They had met neither defeat nor victory. [
L-HOUR
, p. 250]
The German reaction to the Rising was at once complacent and vicious. Governor Fischer, having heard of several premature clashes in the afternoon of the 1st, put the garrison on full alert at 4.30 p.m., and reported to his superiors. Loudspeakers on the streets blared out the warning that bandits were operating and that action against them was starting: ‘any civilian found on the street would be fired on.’
6
That evening, Wehrmacht officers met at the HQ of Gen. von Vormann. The Ninth Army logbook calmly noted ‘the outbreak of the expected insurgency’: ‘Battles are in progress in all parts of Warsaw. The direct supply line of the 39th Armoured Corps has been cut. Fortunately, control of the telephone exchange is facilitating communication . . . Ninth Army Command has requested police formations [to be brought in] for crushing the Rising.’
7
In other words, the hard-pressed Wehrmacht saw no reason to redirect its
own forces. The SS had created the mess in Warsaw, and the SS could sort it out.
The Nazi leaders reacted with savage delight. The Rising gave them the pretext for punishing Warsaw once and for all. Himmler was informed by radio at 5.30 p.m. He immediately flew into a rage, firing off a telegram to the Commandant of KZ Sachsenhausen and ordering him to kill Gen. Arrow. An initial report spoke merely of ‘disturbances’ in Warsaw and of the false supposition that the rebels were Communists. Gen. Hahn corrected his mistake in the evening, informing Berlin that the rebels belonged to the ‘national Resistance movement, the Home Army’, and that they were wearing red-and-white armbands, not red ones.
In due course, Himmler took the news to Hitler.
‘Mein Führer!’
he said, according to his later recollection,
The moment is a difficult one. [But] from the historical point of view, the action of the Poles is a blessing. We shall finish them off . . . Warsaw will be liquidated; and this city, which is the intellectual capital of a sixteen-to seventeen-million-strong nation that has blocked our path to the east for seven hundred years, ever since the first battle of Tannenberg, will have ceased to exist. By the same token, the . . . Poles themselves will cease to be a problem for our children and for all who will follow us . . .
8
Hitler’s response was not directly recorded. But it was undoubtedly reflected in Himmler’s subsequent orders, which talked of ‘every inhabitant to be killed’, ‘no prisoners to be taken’, and ‘every single house to be blown up and burned’.
9
On 3 August, the
Reichsführer-SS
was visiting Poznan and was addressing a conference of Nazi Gauleiters. It would seem that he was asked whether the latest events in Warsaw might upset the Nazis’ strategic plans. His reply was uncompromising. The most important aspect of strategy concerned ‘racial reconstruction’. ‘The programme is irreversible. We have extended our [racial] frontier far to the East, and that, too, is irreversible . . . It is irreversible that we fill this settlement area, that we create a garden of Germanic blood in the East.’
10
To the Nazi mind, the irreversibility of changes to the population was a victory from which no military setback could detract.
Governor-General Frank telexed the Reich Chancellery on 5 August in similar vein:
L-HOUR
A soldier of the K-Div. goes into battle
We received our orders on 31 July and Home Army detachments assembled at their designated points. The first objective was the German army stores in the district of Stavki. We, in K-Div., were relatively well armed with captured weapons and a few Thompson guns from parachute drops. We were also battle-hardened. According to the plan, having secured the stores, we were to march to the [PKO] Savings Bank building in the City Centre and place ourselves at the disposal of General Monter, the commander of the Rising. The battle order stipulated that once the capital had been liberated we were . . . to secure all weapons in arms caches and to remain prepared for possible further clandestine activity under Soviet occupation . . .
In my mind’s eye I saw a victory parade in full glory. I was only twenty-one, and after years of stressful Underground work I was hoping for some recognition. We were overdue for celebrations, and were full of hope that our equally patriotic girls would recognize our valour and succumb to the charms of the uniform . . .
On 1 August, on leaving our base, I saw my old friend Alex T. at the head of his platoon. There was no time to talk and we just waved. Several minutes later, about 3 p.m., as they were crossing [Mitskevich Street], a German tank opened fire and Alex was hit in the forehead. He died instantly. He may have been the first casualty of the insurrection . . .
Our [Jolibord] detachment reached its jump-off point in a covered lorry driven by ‘Columbus’. It was in the grounds of a school bordering the Stavki stores . . . we seized the school at 3.30 p.m. Columbus and I went to move our lorry to a safer location. We travelled maybe ten metres when an artillery shell exploded at the very place we had just vacated . . .
Our attack evolved according to plan. At exactly 5 p.m. we jumped over the fence at the back of the stores. We shot several SS men dead . . . Two Krauts who tried to escape into the ruins of the ghetto on the other side . . . were also killed. Suddenly, inside the stores, a group of about fifty men ran towards us, wearing the striped garb of concentration-camp prisoners. They called out to us, but we couldn’t understand a single word. They were Greek Jews from Salonika who had been put to work there. With difficulty, we explained to them . . . that they were now free.
A young SS officer who survived our initial assault had built a barricade of packing cases on the first floor. He must have amassed a large amount of ammunition, as he kept us under almost constant fire. Columbus was wounded in the hand. So we decided to blow up another door next to the officer’s hideout. Tony Flamethrower did it
with an impact grenade. In his hate-fired eagerness, he did not take cover in time and his legs stopped a number of fragments. After Columbus, he was our second casualty.
As I learned after the war, the inhabitants of the Old Town later managed to remove tons of provisions from the stores: flour, sugar, cereals,
etc.
They carried the bags and boxes on their backs. These supplies helped them to survive the next three weeks of savage fighting, when the Old Town was completely cut off from the outside world.
We spent the night in the stores. We found a large stock of camouflage jackets worn by German paratroopers, and naturally we put them on. As many of us had joined the Rising in civvies, it was only now that we began to look like soldiers. I was wearing a smart pair of high boots, a Polish officer’s tunic . . . and the newly acquired camouflage jacket. I was very proud of it.
1
Stanisław Likiernik
A German military administrator, who later fell into Polish hands, describes the chaos that day in his office
‘The Cracow office of the
Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD
contained a file on the expected Polish Rising. It grouped all our experts’ major studies, opinions, and forecasts, as well as reports from our secret agents. The dossier was kept in a special safe. As an archivist, it was my duty to check the file page-by-page monthly – an extremely boring job. Occasionally some big-shot would request one of the ‘insurrectional’ documents
sofort
. We had hundreds of people working at decoding your group’s secret papers. And what did it all add up to, [do you think]? Fuck all! That’s right, fuck all!’
‘Why fuck all?’ I asked.
‘Because in spite of our preparations, the Warsaw Rising caught us by surprise. The office was a madhouse. Telephone, telegraph, and telex lines were jammed. Dozens of “experts” started pawing through my archives. They concluded that our intelligence reports were outdated, and that the [frequent] rumours of an impending Rising were plants from the Home Army and designed to mislead us. That doesn’t mean that we knew nothing of what was coming. Far from it. But our information was completely inadequate . . .’
2
For the most part, Warsaw is in flames. Burning down the houses is the most reliable means of liquidating the insurgents’ hideouts . . . Indescribable poverty reigns among the million inhabitants. Warsaw
will be punished with complete destruction after the suppression or collapse of the rising. Unfortunately, our own losses are considerable. But thanks to the improved situation [on the Soviet front] one can count on the total crushing of the insurrection by the continuing siege within a few days.
11
Inimitably, the Nazis’ instinct was to think of flattening the rebel city and all its inhabitants by aerial bombardment. But the VI Air Fleet had better things to do. And in any case the German troops that were engaged in the city could not be safely withdrawn.
So, to achieve his aim, Himmler ordered the mobilization of a special anti-insurgent corps to be commanded by von dem Bach. He had the full approval of the Chief of Staff, Guderian. The various elements of the corps reached Warsaw by rail in the course of the first week of August. By that time, the main units at the disposal of von dem Bach’s chief of operations,
SS-Gruf.
Heinz Reinefarth, formed a powerful if somewhat motley array.
— the SS RONA Brigade from the Russian National Liberation Army under
Brig.Fhr.
Mechislav Kaminski: an advance party of 2,000 men— the SS Brigade of
SS-Staf.
Oskar Dirlewanger (two battalions, 3,381 men), including the 111th Azerbaijani Regiment— the 572nd and 580th Cossack Battalions
— the 608th Special Defence Battalion (under Col. Willy Schmidt) from Breslau
— a Posnanian militarized police battalion
— a Luftwaffe guard regiment
— a reserve battalion of the Hermann Göring Panzer-Parachute Division that was operating to the east of Warsaw.