Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Earth was scattered on the coffins. Salvoes were fired. Wreaths were laid.
ROLA-Z.: . . . The people of Warsaw hated the invader with a sacred hate . . . A clique of bankrupt politicians living as émigrés used this hatred to promote their political ends . . . In their fight, the People’s Army took a leading part. Its heroic exploits were ignored by London propaganda, but it is now quite clear that they bore the brunt of the fighting . . . It is only when comparing it to the titanic efforts of the People’s Army that the miserable and shameful part of the Homeland Army became evident. The Homeland Army wasted the blood of our best sons while the People’s Militia . . . and the People’s Army leaders remained close to the nation to the end . . . Farewell, Comrades in Arms! May the soil of Warsaw, which you defended so beautifully, lie upon you . . . Hail to you, O Heroes!
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Also in March, the diligence of the NKVD brought about the capture of Bear Cub and fifteen other Underground leaders. They were trapped by a stratagem of the meanest sort. Once their new ‘place of stay’ had been located, Bear Cub and Sable received a written invitation to meet the local Soviet commander, who promised them a safe conduct and a flight to London for consultations. ‘Mutual trust and understanding’, the letter said, ‘will permit us to solve important problems and to prevent them from becoming acute.’
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Yet when they appeared on 27 March, they were unceremoniously arrested, interrogated, flown to Moscow, and cast into the Lubyanka Prison. As far as the outside world was concerned, the ‘Sixteen’ had simply disappeared.
Apart from Gen. Bear Cub and Chief Delegate Sable, the arrestees included the Chairman of the Council of National Unity, three ministers, nine leaders of democratic parties, and their interpreter. Almost all these men had lived through the Rising in Warsaw. With the sole exception of the Underground leaders of the Socialist Party (PPS), who had steadfastly refused to participate in the proposed parley, they constituted the entire democratic leadership of the country. Their removal meant that democratic hopes had been decapitated, even before the war had ended. Their whereabouts became the subject of intensive international enquiries. It remained unconfirmed for five weeks. On 4 May 1945, at the opening of the United Nations conference in San Francisco, Anthony Eden asked Molotov for a response to his enquiries. He was casually told that ‘the Sixteen’ were awaiting trial in Moscow because they had been conducting hostile operations against the Soviet Army.
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Eden did not protest.
On 21 April, the Provisional Government signed a twenty-year Pact of Friendship, Mutual Assistance, and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. It was in no position to sign anything but a totally one-sided scheme for Soviet political, economic, and cultural domination. It guaranteed the Oder– Neisse frontier, before the Western allies had even discussed the issue; and in security, military, and political matters, it perpetuated Soviet control over Poland’s internal affairs. This treaty made nonsense of the Western contention that the post-war order would be settled by interAllied agreement. Also, long before it was formed, it ensured that the ‘Government of National Unity’, as foreseen by Yalta, was going to be a cipher.
By the end of the war in May 1945, therefore, it was absolutely clear who the winners and losers of the Warsaw Rising were. The exiled Polish Government and its Home Army were the principal losers. They had taken a gamble, which had not worked. The former had lost its military arm and its main political base; and the latter had lost its guiding political authority.
Indirectly, the Western powers had lost their reputation for ethical politics and fair dealing. They had guaranteed Poland’s independence and had seen it crushed. They had expended much rhetoric about the ‘War for Freedom and Democracy’ but in this case they had not stood up for their principles. Poland’s reliance on Churchill and Roosevelt had proved worthless.
In the short term, Germany was among the winners. The threat posed by the Warsaw Rising to the Wehrmacht had been overcome; the Vistula sector had held firm for five months, in which the defence of the Reich could have been marshalled; and the Nazis had the satisfaction of so completely destroying Warsaw that they thought they had achieved another ‘final solution’.
Yet the outright winners were Stalin, the Soviet Union, and Stalin’s Communist clients. Before the Rising, it still seemed possible, or even likely, that Stalin would have been obliged to strike a deal with the exiled Government and with the wartime Resistance movement. After the Rising, it was more than likely that no such deal would be necessary. The cream of Poland’s patriotic and democratic youth, who in normal circumstances would have taken over at the end of the war, had been eliminated. Stalin’s puppets could now assume power in their stead with no regard to popular opinion or to democratic niceties. They set up a dictatorship which lasted for forty-six years.
Once the Rising was over, the generals and armies which had fought in and around Warsaw were ordered elsewhere. Von dem Bach, for example, who had gained a reputation for ruthlessness, subseqently commanded two SS Army Corps in the desperate defence of the line of the River Oder, east of Berlin. Gen. Vormann, commander of the Ninth Army, who wrote daily reports on the Rising between August and October, was appointed nominal commander of the fabled ‘Alpine Redoubt’, where the Nazi leadership was expected to make its last stand. Gen. Reinefarth was appointed Commander of Fortress Küstrin on the Oder, but his unauthorized breakout prior to the Soviet conquest caused him to be arrested on Hitler’s orders. Gen. Stahel, meanwhile, was made Commander of Bucharest on the eve of that city’s surrender. He entered Soviet captivity and died in the Gulag in 1955. Dirlewanger and his brigade, in contrast, were transferred to Slovakia, before moving on to their bloody ‘last stand’ on the Oder in February 1945. The remnants of the RONA Brigade were transferred to the Vlassov Army and saw action in Bohemia. At the end of the war, they were handed over to the Soviets for retribution. The elements of the Cossack Brigade, who had fought in Warsaw, ended the war in the British zone of Austria. There, amid indescribable scenes of mass suicide, they, too, were forcibly handed over to Beria’s bounty hunters.
On the Soviet side, Rokossovsky, feeling demoted, took charge of the Front to the north of his preceding command, and ploughed on into the Reich. In parallel to Zhukov and Konev, he took Danzig, smashed the Pomeranian Wall, drove through Stettin, and approached Berlin from the north-east. The 1st and 2nd (Polish) Armies stayed with the First Byelorussian Front, and participated in the main battle for Berlin. Soldiers of the 1st (Polish) Army, which had been the sole formation under Soviet command to assist the Rising, ended up at the Brandenburg Gate. Long before they arrived in Germany, their commander, Gen. Berling, who had quarrelled with the Lublin Committee, was sent off to honourable exile in a military training school in Russia, and did not return to Warsaw, and not without great difficulty, until 1946.
The 2nd Guards Tank Army, whose alleged sighting on 31 July on the outskirts of Praga had sparked the Rising, drove all the way. Gen. Gorbatov, who had been one of Rokossovsky’s chief subordinates on the approach to the Vistula, finished the war as the Soviet Commandant of Berlin.
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A valuable perspective on Poland’s plight as the war drew to a close can be found in the
Osobaya Papka
or ‘Special File’ which was presented to Stalin by the NKVD.
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In 1944–45, the great Dictator was deluged by reports on a vast range of internal subjects from mass hunger in Central Asia or oil production in Iran to the deportation of the Chechen and Kalmyk nations. So long as the war lasted, he was obviously most concerned with military matters, including the regular hunt behind Soviet lines for enemy infiltrators. Poland was by no means top of his agenda. In August to September 1944, for example, at the time of the Warsaw Rising, he seems to have been most worried by the activities of the nationalist Underground in Ukraine. There were half a dozen countries where ‘anti-Soviet elements’ were being eliminated.
Yet in 1945 Stalin clearly paid closer attention to Polish affairs. In January, he received a personal report from Serov on the situation in Warsaw and he even found time to discuss whether a pre-war senator should be admitted to the Provisional Government. He wanted to hear from Beria how the May Day parades had been organized in various Polish towns. Above all, he took care to supervise ‘preparations’ for the show trial of the sixteen Underground leaders which was to demonstrate his ultimate political triumph.
For decades after 1945, historians could learn very little about the Moscow Trial except from the highly propagandistic publications that were issued by the Soviet Government at the time
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and the reports of Western journalists who were admitted into the courtroom. Since the collapse of the USSR, however, documents have been released from the Russian archives revealing the lengthy process of investigation which preceded the trial. These documents fall into two sections – those which refer to the initial examination of ‘the Sixteen’ following their entrapment in Poland, and those relating to the lengthy preparations for the trial conducted in the Lubyanka in Moscow. These reveal as much about the mindset of the NKVD investigators as about the alleged crimes of the prisoners.
The preliminary interrogation of the ‘Sixteen’ Underground leaders consisted of endless, repetitive questioning about the history, organization, and functions of the Secret State and of all its constituent organs, both civilian and military. It is probably true that the NKVD investigators were trying to trap their prisoners into contradictions and inconsistencies and to elicit confessions of ‘anti-Soviet activities’. But what emerges most strongly is that the Soviet officials were woefully unfamiliar with the subject, and could not easily comprehend the simplest facts about the Polish Resistance
movement. They really could not grasp, or admit to grasping, how anyone could be genuinely ‘anti-Nazi’ and yet non-Soviet.
One of the most interesting and extensive files is devoted to the initial examination of Maj.Gen. Bear Cub. For eight days in early April, his captors sat him down and required him to compose a deposition on a long list of subjects in his own words. The resultant document, which runs to seventy-five printed pages, was translated into Russian, typed up, and forwarded to the higher levels, in the first instance to Beria and to Merkulov. It starts with a description of preparations for Bear Cub’s flight with SOE in April 1944 and ends with his assessment of the current situation.
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(See Appendix 31.) Bear Cub’s approach to his task was perfectly open and straightforward. In describing the Commanderin-Chief’s instructions prior to his flight to Poland, he listed: 1.) to continue the fight with the Germans to the end, and 2.) to explore the possibilities of restoring diplomatic relations with the USSR. But he mentioned the Commander’s prediction that Poland would be turned into the 17th Republic of the USSR.
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On the question of the ‘English Military Mission’, he made a full exposé of Col. Hudson’s intentions as he understood them. These included permission to talk not only with the Home Army, but also with the AL and the NSZ. By way of conclusion, Bear Cub expressed the view that good, neighbourly relations with the Soviet Union were for Poland ‘a matter of life and death.’
A succinct account of the Warsaw Rising, written under pressure by one of the Rising’s key planners, only six months after the Capitulation, is clearly a source of considerable importance. If it had not been buried in the Moscow archives for sixty years, it could have had a significant influence on all the subsequent debates. Bear Cub wrote with military precision. He discussed the Decision; the Course of the Battle; Attempts to link up with the Soviet Army; and the Capitulation. The whole discourse occupied only fourteen printed pages.
According to Bear Cub, there had been nine reasons for launching the Battle for Warsaw, and four arguments against it. Reason No. 1, surprisingly perhaps, was ‘to seize Warsaw before the arrival of the Soviet Army.’ It was justified by the need to establish state power and to welcome the Soviet Armies in the role of host. After that, he listed:
2. to show the whole world our determination to fight the Germans:
3. to resolve the Polish–Soviet conflict by fighting together against Germany:
4. to avenge five years of German repression:
5. by paralysing German forces to facilitate the Soviet encirclement of the city:
6. to obstruct the stabilization of the front along the line of the Vistula:
7. to block the Germans’ intention of taking 100,000 men for building work:
8. to prevent the collapse in military and civilian morale which would have occurred if we had done nothing:
9. to take control of the struggle which, without our leadership, would have broken out spontaneously and chaotically
The military and political leaders in Warsaw held divided opinions. But Bear Cub, Gregory, and Monter had all been in favour, and they carried the day. ‘The commanders and soldiers who fought for Warsaw for sixty-three days’, he believed, ‘were fulfilling their simple duty to the nation.’ There was no word of regret. On the contrary: if the Rising had not been launched, ‘future generations of the Polish nation, and other states and nations, would have to judge us cowards, whose courage failed them at the decisive moment.’
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Bear Cub’s account of how he persuaded Boor after the Capitulation to let him lead the next stage of the Underground struggle fits well with his principled opinions. ‘The battle with Germany’, he claimed to have said, ‘does not finish with the fall of Warsaw.’ Boor had opposed him before the Rising and was opposing him after it. But he ceded the argument on both occasions. And he formally transferred his plenipotentiary powers to him. ‘That same night, I took my leave and left the Staff, not saying a word to anyone, just as Boor had demanded.’
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