Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Forty years after the event, Berman claimed that he had no option but to arrest Anna D. He had received a directive, he said, from Stalin himself. After all, there were many fingers pointed in his direction as a possible ‘Zionist conspirator’. ‘I became the perfect candidate for a [Polish] Slansky,’ he explained.
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In fact, he stayed perfectly loyal and reliable to the last.
By way of a diversion, it is not without relevance to note what Noel Field had been doing at the time of the Warsaw Rising. He was formally employed by the American OSS; but together with Alger Hiss and others he was at Bretton Woods, working on the United Nations project. Indeed, it was Alger Hiss who drafted the UN Charter. Owing to the scepticism of the British, this group of UN planners, which included some of Roosevelt’s closest advisers, worked in close liaison with a team of Soviet experts. When the critical phase of the Rising arrived in the summer of 1944, and Churchill was urging Roosevelt to lean on Stalin hard, it is not difficult to imagine what their advice would have been.
On 31 July 1951, yet another trial began in Warsaw. Ninety-three army officers were charged with various degrees of treachery and of collaboration. It developed into a long series of sub-trials which lasted for three years. The great majority of the defendants were former members of the pre-war officer corps. The chief defendant was Gen. Tabor. At the final count, three of the defendants died during interrogation: thirty-eight were condemned to death, and twenty were executed. It was a foul and bloody story that was carefully timed to open so that the first reports would make the headlines on the morning of the Rising’s seventh anniversary. On 1 August 1951, before any charges had even been discussed, the Communist press was loading the defendants with epithets such as ‘a pack of bandits’, ‘the filthy progeny of crime’, and ‘Pilsudski’s dwarfs’.
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Tabor, who had been well viewed during the war by Allied leaders for his advocacy of close cooperation with the Soviets, had finally fallen foul of his erstwhile friends.
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Needless to say, his Titoist opinions – if that’s what they were – were anathema to Stalin, for whom Tito had become public enemy number one. On 13 August 1951, he was lucky to be handed nothing more than a life sentence. He served five years.
Several men in the ‘Officers’ Case’ had close connections to the Warsaw Rising. One brigadier general, ‘Boguslav’, a graduate of the
École Supérieure de Guerre
in France, had signed the Capitulation on 2 October
1944. He, too, received a life sentence. An infantry officer, ‘Radoslav’, sometime commander of the Home Army’s K-Div., was another sentenced to life, though soon released. The last man to be executed had fought among the victors of Monte Cassino.
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In some respects, the purge of the Polish People’s Army after 1948 resembled Stalin’s attack on his own (Soviet) Red Army after 1936. Very few officers who had served in the Home Army came through unscathed. Yet exceptions did occur. Gen. ‘Krystynek’ had left Warsaw in the entourage of Gen. Boor, and had returned in December 1945. He was untouched. Lt.Col. ‘Iron’ returned from London in 1947, but was left alone and was able to publish his memoirs.
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Suspicions inevitably arose that some sort of price must have been paid.
As the ‘Officers’ Case’ was drawing to a close, the last senior insurgent to stay at large was reaching the end of his own lonely struggle. In later years, the case of Gen. Nile was to become a cause célèbre. It was marked by extreme vindictiveness even by the standards of Stalinist justice. Its details provide eloquent testimony to the procedures of judicial murder. They are contained in the 123 pages of the file for case ‘no. 417/50 versus Fieldorf, Emil August . . .’
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They undoubtedly reflect the treatment which would have awaited Nile’s superiors, such as Anders and Boor who had been condemned
in absentia
, but who had evaded the Communist net. [
BOOR
, p. 572]
Emil August Fieldorf (1895–1953) – pseudonym Nile, alias ‘Valenty’ – had successfully returned from the Soviet Gulag without detection. But he was caught because in applying for registration as a former military officer he had entrusted his true identity to his former regimental commander from 1939. He was not to know that this man, though employed by the Forestry Commission, had gone over to the Communists. He was bundled into a car on the street in Lodz, and driven post-haste to Warsaw. The order for his further detention was signed on 21 November 1950 by Lt.Col. Helena W. from the office of the Supreme Military Prosecutor.
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It cited Article 86.2 of the Military Penal Code: ‘Whoever attempts to change the political system of the Polish State by the use of force is liable to five years’ imprisonment at least or to death.’
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It contained the most disgraceful catalogue of pseudo-accusations that one could invent. No one would ever show that Nile had used force except against the Nazis.
Most of Nile’s twenty-four intensive interrogations took place in Warsaw’s Mokotov Jail. He never succumbed; and after the final interrogation by the Deputy Prosecutor-General, Benjamin W., he pleaded not guilty to all charges. In his capacity as commander of the Home Army’s K-Div. organization, he declared, ‘he had never ordered his subordinates to liquidate or penetrate Soviet, People’s Guard’ or People’s Army partisan units, as he had been busy just fighting the Germans and their collaborators.’
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‘BOOR’
One of General Boor’s sons, who survived the Rising as a two-year-old child in a German-held section of Warsaw, recounts the family’s fortunes
When asked why he hadn’t forewarned his heavily pregnant wife, Irena [née Lemazan-Salins], to leave before the Rising, my father replied that there were countless other pregnant women in Warsaw and there was no way that he could abuse his position for his wife’s benefit. My mother wrote in her unpublished memoirs: ‘Neither of us even considered the possibility of my fleeing the capital when so many others had to stay. My husband came round early on 1 August, and I tried to get in enough condensed milk to last young Adam for six to seven days. The Rising was imminent. The Home Army had about six days’ supplies in hand, which was the time they anticipated before Russian forces would arrive. My husband told me that he would greet the Russians as the host of his sovereign country. Both of us were under no illusions that he might land in a Soviet jail. Other members of the Resistance would stay underground.’
The Rising caught me and my mother living behind enemy lines on Marshal Foch Street in the Polytechnic district. (My mother, officially, was ‘Janina Marynovska’, and I had been registered as the son of a man who later turned out to be a bachelor!) Due to her condition, my mother was unable both to flee and to carry me. Miraculously, we survived the random executions of civilians, and finished up in September in the transit camp at Prushkov. Discharged, we headed for nearby friends. But shortly afterwards, my mother gave birth to my brother George in the most primitive conditions, alone in a derelict shack with no medical assistance. The child was born with Down’s syndrome. He was extremely weak and ill, and due to the absence of medicines, my mother decided to travel to Cracow. He went on to live to the age of forty-nine, a valued and cherished member of the family.
Following the Rising, my father passed through several POW camps, including Colditz. He was appointed Commanderin-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces. He reached London in the spring of 1945 . . .
Meanwhile, the Soviet Army had occupied the whole country, and the NKVD were actively searching for my mother, who was hiding in a country village outside Cracow, drawing charcoal portraits in exchange for food. Against all advice, she decided to escape via Czechoslovakia, and made an audacious dash across the frontier, talking her way past NKVD checkpoints and using my own bawling as a diversion. The British Military Attaché in Pilsen then arranged for a volunteer pilot to fly out to a local field and to pick us up. A picture of us appeared in the London
Evening Standard
with
the by-line ‘British pilot flies the family of General [Boor] to England’. (In 1994, I was invited to meet that pilot, by then the seventy-year-old Johnny Jordan, over tea.) In actual fact, we had not been able to cross the Channel. The British government had put an embargo on our entry to Britain. So we stayed in Brussels until Éamon de Valéra heard of our plight and the family was invited to Ireland. Only then did the British let us in! We were in London by Christmas 1945 and lived at first in Barons Court. The next summer we went on holiday to Banff in Scotland, where my father’s former cavalry regiment [the 9th Uhlans] was stationed. We later moved to Wembley, and I attended school at St Benedict’s in Ealing . . .
My father never talked about the Rising at home. It wasn’t a topic of family conversation. But from my earliest days I never had any doubts about its validity or about its callous betrayal by the Soviets. I never had to be explicitly told. My father always accepted total responsibility for his decision to launch the Rising, and the tragic losses certainly weighed heavily on him. But it was something which he had considered unavoidable if Poland was to have had any chance of freedom. A dedicated patriot, soldier, and horseman, he had planned to retire and run the family estate when events overtook him. He had a strong sense of duty but little personal ambition. A thoroughly modest man, he possessed an excellent sense of humour and was interested in many sports. As far as I know, he only once rode a horse in England. He loved watching football and tennis. He was truly an officer and a gentleman. But to me he was just a father.
1
Adam Komorowski
Nile’s trial
in camera
occupied eight hours at the Warsaw Provincial Court on 16 April 1952. The presiding judge, a woman, had been appointed by the security services. So, too, had the defence lawyer. Prosecutor W. demanded the death sentence under Article 1 of the decree of 31 August 1944 ‘concerning the punishment of Hitlerite–Fascist criminals.’ The verdict was negative. The sentence was to be death by hanging. It stripped the convict of all public rights and of his entire property. A plea for mercy from the condemned man’s wife was rejected. ‘Convict Fieldorf does not deserve mercy.’
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The appeals procedure lasted from May 1952 to February 1953. The Supreme Court upheld the verdict. The party leader, Bierut, declined to recommend clemency; and the Council of State refused a pardon. According to the judges’ opinion, ‘the convict manifested an intensification of criminal will . . . there is no possibility of re-socialization.’ Since by that time he was unable to stand, he listened to his fate lying on a stretcher.
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He was executed by hanging at Mokotov Jail on 24 February 1953. The hangman used a length of common string. Since the bodies of convicts were buried in unmarked mass graves, the exact location of his burial remains unknown.
Some details of the case were no less disturbing than the bare fact that an innocent man had been killed by judicial murder. Everything points to an interpretation which holds that the prosecutors and their minions would not have been satisfied by liquidating a political opponent:
It was not just a matter of taking a man’s life. It was an act of desecration and defilement against a whole organization, a wilful attempt to break people’s pride in belonging to it, and a desire to deprive the defendant of all personal dignity . . . In the case of Gen. Nile, one observes an identity parade of a long list of policemen, lawyers and prosecutors who were responsible, between them, for the murders of hundreds, if not thousands . . .
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Thirty years later, when Berman was interviewed about Nile, he feigned ignorance:
[
INTERVIEWER
]: Was that how Nile died?
BERMAN
: I don’t recall the case.
[
INTERVIEWER
]: Curious . . . None of you gentlemen seems to know the name, although the man was a national hero. He was the head of the Home Army’s Directorate of Subversion K-Div. First the NKVD arrested him under a false name and sent him to Siberia and then the Polish security services arrested him when he got back.
BERMAN
: If he belonged to the Home Army leadership, his case certainly can’t have been dealt with on a low level. Still, it must have passed me by.
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In September 1953, six months after Stalin’s death, the regime signalled a new stage in its programme of repressions by arresting Cardinal Stefan W., the Primate of Poland.
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It was a step which even the Nazis had hesitated to take. Moreover, in the old Polish tradition, the Primate was taken to be the
interrex
, the supreme political authority, whenever the country had lost its legitimate ruler. So the Communists knew that they were risking popular fury. The Primate was incarcerated in a remote monastery in the south, and held incommunicado. The problem, of course, was that the Roman Catholic hierarchy took their orders from the Vatican. They formed part of an international organization which lay beyond Moscow’s control. So if the orders could not be stopped, the people who received them had to be locked up.
The Cardinal’s virtues were many. His reputation was built on the fact that he had been a humble Home Army chaplain during the Warsaw Rising. He was a shepherd who would never leave his flock. Unbeknown to him, however, the security services would never leave him. Long after his death, when the archives of the Security Ministry were opened, it was found that daily reports on the imprisoned Primate were filed by agent ‘Little Bird’, the codename of Sister Maria-Leonia G. This Franciscan nun had been positioned by her controllers to watch over the prisoner’s every movement. On the tenth anniversary of the Rising, she filed her copy as usual: