On Hitler’s instruction, the OKW rapidly issued orders to German formations beyond the Bug to prepare to pull back. Close cooperation between Berlin and Moscow ensured that German withdrawals from the areas allocated to the Soviet Union under the secret protocol were coordinated with the advancing Red Army formations.
The first contact between the unlikely allies took place north of Brest-Litovsk (Brze). And on 22 September the great fortress of Brest-Litovsk was handed over to the Red Army during a ceremonial parade. Unfortunately for the Soviet officers involved, this contact with German officers later made them prime targets for arrest by Beria’s NKVD.
Polish resistance continued as surrounded formations still tried to break out, and isolated soldiers formed irregular groups to fight on in the less accessible areas of forest, marsh and mountain. Roads to the east were choked with refugees, using farm-carts, dilapidated vehicles and even bicycles in their attempt to escape the fighting. ‘The enemy always came from the air,’ wrote a young Polish soldier, ‘and even when they flew very low, they were still beyond the range of our old Mausers. The spectacle of the war rapidly became monotonous; day after day we saw the same scenes: civilians running to save themselves from air raids, convoys dispersing, trucks or carts on fire. The smell along the road was unchanging too. It was the smell of dead horses that no one had bothered to bury and that stank to high heaven. We moved only at night and we learned to sleep while marching. Smoking was forbidden out of fear that the glow of a cigarette could bring down on us the all-powerful Luftwaffe.’
Warsaw meanwhile remained the chief bastion of Polish defiance. Hitler was impatient for the subjugation of the Polish capital, so the Luftwaffe began intensive bombing raids. It faced little opposition in the air and the city lacked effective anti-aircraft defences. On 20 September, the Luftwaffe attacked Warsaw and Modlin with 620 aircraft. And the next day, Göring ordered both the First and the Fourth Air Fleets to mount massive attacks. The bombing continued at maximum strength–the Luftwaffe even brought in Junkers 52 transport planes to drop incendiaries–until Warsaw surrendered on 1 October. The stench from corpses buried by rubble and the bloated bodies of horses in the streets became overwhelming. Some 25,000 civilians and 6,000 soldiers had been killed in these raids.
On 28 September, while Warsaw was under attack, Ribbentrop flew to Moscow again and signed an additional ‘boundary and friendship treaty’ with Stalin making various alterations to the demarcation line. This allowed the Soviet Union almost all of Lithuania in return for a slight increase in German-occupied Polish territory. Ethnic Germans in Soviet occupied territories would be transferred to Nazi areas. Stalin’s regime also handed over many German Communists and other political opponents. Both governments then issued a call for an end to the European war now that the ‘Polish question’ had been resolved.
There can be little doubt about who gained most from the two agreements which formed the Nazi–Soviet pact. Germany, threatened with a naval blockade by Britain, was now able to obtain all it needed to prosecute the war. Apart from everything supplied by the Soviet Union, including grain, oil and manganese used in steel-making, Stalin’s government also acted as a conduit for other materials, especially rubber, which Germany could not purchase abroad.
At the same time as the talks in Moscow, the Soviets began to apply pressure to the Baltic states. On 28 September, a treaty of ‘mutual assistance’ was imposed on Estonia. Then, over the next two weeks Latvia and Lithuania were forced to sign similar treaties. Despite Stalin’s personal assurance that their sovereignty would be respected, all three states were incorporated into the Soviet Union early the following summer, and the NKVD proceeded to deport some 25,000 ‘undesirables’.
While the Nazis accepted Stalin’s takeover of the Baltic states and even his seizure of Bessarabia from Romania, they found his ambitions to control the Black Sea coast and the mouth of the Danube close to the Ploesti oilfields not merely provocative but threatening.
Isolated Polish resistance continued well into October, but the scale of the defeat was savage. The Polish armed forces fighting the Germans are estimated to have lost 70,000 killed, 133,000 wounded and 700,000 captured. Total German casualties ran to 44,400, of whom 11,000 were fatal. The small Polish air force had been annihilated, but the Luftwaffe’s losses of 560 aircraft during the campaign, mainly from crashes and ground-fire, were surprisingly heavy. The available casualty estimates from the Soviet invasion are chilling. The Red Army is said to have lost 996 men killed and 2,002 wounded, while the Poles are said to have suffered 50,000 fatal casualties, without any figure for wounded. Such a disparity can perhaps only be explained by executions, and may well include the massacres perpetrated the following spring, including that of the Katy Forest.
Hitler did not declare the death of the Polish state immediately. He hoped that October to encourage the British and the French to come to an agreement. The lack of an Allied offensive in the west to help the Poles made him think that the British and especially the French did not really want to continue the war. On 5 October, after taking the salute at a victory parade in Warsaw with Generalmajor Erwin Rommel beside him, he spoke to foreign journalists. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘You have seen the ruins of Warsaw. Let that be a warning to those statesmen in London and Paris who still think of continuing the war.’ The next day, he announced a ‘peace offer’ in the Reichstag. But when this was rejected by both Allied governments, and once it became clear that the Soviet Union was determined to eradicate any Polish identity in its zone, Hitler finally resolved to destroy Poland completely.
Poland under German occupation was divided between its Generalgouvernement in the centre and south-west and those areas which were to be incorporated into the Reich (Danzig-West Prussia and East Prussia in the north, the Wartheland in the west and Upper Silesia in the south). A massive programme of ethnic cleansing began to empty the latter ‘Germanized’ areas. They were to be colonized by Volksdeutsche from the Baltic states, Romania and elsewhere in the Balkans. Polish cities were renamed. Łód was called Litzmannstadt after a German general killed near there in the First World War. Pozna returned to its Prussian name of Posen, and became the capital of the Warthegau.
The Catholic Church in Poland, a symbol of the country’s patriotism, was relentlessly persecuted through the arrest and deportation of priests. In an attempt to eliminate Polish culture and destroy a future leadership, schools and universities were closed. Only the most basic education would be permitted, sufficient only for a helot class. The professors and staff at Kraków University were deported in November to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Polish political prisoners were sent to a former cavalry barracks at Owicim, which was renamed Auschwitz.
Nazi Party officials began selecting large numbers of Poles for labour in Germany as well as young women to work as domestic servants. Hitler told the army commander-in-chief General Walther von Brauchitsch, they wanted ‘cheap slaves’ and to clear the ‘rabble’ out of the newly acquired German territory. Blond children who corresponded to Aryan ideals were seized and sent back to Germany for adoption. Albert Förster, the Gauleiter (or regional leader) of Danzig-West Prussia, however, outraged Nazi purists when he permitted a massive reclassification of Poles as ethnic Germans. For the Poles concerned, however humiliating and distasteful, this redesignation of their origins offered the only way to avoid deportation and the loss of their homes. The men, however, soon found themselves conscripted into the Wehrmacht.
Hitler issued an amnesty order on 4 October to troops who had killed prisoners and civilians. They were presumed to have acted ‘from bitterness over atrocities committed by Poles’. Many officers were uneasy at what they saw as a loosening of military discipline. ‘We have seen and witnessed wretched scenes in which German soldiers burn and plunder, murder, and loot without thinking about it,’ an artillery battalion commander wrote. ‘Grown men, who without being conscious of what they were doing–and without any scruples–contravene laws and instru
ctions and the honour of the German soldier.’
Generalleutnant Johannes Blaskowitz, the commander-in-chief of the Eighth Army, protested vehemently at the killing of civilians by the SS and their auxiliaries–the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz. Hitler, on hearing of his memorandum, said in a fury that ‘you can’t run a war on Salvation Army lines’. Any other objections from the army were also dealt with in scathing terms. Yet many German officers still believed that Poland did not deserve to exist. Hardly any had objected to the invasion on moral grounds. As former members of the Freikorps in the violent chaos which followed the First World War, some of the older officers had been involved in bitter fighting against the Poles in frontier battles, especially in Silesia.
In a number of ways the Polish campaign and its aftermath became a trial run for Hitler’s subsequent Rassenkrieg, or race war against the Soviet Union. Some 45,000 Polish and Jewish civilians were shot, mainly by ordinary German soldiers. The SS Einsatzgruppen machine-gunned the inmates of mental asylums. An Einsatzgruppe had been allocated to the rear area of each army, under the codename Operation Tannenberg, to capture and even kill aristocrats, judges, prominent journalists, professors and any other person who might provide some form of leadership for a Polish resistance movement in the future. On 19 September, SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich told General der Artillerie Franz Halder, the army chief of staff, quite openly that there would be ‘a clear-out: Jews, intelligentsia, priesthood, aristocracy’. At first the terror was chaotic, especially that carried out by the ethnic German militia, but towards the end of the year it became more coherent and directed.
Although Hitler never wavered in his hatred of the Jews, the industrial genocide which began in 1942 had not always been part of his plan. He exulted in his obsessive anti-semitism and established the Nazi mindset that Europe had to be ‘cleansed’ of all Jewish influence. But his plans before the war had not included a murderous annihilation. They had concentrated on creating an unbearable oppression which would force Jews to emigrate.
Nazi policy on the ‘Jewish question’ had fluctuated. In fact the very term ‘policy’ is misleading when one considers the institutional disorder of the Third Reich. Hitler’s dismissive attitude towards administration permitted an extraordinary proliferation of competing departments and ministries. Their rivalries, especially those between the Gauleiters and other Nazi Party officials, the SS, and the army, produced an astonishingly wasteful lack of cohesion which was totally at variance with the regime’s image of ruthless efficiency. Seizing on a random comment from the Führer, or trying to second-guess his wishes, competitors for his favour would initiate programmes without consulting other interested organizations.
On 21 September 1939, Heydrich issued an order laying down ‘preliminary measures’ for dealing with Poland’s Jewish population, which, at about three and a half million before the invasion, had represented 10 per cent of the population, the highest proportion in Europe. The Soviet zone held about one and a half million, a figure which was increased by the 350,000 Jews who had fled eastwards in front of the German armies. Heydrich ordered that those who still remained on German territory were to be concentrated in larger cities with good rail links. A massive movement of population was envisaged. On 30 October, Himmler gave instructions that all Jews in the Warthegau were to be forcibly transported to the Generalgouvernement. Their houses would then be given to Volksdeutsche settlers, who had never lived within the borders of the Reich and whose spoken German was often said to be incomprehensible.
Hans Frank, the overbearing and corrupt Nazi bully who ran the Generalgouvernement for his own profit from the royal castle in Kraków, was angry when told to prepare for the reception of several hundred thousand Jews as well as displaced Poles. No plan had been made to house or feed the victims of this forced migration, and nobody had thought what to do with them. In theory, those Jews fit enough would be used for forced labour. The rest would be confined in temporary ghettos in the larger cities until they could be resettled. Jews trapped in the ghettos, deprived of money and with little food, were in many cases left to die of starvation and disease. Although not yet a programme of outright annihilation, it represented an important step in that direction. And as the difficulties of resettling Jews in an as yet undesignated ‘colony’ proved greater than imagined, the idea soon began to grow that killing them might be easier than moving them around.
While the looting, killing and chaotic conditions in Nazi-occupied areas made life appalling, it was scarcely better for Poles on the Soviet side of the new internal frontier.
Stalin’s hatred of Poland went back to the Soviet–Polish War and the defeat of the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw in 1920, which the Poles referred to as the Miracle on the Vistula. Stalin had been strongly criticized for his part in the failure of the 1st Cavalry Army to support the forces of Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, whom he had executed on false charges in 1937 at the start of his purge of the Red Army. During the 1930s, the NKVD targeted as spies the large number of Poles in the Soviet Union, mostly Communist.
Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD during the Great Terror, became obsessed with imagined Polish conspiracies. Poles in the NKVD were purged, and in Order 00485 of 11 August 1937 Poles were implicitly defined as enemies of the state. When Yezhov reported after the first twenty days of arrests, torture and executions, Stalin praised his work: ‘Very good! Keep on digging up and cleaning out this Polish filth. Eliminate it in the interests of the Soviet Union.’ In the anti-Polish drive during the Great Terror, 143,810 people were arrested for espionage and 111,091 executed. Poles were about forty times more likely to be executed during this period than other Soviet citizens.
Under the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which had ended the Soviet–Polish War, victorious Poland had incorporated western parts of Belorussia and Ukraine. It then settled them with many of Marshal Józef Pisudski’s legionaries. But following the Red Army’s invasion in the autumn of 1939, more than five million Poles found themselves under Soviet rule, which treated Polish patriotism as counter-revolutionary by definition. The NKVD arrested 109,400 people, most of whom were sent to the labour camps of the Gulag, while 8,513 of them were executed. The Soviet authorities targeted all those who might play a role in keeping Polish nationalism alive, including landowners, lawyers, teachers, priests, journalists and officers. It was a deliberate policy of class warfare and national decapitation. Eastern Poland, occupied by the Red Army, was to be split and incorporated into the Soviet Union, the northern region becoming part of Belorussia and the southern joined to Ukraine.
Mass deportations to Siberia or central Asia began on 10 February 1940. The NKVD rifle regiments rounded up 139,794 Polish civilians in temperatures below 30 degrees Centigrade. The first wave of families selected were roused by shouts and the banging of rifle butts on their door. Red Army soldiers or Ukrainian militia, under the command of an NKVD officer, would barge in and point their guns, yelling threats. Beds were overturned and cupboards searched, allegedly for hidden weapons. ‘You are Polish elite,’ the NKVD man told the Adamczyk family. ‘You are Polish lords and masters. You are enemies of the people.’ A more frequent formula of the NKVD was ‘Once a Pole, always a kulak’–the Soviet term of abuse for a rich and reactionary peasant.
Families were given little time to prepare for the terrible journey, abandoning their homes and farms for good. Most felt paralysed by the prospect. Fathers and sons were forced to kneel facing the wall, while the womenfolk were allowed to gather possessions, such as a sewing machine to earn money wherever they were taken, cooking utensils, bedding, family photographs, a child’s rag doll and school books. Some Soviet soldiers were clearly embarrassed by their task and murmured apologies. A few families were allowed to milk their cow before they left or to kill some chickens or a piglet as food for the three-week journey in cattle wagons. Everything else had to be left behind. The Polish diaspora had begun.
3
F
rom Phoney War to Blitzkrieg
SEPTEMBER 1939–MARCH 1940
Once it became evident that massed enemy bombers were not going to flatten London and Paris immediately, life returned almost to nor mal. The war had ‘a strange, somnambulistic quality’, wrote a commentator on daily life in London. Apart from the risk in the blackout of walking into a lamp-post, the greatest danger was being run down by a motorcar. In London, over 2,000 pedestrians were killed in the last four months of 1939. The absolute darkness encouraged some young couples to have sexual intercourse standing up in shop doorways, a sport which soon became a subject for music-hall jokes. Cinemas and theatres gradually reopened. In London, pubs were packed. In Paris, cafés and restaurants were full as Maurice Chevalier sang the hit of the moment, ‘Paris sera toujours Paris’. The fate of Poland had almost been forgotten.
While the war on land and in the air languished, the war at sea intensified. For the British, it had begun with a tragedy. On 10 September 1939, the submarine HMS Triton sank another submarine, HMS Oxley, in the belief that it was a U-boat. The first German U-boat was sunk on 14 September by the escort destroyers to the carrier HMS Ark Royal. But on 17 September the U-39 managed to sink the obsolete carrier HMS Courageous. Nearly a month later, the Royal Navy suffered a far greater blow when U-47 penetrated the defences of Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak. Britain’s confidence in the strength of its navy was deeply shaken.
The two pocket battleships loose in the Atlantic, the Deutschland and the Admiral Graf Spee, had meanwhile been given permission to start the war in earnest. But the Kriegsmarine made a grave mistake on 3 October, when the Deutschland seized an American freighter as a prize of war. Following the brutal invasion of Poland, this helped to swing public opinion in the United States against the Neutrality Act, which forbade the sale of arms to a belligerent, and in favour of the Allies who needed to purchase them.
The Second World War Page 6