by George Bruce
This ‘evil’ sprang from the historical role of Warsaw in the nation’s 150-year fight for independence, which began with the Kosciuszko Insurrection of 1794. Polish soldier, democrat and reformer, Kosciuszko had sailed to America in 1776 to join the American revolt against British rule. He became a colonel of engineers, and finally chief engineer of General Green’s Southern Army. For his part in victory, Congress promoted him to brigadier-general and awarded him a large grant of land. But he felt compelled to return to Poland in 1784 to fight under Prince Poniatowski against the Russians and to lead the uprising of 1794 against them. The Warsaw Uprising of 1794 did not actually launch the Kosciuszko Insurrection of that year but it was of vital importance for its alliance between the lower strata of Warsaw artisans, led by the shoemaker Jan Killinski, and the Jacobin military intelligentsia of the day.
A similar alliance was the November 1830 insurrection against Tsar Nicholas I’s rule and occupation, launched by the Warsaw School of Infantry cadets. Again, the Warsaw revolutionaries played an important part in the nationwide rising of 1863. Later, the Polish Socialist Party led the Warsaw proletariat in the anti-Russian uprising of 1904-7. In trying to defend the city against the Nazis in 1939 the citizens of Warsaw had followed this vital tradition; and inevitably Hans Frank’s efforts to crush every growth of Polish resistance were in the first place directed against Warsaw and its citizens.
Warsaw was also Poland’s cultural centre, with an influence in national life far greater than its four per cent of national population, or one million, three hundred thousand people, suggested. It held about nine hundred schools and forty colleges and scientific institutes. Its professors and students amounted to forty per cent of the country’s scholars, and fifty per cent in the field of technology. More than half of the total of Polish periodicals were published in Warsaw, while its libraries and archives held fifty-six per cent of the nation’s valuable books, documents and papers.[4] Industrially, the capital was a potential powerhouse for the Nazis, with ninety thousand factory workers and twenty-three thousand independent artisan workshops, amounting to twelve per cent of the national total. In order to gear this to their war machine the Nazis needed to crush armed resistance there.
Everyone capable of leadership in the capital was listed by the German Security Police, specifically its Department IV, the Gestapo.[5] The list included Poles and Jews, scholars and artists, army officers, civil servants, students, schoolteachers, artisans and politically conscious labourers. Arrests of civilians began immediately after the surrender of the capital, when the Gestapo raided many houses and seized the first batch of those who were to disappear for ever. Among them was the Lord Mayor, Stefan Starzynski, who had done so much to organize resistance in September.
Manhunts, street round-ups, street executions and mass executions in the forests soon followed. They were part of a campaign of genocide laid down in Hitler’s decree on ‘the strengthening of Germandom’ of 7 October 1939, which demanded ‘the elimination of the harmful influence of nationally alien population groups constituting a danger to the Reich…’[6]
The Nazis took over two Warsaw prisons to carry out Hitler’s plans. These were the Pawiak prison and the women’s section known as the Serbia, kept solely for political prisoners in the hands of the Security Police. But men and women suspected of links with the underground were taken first to the Gestapo Headquarters in Szuch Avenue, re-named Strasse der Polizei. Here, in the former Polish Ministry of Religion and Education, they were kept for days or for weeks, and tortured, whatever their age, to obtain information.
Fear and anguish gripped the city. Green-uniformed security police and Nazi Death’s Head battalions started to comb the streets at night with the names and addresses of outstanding men and women obtained from official Polish files. Nobody felt safe. In a desperate migration to try to escape the executioners thousands of people criss-crossed the city shortly before the curfew hour to an alternative sleeping-place usually in the house of a friend. At night, recalled Stefan Korbonski, one of the leaders of the Peasant Party who had escaped captivity in the Russian zone to return to Warsaw, the deserted streets echoed to the Nazi patrols’ heavy footsteps. Behind blacked-out windows the city kept vigil. No one knew where the searches and arrests were to take place. Restlessness and anxiety made sleep impossible.
Hungry, often without work or homes in this stricken city that lacked gas or electricity and where horses and carts did duty for the once noisy and familiar red trams, the people of Warsaw seemed without hope in the autumn of 1939. But already resistance was stirring. First steps towards the formation of the Secret State and Army had been taken.
Chapter Two: Birth of the Secret Army
On 27 September 1939, while Nazi phosphorus bombs spread streams of fire over the roofs of old Warsaw and heavy artillery shells crashed indiscriminately into workers’ homes and eighteenth-century palaces, Lieutenant-General Rommel, Polish C-in-C of the Warsaw region, sent urgently for Major-General Tokarzewski. This dynamic officer with piercing blue eyes had returned to take part in the defence of the capital after German Panzers had routed his infantry division in the west earlier in the campaign. The two men met in a map-lined room of the War Department building in Pilsudski Square shortly before it was blown to pieces; and General Rommel, on behalf of the Polish Government about to seek refuge in Rumania, authorized Tokarzewski to set up and command the military underground.
The Secret Army was born there in Warsaw, within sight of the eternal flame to Poland’s unknown soldier, which was still burning brightly, though most of the Doric columns on each side of it were shattered.
Tokarzewski promised solemnly that he would ‘assume full responsibility for the organization of armed resistance against the occupying powers, and the preparation of the country’s moral and physical readiness to begin open warfare when conditions were favourable’.[7]
Tokarzewski’s hard and dangerous task was made more difficult by Poland’s political leaders during the last two decades, who had alienated the majority of those people to whom he would now have to turn for popular support. After the First World War, a stormy period of weak, short-lived governments was ended when Marshal Pilsudski seized power with a military coup d’état in May 1926. Forming a ‘non-party’ centre bloc, Pilsudski had then steered an uneasy course between dictatorship and democracy. Aided by a group of ‘colonels’ who governed as he decreed, he became the nation’s ‘moral dictator’. Believing the USSR to be Poland’s number one enemy, he nevertheless opposed German pressure to join a campaign against her. He imposed a strongly authoritarian constitution on Poland in 1935 and died a month later.
His group of near-fascist colonels then passed legislation reducing the people’s electoral power and moving nearer to a totalitarian system. As a result, the Socialist and Peasant parties boycotted the 1935 elections; only about 46 per cent of the electorate voted. The Government won, but lacked real popular support.
In 1936 General Smigly-Rydz was promoted to Marshal and thrust forward as Pilsudski’s successor. He fostered the growth of the Camp of National Unity, a Catholic, nationalist and anti-Semitic organization, which the Left parties saw as fascist and opposed in every way. The great ten-day strike of August 1937 during which the Peasant Party, supported by Socialist strikes in the towns, stopped the movement of all food supplies, was the climax of this opposition. Street fighting followed between the army, the police and the strikers, with a heavy death toll.
Marshal Smigly-Rydz eventually gave in to the opposition to fascism and the so-called Camp of National Unity was checked. A year later, in September 1938, President Moscicki dissolved Parliament, but he refused to allow measures of electoral reform already passed to take effect in the forthcoming elections.
The outcome was that in this crucial period, with war already looming on the horizon, the Opposition parties boycotted the elections. As a result they presented the Government with an easy victory. However, in the municipal elections which foll
owed, the Opposition parties reversed this false achievement by winning 639 seats against the Government’s 383, a clear index of national feeling. But Marshal Smigly-Rydz held on to power throughout the ominous spring and summer of 1939.
Poland therefore entered the war with a totally unrepresentative Government, backed by the Army but opposed by the nation. Swift defeat followed and despite its heroic resistance a flood of bitter feeling against the Army swept the nation — a mixture of despair, cynicism and disbelief. Amid this revulsion of feeling, Tokarzewski had now to begin creating a new underground military force. It was no easy assignment, working under the noses of the triumphant Nazis.
He enrolled some two hundred officers willing to stay on and help. In disguise, hiding from the ever-watchful enemy, carrying false identity papers when in the streets, they worked hard, and by December 1939 had created the framework of a secret military underground throughout both the German and the Russian zones of Poland, with headquarters in Warsaw.
But a skeleton command of officers was not enough. Tokarzewski wanted popular support and to get this he had to obtain the backing of the three main pre-war Opposition political parties and their para-military organizations. These organizations could supply the Secret Army, which he had named Service For Polish Victory, with large numbers of loyal young soldiers. So early in October he turned to the political leaders still in Warsaw.
One or two of them had ventured cautiously to meet again, despite the Nazi threat of death by torture or a firing squad for political activities. Stefan Korbonski,[8] a leader of the Peasant Party, had escaped from captivity in the Russian zone to this new and quite unfamiliar Warsaw — dangerous, war-scarred, with the empty, blackened window-frames of crippled houses gaping on to streets where Germans in grey-green uniforms barked angry commands.
One morning in October Korbonski made his way to the modest four-roomed apartment of Mathew Rataj, former Speaker of the Polish Parliament and a leader of the Peasant Party, who had already become a focus of secret political activity. Rataj, a man in his late sixties whose fine-drawn features had grown gaunt and his hair white since the Polish defeat, welcomed Korbonski cordially, but made him promise secrecy. He then revealed that with Niedzialkowski, the Socialist Party leader, he was organizing an underground civil authority throughout the country in defiance of the German administration. It would be composed of the main parties of the pre-war political Opposition and exclude altogether the bankrupt right-wing parties of the former Government.
Inspired by the prospect of armed struggle, Korbonski met Rataj frequently after this to help plan the structure of the secret civil authority. He warned the old man of the danger of Gestapo arrest which as a known political leader with many visitors he obviously risked. Rataj shrugged. ‘What can I do?’ he exclaimed. ‘I cannot keep the doors locked all day long. I might move to another place, but I won’t do it. This is my home.’[9]
Two Gestapo officers arrived at his home a few days later and bundled him off in such a hurry that he had barely time to dress. Shocked by the arrest and aware of the urgent need to discover the reason for it in case the underground had already been discovered, Korbonski boldly walked into the former Ministry of Education building in Szuch Avenue, then the Gestapo Headquarters, and pretending to deliver a parcel for Rataj politely asked why he had been taken in. Korbonski was lucky to escape with his skin; he learned nothing, but came away convinced that the arrest was a routine matter not linked with suspicion that the underground movement had begun.
Korbonski met Niedzialkowski some days later by appointment at 8 AM in a café. The Socialist leader was a burly man with a mop of dark hair, double chin and frameless spectacles, who kissed the hands of the two pretty waitresses and cracked jokes with them before conferring with Korbonski. In a stage whisper he then invited him to deputize for the unfortunate Rataj. Korbonski agreed, and learned from him that the political leaders were trying to form a political committee which could be linked with the burgeoning military underground.
Tokarzewski, who saw Poland as an independent social democracy after liberation, had lost no time in making contact with Niedzialkowski. Some agreement was achieved, but the politicians complained that the military wanted to control everything, which ran counter to their wish to keep the underground civil-political authority free of military influence. Niedzialkowski, zealous and active, played the key part in these negotiations.
But on 23 December the Gestapo called at his apartment and took him off to Szuch Avenue at midday for a preliminary interrogation. They then let him go and ordered him to report again the following day. Niedzialkowski inexplicably missed this chance to go into hiding. Some vestiges of trust in the Germans still remained, for Niedzialkowski actually went back. He was imprisoned, and some time later shot in a mass execution in Palmyra Forest.
To lose both him and the no less able Mathew Rataj in a few weeks was a setback, but the men of the infant underground accepted their perilous situation and meeting as and when they could, always in different houses, achieved some accord. By the end of the year the secret underground state had taken first form in the Political Liaison Committee, made up of representatives of the three main parties. General Tokarzewski was also a member and together they drew up the Statute of the Service for Polish Victory,[10] which was an agreement on general aims between the political and military underground.
It charged that the organization should ‘undertake a decisive and unrelenting struggle against the invader in every field of his activity… until the day of liberation of Poland within her pre-war boundaries.’ Secondly, it should reorganize the Polish Army; and thirdly, create the nucleus of a temporary national authority in Poland. These aims were amplified in an Ideological Declaration which proclaimed:
The struggle for the independence of Poland against the Germans and the Russians continues. It will continue until our final victory is achieved. Every Pole has the duty and the honourable right to take part in this struggle. One of the conditions of its success and of the effective use of all our forces is the uniformity of its leadership over the entire territory of Poland. Subordination to the leadership and loyal cooperation with it are the least we expect today from every citizen.
Significantly, the declaration added that ‘our enemies are all totalitarian ideologies, and, today, in the first place, Hitlerism and Bolshevism’. Finally, it promised that the structural foundation of the Polish state and its social and economic system ‘will be decided by Parliament, assembled on a wide democratic basis after the restoration of independence’.
Thus the Declaration demanded uncompromising hostility both to Nazi Germany and to Soviet Russia, with no hint of willingness to compromise for the sake of national survival. This was called the ‘two enemies’ doctrine. And the leaders of the Secret Army would cling to it to the very end.
But meantime a new Polish Government had been set up in Paris and was planning a rival underground in Poland. When the former Government was interned in Rumania and therefore unable to govern, the President had resigned in favour of the Speaker of the Senate, Ladislas Raczkiewicz, who had already gone to Paris.
The new President had appointed as Prime Minister General Sikorski, a distinguished soldier but no friend of the military dictatorship which had led the country to defeat. Sikorski formed a government composed mainly of politicians of the pre-war Opposition parties who had escaped to France. It set up a ‘parliament’ of nineteen members and raised the banner of the Polish Armed Forces, drawing on thousands of soldiers from the country’s defeated armies who had sought freedom abroad. These troops formed the nucleus of the Polish divisions who fought in Norway, North Africa, Italy, France and Germany.
In October General Sikorski, C-in-C of the Polish Armed Forces as well as Prime Minister, now formed the second secret armed force in Poland, the Union for Armed Struggle. He nominated the right-wing General Sosnkowski as chairman of a committee of ministers responsible for Home Affairs, and Commander-in-Chief of the U
FAS, though subject to his own orders. The Statute of the UFAS declared that its task was to ‘cooperate in the reconstruction of the Polish State through the means of war’.[11] It was to be the only secret armed force in Poland, all other underground groups were to place themselves under its command; it was to embrace the whole nation, be above party politics and base itself on ‘strictly understood principles of hierarchy, obedience and discipline’.
General Sosnkowski, whom he had chosen to command the Union for Armed Struggle, was not welcomed by the left-wing political parties upon whom the movement depended. A tall, burly soldier with bushy eyebrows, a sharp manner and an inborn distaste for politicians, he had been Minister for Military Affairs under Marshal Pilsudski during Poland’s rout of the Bolsheviks in 1920, had been anti-Soviet ever since and was rigidly against any kind of collaboration with Soviet Russia.
Two military underground organizations now existed in Poland: Tokarzewski’s Service for Polish Victory and the Union for Armed Struggle, formed by Sikorski’s Government-in-exile. ‘Already, today, if the need arose, it would be possible actively to take the field and by so doing inspire the masses,’ Tokarzewski reported to Sikorski in optimistic tone on 14 December 1939.[12] But Sikorski at first jealously refused to recognize his organization and finally did so only with reluctance, on condition that it was wholly subordinated to his own Union for Armed Struggle. At a meeting on 26 February 1940 Tokarzewski and the political leaders in Warsaw accordingly all swore to support the work and plans of the UFAS as the sole secret military organization called into being by the Government of the Republic.