The Warsaw Uprising: 1 August - 2 October 1944 (Major Battles of World War Two)

by George Bruce

  For this reason he personally kept command over the place and timing of the Uprising. ‘On account of the possible worsening of our relations with the Soviets,’ he told Rowecki in a message later,[29] ‘I am keeping in my own hands the power to decide on whether the rising is to be declared in the two eastern belts. If the Soviet attitude to us should show itself to be openly hostile, I will only order the coming out of the civil authorities, withdrawing all our armed forces to the heart of the country to avoid their destruction by the Russians.’

  The rising against the Germans in the eastern territories would obviously depend upon the state of Poland’s relations with Russia at that time. Any threat of hostilities between them would cause a withdrawal of the Home Army to Central Poland and the probable application of Rowecki’s plan for defending the country.

  But soon Poland would lose General Sikorski for ever and without his wise leadership her fortunes would begin to waver. For the Communists would return to Poland as an organized party determined, with the aid of Soviet bayonets, to seize power.

  Chapter Four: Two tragedies — the Ghetto and Katyn

  Early in January 1942 a Red Air Force transport aircraft flew westwards through the night over Poland. It carried a team of Polish Communist activists, members of a special ‘Initiative Group’ who had been making preparations in Moscow after training and studying at the Marxist-Leninist school at Puszkino there. Led by Marceli Nowotko and Pawel Finder, former members of the pre-war Polish Communist Party, they leapt out into the darkness and parachuted down on to the snowy plains some miles from Warsaw. They had orders from the Red Army Staff’s 4th Department, and from the Comintern, to form a new workers’ party to absorb and control the various independent Marxist groups in Poland.

  Nowotko and company met at a prearranged rendezvous the Warsaw Communists and Soviet special NKVD agents. Before the end of January they had formed the Polish Workers’ Party, which was to seize power after the war by Moscow-dictated shock tactics and rule Poland as a Soviet satellite. Its first manifesto, issued in January 1942, demanded a ‘free and independent Poland in which the nation will decide its own fate… in which there will be no fascism, no landowners’ rule of slavery, no concentration camps, no national oppression, no hunger, poverty and unemployment’.[30]

  But behind this façade of political idealism the new party urged that Russia should be given the large slice of eastern Poland that she wanted, including the old Polish cultural cities of Lwow and Wilno; and that Poland should be compensated in the west by the ancient Piast lands, to be seized from a defeated Germany. The manifesto added that the foundation of Poland’s security must be an alliance with the Soviet Union.

  Most Poles, however, strongly disliked and mistrusted the USSR, who had invaded their country twice within the space of twenty years — in 1920 and 1939. The manifesto therefore failed in its object of rallying thousands of Poles of left-wing views to the new party’s standard.

  In the first months of 1942 the new party formed a revolutionary military arm, the People’s Guard. Dedicated to systematic guerrilla warfare, and advised by a Soviet colonel whose name or alias was Glebov,[31] it called for the speedy intensification of operations against the Germans so as to help the Red Army, a policy in stark contrast to that of General Rowecki and the Home Army.

  Sikorski feared that premature large-scale operations against the Germans would cause them heavy losses and frustrate plans for an uprising at the moment of Germany’s collapse before the entry of the Red Army into Poland. While Rowecki was therefore training and building up the Secret Army’s strength he was ordered to limit it to sabotage and minor diversionary operations.

  Small People’s Guard detachments went into action during the second six months of 1942. Equipped with arms supplied by Soviet partisans or captured from the Germans, they derailed twenty military trains, destroyed seven bridges, freed a few hundred men and women from prisons and camps, and fought twenty-seven actions with Nazi units. Though not comparable with the extensive Home Army sabotage at this time, it was a beginning.

  Throughout Poland, meantime, and in Warsaw especially mass arrests grew daily more frequent. Ever larger numbers of people were seized on the streets, never to be seen again. On the night of 27 May 1942, some 201 men and twenty-two women, arrested at random earlier, were herded into lorries at Pawiak prison and driven to the village of Magdelenka, twenty-five miles south of Warsaw. There SS firing squads shot them in a near-by pinewood. Villagers testified that the SS men drove off singing.

  On 11 June 1942 the underground Information Bulletin under the headline ‘Mass Murder Continues’ reported ‘rumours circulating in Warsaw that some fifty prisoners were shot on Corpus Christi (4 June). This brings the total number of persons murdered within one week to over 250.’

  In July 1942 the Nazis began the worst crime of all, the so-called ‘liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto’, that small area in the city surrounded by walls eight feet high guarded by German sentries, inside which some 400,000 Jews, collected from all over German-occupied Europe, were forced to live in horrifying conditions. Five thousand or more Jewish men, women and children were every day transported from there to the Treblinka concentration camp and the gas chambers. By 8 August 1942 more than 150,000 Jews had been massacred.

  Stefan Rowecki ordered the chief of the Home Army section which arranged help for Jews to offer arms, ammunition and a diversionary attack on the city, to be coordinated with a Jewish rising. But the orthodox Jewish leaders, mostly elderly men, preferred appeasement, arguing that if they were obedient and docile the Nazis would kill fewer Jews. Confronted with this mistaken decision, Rowecki nevertheless set in hand sabotage of railway links with the German extermination camps, to try to delay the transports as much as possible. But the Germans used guarded road convoys, too. By 10 September 1942, as the whole world was later stunned to hear, only about 30,000 Jews were left alive — officially — though in fact another 40,000 still survived in secret underground passages and rooms.

  The survivors, young Zionists, Socialists and Communists, formed the Underground Jewish Militant Organization, determined to fight the Nazis the moment they resumed their genocide policy.

  Rowecki ordered Colonel Chrusciel, Home Army commander for Warsaw, to arrange for as much arms and ammunition as could be spared to be smuggled in to the Jewish militants together with a tactical plan for the Ghetto’s defence and materials for the manufacture of anti-tank and hand-grenades.

  On 16 February 1943 Himmler ordered the total destruction of the Ghetto and all its inhabitants. Just over four weeks later, at dawn on 19 April, Nazi troops commanded by SS-Oberführer von Sammern-Frankenegg, later relieved by SS-Brigadeführer Jurgen Stroop, marched in to remove the remaining Jewish residents. The Jewish militants met them with a hail of fire, routed an SS company in battle order, stopped two armoured cars with anti-tank grenades and forced two more to retreat.

  But on Easter Monday evening the Germans brought in batteries of field artillery and with salvoes which rattled the city windows began systematically to shell the defended areas. For a week Jews fought Nazis in bitter house-to-house battles, retreating step by step as gunfire and flame-throwers razed their strong-points.

  Picked Home Army units under Rowecki’s personal command made diversionary attacks on the German rear-guard to enable the Jewish defenders either to escape or to strengthen their positions, but without decisive effect. By Saturday almost all the young Jews had lost their lives in the struggle. Only isolated strong-points held out, fighting bitterly until 16 May 1943. Stroop then reported his assignment completed. Daily rail transports began to leave Warsaw again for the gas chambers. Some fifty-six thousand Jews died or were captured in this last operation, in burning houses, under the wreckage of blown-up buildings, in the fighting or afterwards in the gas chambers.[32]

  The Secret Army did not take these Nazi acts of terror passively. Sabotage and armed diversionary operations were already on the increase and on 27
April 1942 General Sikorski in a radio message ordered the Home Army to make special efforts to inflict the greatest possible losses on the enemy.

  On 19 May 1942 members of the Socialist Combat Organization blew up with a time-bomb a casino frequented by German officers near the Gestapo Headquarters in Szuch Avenue. On 17 June a number of Gestapo were wounded in a gun-fight when they raided the premises of the secret weekly Rampart in a plumber’s shop. On the night of 24 May the Home Army blew up a building into which the German Kriminalpolizei were moving. A sabotage squad set afire a petrol and lubricants depot in the Praga district, burning some 300,000 litres of fuel for the Wehrmacht. A few weeks later on 23 July 1942 fifteen army lorries were destroyed by fire in a Warsaw garage on Jagiellonska Street. On 30 September, Home Army sabotage groups burned to the ground a factory in the Warsaw Zoliborz district making airscrews for the Luftwaffe.

  There were also larger-scale operations. Not long after midnight on 8 October 1942 Warsaw was shaken by a series of heavy explosions rumbling around the city’s suburbs. Many people took refuge in cellars and shelters in the belief that the Red Air Force was bombing the city. In fact, seven Secret Army, including two women’s squads, all commanded by Captain Lewandowski, had simultaneously blown up every one of the railway tracks leading out of Warsaw, derailing several trains, paralysing transport to the Eastern Front and stopping an urgent German supply and ammunition convoy destined for Stalingrad.

  The Nazis intensified their reprisals. In revenge for the Secret Army’s sabotage of the railway lines fifty suspected Communists were hanged. Then during four days of January 1943 alone more than 35,000 men and women were seized and packed off to concentration camps, or to work as slave-labourers in Germany. Even boys and girls were dragged out of trams or railway waiting-rooms into waiting lorries. Often armed SS detachments surrounded entire blocks of houses, paraded the inhabitants, picked out the most useful-looking ones and marched them off.

  The Poles were thirsting for revenge, but Rowecki and the Secret Army command were still held back by the order to conserve their forces. ‘Terror should be answered by terror and violence by an armed fight,’ shouted the Communist underground paper Freedom Tribune. But the Home Army’s Information Bulletin Number 29 warned that the time would come for a great Polish guerrilla action, ‘not when it suits the purpose of our Communist neighbour, but at a time when it will be purposeful from our own point of view’.

  Underground fighters of two opposing factions were now at the beginning of a struggle in Poland against both the Nazis and each other. The Home Army, commanded by General Rowecki, backed by the Government-in-exile and the majority of the Polish people, was conserving its strength for an uprising with the object of installing a parliamentary government loyal to the London Polish Government and the West. The Communists, the Polish Workers’ Party, and the People’s Guard, then only a few thousand strong, had launched small-scale partisan warfare in aid of the Red Army. They intended to seize power with its help and set up a workers’ dictatorship loyal to the Soviet Union.

  For General Stefan Rowecki the situation was becoming critical. Already in August 1942 he had reported to Sikorski[33] that the Nazi policy of terror was causing heavy casualties and was sending many young people to join the ranks of the People’s Guard. He suggested that he should increase armed resistance and start regular guerrilla warfare in eastern Poland. ‘German terror has aroused in the community the desire for active self-defence, thus confirming for a large part of public opinion the correctness of the slogans of the Polish Workers’ Party — armed defence and immediate struggle against the occupiers[34],’ the Information Bureau of the Home Army said in a report to London.

  With its slogans and methods of fighting ‘K’ (the Communists) has outshone the Polish liberation organizations, winning a strong propaganda argument… To the People’s Guard in all districts there has been an inflow of volunteers, especially among non-organized youth. There have also been frequent cases of whole groups going over to it discouraged by the passivity of the Polish organizations — from the Polish Socialist Party, for instance, and the General Sikorski Military Organization…[35]

  Rowecki sent Home Army units into action. They blew up railways and bridges leading to the Zamosc area, attacked German military units, burnt down the villages into which the German immigrants had moved and sabotaged enemy lines of communication. Terrified, the German settlers abandoned the farms and homesteads, and caused the Nazis to give up this plan for mass German immigration.

  During 1943 tension between the Home Army and its associated political parties on the one hand, and on the other the Communists and the People’s Guard increased to breaking-point. In November 1942 Marceli Nowotko, the Secretary-General of the Polish Workers’ Party was assassinated on the orders of one of his colleagues. Pawel Finder became Secretary-General and authorized Wladyslaw Gomulka, one of the secretariat, who later succeeded him, to try to negotiate a common front, including military cooperation, with the Home Army.

  ‘We the Polish Workers’ Party, the youngest party of the underground Poland,’ Gomulka wrote, ‘hold out our hand to all the political parties of Poland, inviting them to cooperate and to organize together with us the struggle of the whole Polish nation against the Nazi occupier.’[36] Gomulka also argued that the anti-Nazi struggle would be most effective if it was waged on the basis of an alliance with the Soviet Union.

  Conditions for collaboration as stated by Gomulka were: (1) increased anti-German operations by Home Army units. (2) People’s Guard representatives to be stationed at the Home Army headquarters and regional staffs to form a joint operational command. (3) The People’s Guard to retain its own communist form of organizational structure and the right to its own political decisions. (4) Renunciation of the Polish Constitution of 1935. (5) The creation of a new government in Poland to supersede the London Government.

  Gomulka added that if these conditions were unacceptable, limited military collaboration would still be worth undertaking. He pointed out that if the London Government were to turn down these proposals entirely it would give the Polish Workers’ Party a free hand in the future.

  On behalf of the London Government, the new delegate, Jan Jankowski demanded from Gomulka first a clear statement that his party recognized the Polish Government in London; secondly, that it had no links with international communism; thirdly, that it would defend the country against aggression from any quarter, and finally that it recognized the inviolability of Poland’s pre-war frontiers. Gomulka had to reject conditions which would destroy his party’s links with the Soviets; Jankowski therefore turned down any form of collaboration.

  It was a milestone in Polish-Soviet affairs. Even before the talks had failed, Stalin began early in 1943 a campaign against the London Polish Government. His policy was to extend Russia’s western frontiers into territory granted to Poland in 1920 by the Treaty of Riga between the two. Marshal Pilsudski’s 1920 rout of Bolshevik Russia’s invasion of Poland when Stalin was a young political commissar had never ceased to rankle.

  Perhaps he had waited patiently over the years for the chance to revise Russia’s western frontiers. When it came, with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he seized it quickly enough. In January 1942 he had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Sikorski in Moscow to discuss the issue.[37] In his report of a talk at the Foreign Office on 26 January 1942, Sikorski quotes Sir Stafford Cripps as remarking that Russia had established certain principles in the matter of State frontiers which she considered beyond discussion.[38] He added that in unofficial Russian circles the Curzon Line had even been mentioned. Sikorski never officially gave up Poland’s claim to the 1939 frontiers, though as a political realist he might well have compromised on the basis of keeping the Polish city of Lwow.

  The issue of the frontiers was first raised in a Russian newspaper on 19 February 1942, and on 2 March a Tass communiqué[39] declared that the Polish denial of rights to the Ukrainians and the Belorussians — up till 1939, Polish citiz
ens — was ‘contrary to the Atlantic Charter…’ It then uttered what became the constant Soviet refrain — that the Polish Government in London was ‘not representative of the Polish people’.

  A Polish newspaper appeared in Moscow, Wolna Polska (Free Poland), which declared that it was the organ of the Union of Polish Patriots, a new body devoted to ‘uniting all Polish patriots living in the USSR’. Its aim, the paper said, was to ‘regain for Poland every inch of Polish ground, but not to claim an inch of other people’s land’. President was Wanda Wasilewska, communist daughter of a Polish colonel, at the time a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet and third wife of Alexander Korneichuk, a Ukrainian playwright.

  Colonel Berling, one of the handful of Polish officers who had opted to stay with the Soviets rather than leave Russia with General Anders and the Polish division for the Middle East, was one of the founders. The formation of the Union of Polish Patriots now put at Stalin’s disposal an organization for furthering his plans for Poland. These began with Berling’s move in March to form two or three divisions from the numerous Polish soldiers still in Russian prison or transit camps. At the same time, Tass, the Moscow Kosciuszko radio station, the Free Poland newspaper there and the Communist Warsaw paper Liberty Tribune all began a synchronized campaign denouncing the London Polish Government and the Home Army.

  In April 1943 the conflict between the two governments reached breaking point. The cause was the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers. Ever since the restoration of relations between the two countries in 1941, Generals Sikorski and Anders, Ambassadors Kot and Romer, had persistently inquired of Stalin, Molotov or Vyshinsky where the 10,000 Polish officers were who had been taken prisoner by the Russians on the Eastern Front in 1939. No satisfactory answers were ever received.