by J. Lee Ready
Finally the hotheads won the argument: the AK would revolt and ask Berling for help.
On the morning of 1 August 1944 the German authorities were alerted by several informers and spies that the guerillas planned an uprising. The commanders of the various German units could do little but call in off duty personnel and all reservists and await the attack.
In fact the revolt got off to an unscheduled start when police patrols ran into mobs of guerillas that were picking up weapons at hidden caches. Naturally shooting broke out at once. Reports started to come in from all over the city of ‘incidents’. The population fled indoors, for 97% had no connection either with the security authorities or the guerillas.
About 5:30 pm the various offices and barracks of the security forces throughout the city came under fire. Windows were smashed by bullets and grenades, and serious firefights quickly broke out at many of them. In some localities large mobs of guerillas attempted to storm the buildings. Already on full alert the troops and police were able to shoot down guerillas by the score. Some soft targets were lost immediately: e.g. offices of female clerk typists for the police were attacked by the guerillas and the girls were gunned down in an orgy of bloodlust. Unarmed servicemen who had not received the alert were stabbed to death in the street. Some Volksdeutsch/German civilians were murdered. A bar on Novy Swiat Boulevard was besieged. Its customers, mostly off duty police and troops, defended the building with what few weapons they had.
Naturally every besieged unit was radioing and telephoning for rescue, but everyone was besieged, and no one could rescue anyone. Even Stahel could do little as the bullets streamed through his office window. He radioed for a rescue by troops from outside Warsaw.
At the barracks in Koszykowo Street a unit of Azerbaijani troops was besieged, but the guerillas then approached the barracks with a white flag and announced that as these were not Germans they could leave if they disarmed. After a quick huddle the Azerbaijanis agreed. Once they had been disarmed, the guerillas slit the throat of every soldier…except one, who hid in a cupboard.
At the electric power station 100 Polish police fought back with fanatic resistance.
At midnight the bar on Novy Swiat Boulevard was finally conquered and its defenders were butchered.
On 2 August German army reinforcements began to move towards Warsaw: the 4th Grenadier Regiment and a battalion of the 608th Security Regiment. They were directed to seize and hold bridges.
This day the AK also received a reinforcement, as the 2,000 Communist guerillas in Warsaw decided to join the uprising.
Himmler took this revolt as a personal affront, for the guerillas were attacking ‘his’ police, and he also saw it as an opportunity. Declaring this to be a partisan attack, which of course it was, he claimed that it came within the bailiwick of von dem Bach Zelewski, who was now calling himself General der Waffen SS. This declaration ignored the fact that as it was taking place within thirty miles of the front line it was really an army affair. At first the army permitted this – after all, putting down this revolt was just one more headache that they did not need.
Zelewski ordered Brigadefuehrer Heinz Reinefarth to take charge of the Warsaw relief column and gave him the Posen SS Police Regiment, the SS Dirlewanger Brigade and the SS RONA Sturmbrigade. Reinefarth was surely pleased with this order on two levels. First of all the army had never promoted him higher than feldwebel while he wore their uniform, yet here he was being asked to rescue thousands of army soldiers including generals. Secondly he had been born in the Wartheland and at the age of fifteen had watched the Poles conquer his home. Now he was currently HSSPF for the Wartheland, and he was being ordered to put down the Poles in their ‘capital’ city. Surely this was the best revenge of all.
The struggle inside Warsaw was brutal from the first moment. Five years of cruel occupation had taught the guerillas to fight without remorse. Whenever troops or police retook a building they found evidence of guerilla atrocities: - wounded men shot in the head or their throats slit, female rear-echelon personnel of the army and police gunned down at their desks, and wives of policemen murdered in their homes. When a military hospital was recaptured the police found the patients dead in their beds, their throats cut.
On this second day the last of the Polish police defending the electric power station were finally overrun.
On 3 August Stahel received some good news. The 4th, 19th, Hermann Goering and 5th SS Wiking Panzer Divisions had counterattacked, had hurt the Soviet VIII Guards Tank and III Tank Corps and had seemingly stopped the Soviet offensive.
On 4 August Stahel managed to get some Luftwaffe fighter planes to strafe known concentrations of guerillas in the city. This day the 2,695 policemen of the Posen SS Police Regiment arrived. These Germans and Volksdeutsch were armed as light infantry. Also this day Sturmbannfuehrer Trolow arrived in Warsaw with the first contingent of the SS RONA Sturmbrigade. Briefly he instructed his poorly trained Russians in house to house combat and then let them loose. Thus by day’s end about 4,500 Axis infantry were attacking into the city.
On 5 August a battalion of the SS Dirlewanger Brigade arrived in Warsaw. The troops and police who witnessed them in action were astonished by the complete disregard for discipline within this so-called brigade. Veteran SS men were ashamed that this band of cut-throats and thieves had been given SS status. Dirlewanger’s international thugs were looking forward to fighting in a city, where they would have the opportunity to loot and rape. By now there were few Germans in Dirlewanger’s brigade.
Reinefarth ordered the Posen, RONA and Dirlewanger to attack due eastwards in order to spit the city in two. On his way to Warsaw he had grabbed any ‘soldier’ he could, including some Luftwaffe ground crews armed with rifles, and a few armored vehicles from the Hermann Goering and 5th SS Wiking Panzer Divisions.
In late morning on the 5th these mixed units advanced, foot soldiers huddled behind armored vehicles. However, within minutes the Dirlewanger lost all cohesion, and its members began ordering everybody out of apartment blocks, murdered some, robbed everyone and proceeded to get drunk on looted alcohol. Officers from the Posen managed to shove some of them back into the line, but once these Dirlewanger ‘soldiers’ had become deliriously drunk they charged in front of the armored vehicles and were mowed down by Polish guerillas firing rifles from upstairs windows. The men of the Posen and RONA were not all that concerned at the slaughter of Dirlewanger’s men, most likely mumbling ‘good riddance’.
However, not all members of Trolow’s SS RONA were disciplined soldiers either, and certainly not all had morals, and just before noon some of these Russians entered a cancer hospital and began raping female patients and nurses. Any man who opposed them was brutally beaten or stabbed with a bayonet.
By dusk the Posen had only advanced a few hundred yards. Trolow reported that his SS RONA detachment had advanced 300 yards. It is true that the Dirlewanger thugs had advanced a thousand yards, but they had bypassed some guerilla pockets.
Zelewski arrived and was informed by Reinefarth of the poor performance of the rescue column. So far they had hardly rescued anybody, except the 1/818th Azerbaijani Regiment. Both Zelewski and Reinefarth were highly dismayed at the sight of men in uniform wandering around aimlessly, many of them drunk, while civilians by the thousands were fleeing the city. The veteran armored crews of the SS Wiking were embarrassed that Dirlewanger’s brigade and Kaminski’s SS RONA had been thought worthy of Waffen SS membership by Himmler. Zelewski ordered all executions, looting and rape to stop at once.
While he was tied down in Warsaw Zelewski allowed Gruppenfuehrer Karl Brenner to control overall anti-partisan operations elsewhere in the east. Brenner had been wounded four times in World War One, had then soldiered in the Freikorps and had been a revolutionary in the Kapp Putsch. He had followed this as a career policeman. In the current war he had been wounded in the face and had lately been a BdO in the Ukraine, but was now out of a job owing to the Soviet advance, hence he was avai
lable to deputize for Zelewski.
On the morning of 6 August the army’s 4th Grenadier Regiment finally joined the counterattack, by sneaking into the northern suburbs of the city’s Kolo district. Reinefarth had deliberately put these army soldiers out of sight of Dirlewanger’s men, for the German soldiers had threatened to shoot any of Dirlewanger’s men they saw committing a crime! Meanwhile in the Wola district Reinefarth launched another attack by the SS Posen Police Regiment, the SS Dirlewanger Brigade and the 1/818th Azerbaijani Regiment. All told Reinefarth had about 7,000 infantry.
Brigadefuehrer Bronislaw Kaminski arrived during the day with the rest of his SS RONA Sturmbrigade, and he began attacking from the south into the Ochota district.
Each of the columns had armored support from the SS Wiking and Hermann Goering Panzer Divisions, plus they could now call upon artillery and air support.
Block by block they began liberating the city and block-by-block they were destroying it. The battle was a series of independent skirmishes fought among apartment blocks, warehouses, factories and offices, all of them multi-story, and also in parks and streets barricaded by piled furniture. The armor was brought up to blast holes into the walls of buildings where even just one sniper was holding out. Some entire multi-storied brick and stone buildings collapsed, having become structurally weakened by the vibrations of explosions, and more often than not these structures were full of people when they fell. In places fighter planes swooped low and dropped bombs on stubborn centers of resistance or crowds of guerillas. Sometimes lines of women queuing for food and water were mistaken for guerillas and were strafed.
Fires were blazing out of control as water pipes were burst by gunfire and firemen were shot at by the guerillas.
The more gruesome fights took place in cellars, cemeteries and sewers.
The Posen policemen paused to regain their breath and then charged forward across the Saxon Gardens under rifle fire, most of them surviving, and they liberated Stahel and his headquarters. A party of Dirlewanger’s men huddled behind armored vehicles and also crossed this park.
Later, members of the Posen reached several buildings where SA stormtroopers were holding out. A few of Dirlewanger’s men hit upon the idea of grabbing innocent civilians and forcing them forward at gunpoint using them as human shields, but the guerillas continued to fire until the civilians were dead or wounded and the bullets started hitting Dirlewanger’s thugs.
On the 7th part of Dirlewanger’s force with some armor reached the Vistula River, thus cutting the city in two.
On the 8th the Posen, Dirlewanger’s men and the 4th Grenadier Regiment met at a cemetery. Armor was brought up as a few of the guerillas here were using captured armored vehicles! Over the next three days the battle raged for possession of the cemetery. The SS RONA was conspicuous in this attack by its absence, for by now most of its members were drunk and wandering the liberated zones.
The army high command [OKH] now stepped in, deciding that the rescue was taking far too long, and it placed General Guenter Rohr in command of the battle with the mission of controlling Reinefarth’s relief column and the other units in the area, both those who had been liberated and those still holding out. The army’s 654th Engineer Battalion and 580th Russian Cavalry Detachment were rescued.
Zelewski informed Rohr of the atrocious discipline problems within Dirlewanger’s and Kaminski’s units, and Rohr ordered both of these formations to be withdrawn at once. However, Rohr knew he would have to bring in other troops to replace them. Until that could be done he ordered the armored vehicles of the SS Wiking and the Hermann Goering to support Dirlewanger’s and Kaminski’s men, but also to keep an eye on them and to use their judgment. In effect this was an order to shoot anyone running away or stopping to loot or rape. Rohr saw for himself how serious the problem was when he stumbled upon two Russian SS RONA soldiers attempting to rape two Polish women. Bravely he stood his ground to protect the women, only his general’s shoulder tabs shielding him from death, and the two soldiers eventually backed off.
Zelewski had a problem of his own: how to rid the city of Dirlewanger and Kaminski without antagonizing his boss, Himmler. He knew that Himmler had befriended Dirlewanger. Furthermore, he knew that while Dirlewanger’s men could care less if their leader was removed, Kaminski’s men on the other hand were loyal to their commander. Zelewski came up with a plan. He ordered Kaminski to attend a conference in Lodz in the Wartheland. Though suspicious, Kaminski obeyed. Just outside Lodz he was arrested by a roadblock of SD, taken into the woods and executed. Then his body was laid in a car so as to appear to be the victim of a terrorist ambush. Some SS RONA officers were brought to the site and shown the evidence, but the fact that this was done told the SS RONA officers the truth, that the Germans were trying to cover up something. Thereupon the SD announced the truth that this SS general had in fact been executed, but they listed his crime as ‘stealing jewelry’! Zelewski’s office was currently denying to the world press that any atrocities were being committed in Warsaw, so he could hardly then admit he had killed an SS general for committing them.
Either way the lesson was not lost upon the men of the SS RONA or the SS Dirlewanger. It was a sobering moment, and these men would now think twice before committing a crime.
Rohr was gaining considerable reinforcements by now both from the army and Himmler. On the 11th he launched an assault on the city center with Himmler’s 3rd Cossack Police Regiment, the SS Dirlewanger Brigade, the Sarnow Police Regiment and a company of German gendarmerie, and the army’s 2/Bergmann’s Azerbaijani Regiment and the Liebisch Battalion. At the same time he advanced into the city from the south with Himmler’s SS RONA Sturmbrigade and the army’s 1/3rd Azerbaijani Regiment [minus a company], assisted by a battalion of self-propelled artillery. From the north another column entered the city containing the army’s Reck-Liebisch Battalion, the 7th/Bergmann’s Azerbaijani Regiment, the 5th Panzergrenadier Battalion and the 654th Engineer Battalion, and a company of Himmler’s gendarmerie. Alongside them advanced the army’s Battlegroup Schmidt, which consisted of the 608th Security Regiment and one company of the 1/3rd Azerbaijani Regiment. With close artillery support provided by the army’s 201st Mortar Battery and 507th Artillery Detachment, and armored assistance from the 500th Armored Assault Engineer Battalion, this was a powerful column, though the 608th Security Regiment was in fact only about 600 German soldiers aged 36 to 45.
Rohr retained a powerful reserve: Himmler’s Police Battalion Burckardt and the army’s 246th Security Battalion, the 572nd Cossack Battalion, the 4th Cossack Battalion of the 750th Security Regiment, the 960th Detachment of the 3rd Cossack Cavalry Brigade and the 580th Russian Cavalry Detachment. Therefore about 14,000 troops were available to Rohr, not counting those thousands who were still trapped and holding out.
However, his force had weaknesses. Many of these troops had not been trained for infantry combat, the light weapons carried by policemen were barely adequate for this sort of house-to-house fighting, and these units had never cooperated with each other before. There were also language difficulties.
On the 12th the cemetery having been taken, a battle began for the old town hall.
A most unusual reinforcement arrived, the 702nd Panzer Detachment armed with Goliath tanks. These vehicles were in fact too small for a human occupant. Instead they carried explosives. Guided by a remote control cable they were steered into an enemy bunker and then detonated. They proved to be a silly idea. The guerillas simply trained their eyes along the control cables until they saw the ‘driver’ and shot him.
However, as dubious as the value of this detachment was, it was certainly not as useless as the next reinforcement Himmler sent. He ordered 1,900 military prisoners of SS Matzlau prison to join Dirlewanger’s troops. These SS soldiers had been imprisoned for a variety of offences - theft, drunkenness on duty, insolence and so on, and they were now offered a chance for parole. Some of them took the opportunity to fight honorably, but not all, and e
ven those who did had no supervision from the Dirlewanger’s officers, nor any effective orders.
After being besieged for twelve days the guards at Pawiack prison were joyously liberated. Gdansk rail station was also recaptured. For twelve days railway employees, train station police, train guards and miscellaneous personnel had held out with the aid of an armored train. Naturally they were all starving.
Nonetheless by the 14th Rohr and Zelewski realized they had to come up with a different strategy. Some guerillas had been captured carrying fresh food from the countryside! To cut off the guerillas from their lines of supply Rohr now called in every available man to guard the perimeter of the city: army rear echelon soldiers, Polish police, OT, NSKK, RAD and provisional units of hiwis. A few Hungarian infantry battalions were brought in for this purpose too, but they proved so useless that Rohr sent them away.
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In Italy the SS Italien Sturmbrigade was still fighting a slow withdrawal action, but the 16th SS Reichsfuehrer Panzergrenadier Division under Brigadefuehrer Max Simon had retreated faster into the German rear as per orders. They were now to begin anti-partisan duty, as a direct result of the increase in Italian partisan activity. Despite the presence of a huge force of anti-partisan troops serving under Mussolini and Wolff, the Italian partisans seemingly did as they wished, blowing up bridges, derailing trains, destroying factories, burning down warehouses, smashing power stations and making travel all but impossible.