This psychosis extended to Polish civilians as well, with the distinction between combatants and non-combatants growing ever more blurred. As one trigger-happy German infantryman wrote home: ‘As we’re in enemy territory I trust no one! The pistol should talk before I believe someone.’118 This phenomenon was certainly recognised at the time. The war diary of the German 31st Infantry Division, for instance, noted that ‘the first days of the war have already shown that the men and the inexperienced officers were made insufficiently aware in their training of the typical conditions in warfare’. The result, it said, was a ‘nervousness, anxiety and disorientation’ which led to ‘shootings and arson’.119 In countless instances, German troops behaved with wanton, murderous cruelty towards Polish civilian populations, targeting ordinary people as hostages, or murdering them as ‘bandits’. At Sulejówek, for instance, fifty civilians were murdered in retaliation for the death of a single German officer.120 The burning of villages was similarly routine; indeed it was becoming standard practice when German units came under fire.121 In this way, local civilians were often targeted in revenge for the legitimate defensive actions of the Polish army.
In addition, the convention that civilians were executed if they were found in possession of a weapon gave carte blanche to some of the most brutal impulses of German soldiers. As many eye-witnesses recalled, a weapon could be interpreted in myriad ways and could include such innocuous items as flintlocks, pocket knives, razors or rusty bayonets.122 Farmers were particularly at risk, as even the most routine search of their properties could often yield a shotgun or a pitchfork. Consequently, they regularly found themselves victims of German massacres: eighteen were shot after the defence of Uniejów, for example, twenty-four were murdered at Wylazłów, thirty were killed in Chechło and thirty-two were executed near Łowicz.123 The list goes on.
Of course, there were a number of factors driving this brutal behaviour. It has been suggested, for instance, that one reason for the murderous impetuosity among German troops was perhaps their use of Pervitin – a methamphetamine in pill form that produced improvements in energy, concentration and libido and had become very popular in Germany. Tests carried out by the Wehrmacht, which issued the drug in particular to drivers during the invasion of Poland, discovered among the subjects heightened alertness, increased self-confidence, reduced inhibitions and a greater willingness to take risks. Of course, Pervitin was also readily available to ordinary soldiers, and though the level of consumption is unclear, it can be assumed that a proportion of them had their own supply. When the author Heinrich Böll wrote to his parents and siblings from Poland that autumn, he asked them to ‘send Pervitin’.124
The military benefits of the drug are obvious. Soldiers who were alert, willing to take risks and able to stay awake for three days on end made for highly effective fighters in the new age of mobile warfare. Indeed, the guidelines issued the following year for the drug’s safe use stated that ‘the experience of the Polish campaign’ showed that military success in 1939 had been ‘crucially influenced’ by Pervitin.125 It is very probable that those advertised effects would have lowered inhibition and made German soldiers more likely to commit atrocities against civilian populations, particularly when combined with ‘partisan psychosis’. Just as Pervitin turned them into more efficient fighters, it almost certainly also made them into more efficient killers.
Yet, whatever the role played by Pervitin, or by ‘partisan psychosis’, there can be no doubt that the primary driver of German atrocities in Poland in 1939 was simple racism. As at Ciepielów, the very act of Polish resistance was often seen through a racist lens. Harrying and ambushing a superior enemy, German soldiers told themselves, was the sort of cowardly warfare that was waged by the racially inferior – and by Nazi logic, it deserved the most brutal punishment. As one soldier wrote at the time, the Poles ‘behave in an un-European way and indeed an un-human way … The civilians go to prayer, hiding themselves behind holy pictures and crosses, but then fire at our people again whenever they can. Who can blame us for feeling bitter and using harsher methods?’126 German soldiers did not treat Polish civilians or prisoners of war with respect because they did not consider they deserved it. To the German mind, these people were ‘uncivilised’, ‘filthy’, ‘a rabble’; in short, as one soldier confessed, they were barely human.127 German soldiers were engaged in a race war, and the Polish people – whether soldiers or civilians – were the enemy.
Atrocities, then, were by no means exceptional. Among countless examples, the experiences of a few Polish villages must serve to demonstrate the wider slaughter. At Złoczew, near Sieradz, units of the 95th Infantry Regiment and SS-Leibstandarte murdered around 200 Poles, including refugees, women and children, in a frenzy of night-time violence. One survivor recalled the Germans shooting ‘not only at those fleeing, but at anyone that they saw on the lane, on the street, or in the courtyard’.128 The fires in Złoczew burned for days, consuming most of the village. A later investigation by the German military found no explanation for the killings.129 At Kajetanowice, meanwhile, seventy-two Polish civilians were shot or burned alive after the death of two German horses in a ‘friendly fire’ incident. Of the dead, only fifteen could be identified; they included three children, the youngest of them barely six months old.130
Brutal as they were, such actions would pale into near insignificance, however, in comparison to the events witnessed at Bydgoszcz. When German forces entered the city, on the morning of 5 September, they were primed to avenge the Polish suppression of the earlier insurrection by ethnic Germans. Ominously, the war diary of the German 122nd Infantry Regiment, then entering Bydgoszcz from the north, suggested that no quarter would be given to the city’s remaining defenders, a makeshift 2,000-strong militia, composed of labourers, railway workers, students and boy scouts: ‘Those who resist’, it proclaimed, ‘will be shot.’131
By the time resistance had been quelled that afternoon, those dire predictions were already being realised. When sporadic violence continued, the town’s new commander, Brigadier-General Eccard Freiherr von Gablentz, ordered a full-scale ‘pacification’, and the following day, 6 September, units of the Wehrmacht along with the Order Police and Security Police – assisted by Volksdeutsche informants – began a systematic search of the town, looking for weapons as well as those considered responsible for the earlier executions of German insurgents. As one witness recalled, they were ‘dragging people out of their homes, making them stand for hours with their arms in the air, arresting adults and boy scouts alike’. ‘Filled with fear,’ he went on, ‘we listened to the screams coming from the street, wondering if we would be next.’132
‘Pacification’ quickly became indistinguishable from a general targeting of the Polish elite and intelligentsia, and from revenge executions in response to spasms of continued Polish resistance. Those identified by the Volksdeutsche as perpetrators were generally executed on the spot, as were those discovered in possession of any sort of weapon.133 In addition, countless others deemed in any way suspect were arrested and taken to empty buildings, such as the former army barracks on Gdańska Street, where they were interrogated. One of those arrested, Franciszek Derezinski, later recounted his experience:
I was picked up on the street by German police and led to the artillery barracks, along with around 500 other Poles. Ethnic Germans there identified people who had allegedly murdered Volksdeutsche. These persons were immediately shot and local Jews were forced to dig a grave for them in the courtyard of the barracks.134
Elsewhere in the town, continued outbreaks of sniping from Polish militiamen provoked ever more draconian counter-measures. On 7 September, the command of the 4th Army ordered that military and police units in Bydgoszcz were to take hostages from among the civilian population, who would be publicly executed in response to further attacks. When a sniper shot and wounded a German soldier the following day, that threat was carried out and some forty Polish hostages were shot in the market square.135
Among them was a group of boy scouts, between twelve and sixteen years of age. ‘Unaware of what awaited them,’ one by-stander recalled, ‘these poor children joked and even played games amongst themselves. They realised the truth only when they were made to line up … and the machine guns were brought. Some of the little ones began to cry, but the others gave proof of the most admirable courage. They intoned the Polish national anthem and fell like heroes.’136 A priest who rushed to give them the last rites was shot as well.
Within a couple of days, the German media began to provide a ‘spin’ on events, remaining silent about the brutal reprisals being carried out by their own troops, while loudly proclaiming the barbarism and subhumanity of the Poles, and fostering a further clamour for revenge. On 9 September, the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, led the chorus, describing the ‘Gruesome Crimes in Bromberg’ in the most harrowing terms. Men, women and children had been beaten to death, tongues had been cut out and eyes gouged by ‘Polish vermin’. ‘In streets and gardens’, its editorial declared, ‘lie the mutilated bodies of countless ethnic Germans; the victims of a cruel Polish slaughter.’137 The evocative term ‘Bromberger Blutsonntag’ (‘Bromberg’s Bloody Sunday’) was coined by Berlin’s propagandists for the earlier killing of Volksdeutsche insurgents, with the instruction that it ‘must enter as a permanent term in the dictionary and circumnavigate the globe’.138 In response to these real and imagined crimes, German actions in Bydgoszcz provided a grim foretaste – for Poland and the world beyond – of the horrors that were to come.
*
Given the accelerating German advance, and reports of the horrific atrocities being committed in its wake, the mood in Warsaw grew increasingly anxious. Having ordered the general military withdrawal behind the Vistula on the evening of 6 September, the following day Edward Śmigły-Rydz gave instructions for the evacuation of the Polish High Command itself, from Warsaw to Brest, 200 kilometres to the east. Writing his diary that evening, the Polish prime minister, Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, pondered whether it might be possible to ‘hold on’ to the capital. However, after being summoned to see Śmigły-Rydz, he learned that the Germans were less than 20 kilometres away, and that conditions were such that it was now ‘impossible either to govern or to command the army’.139 Evacuation of both the government and the High Command, it seemed, was the only option left.
Such a move would have been difficult enough to achieve in peacetime, but during a war, with the enemy on the doorstep, it was inviting catastrophe. Already two days earlier, most official bodies and ministries had been ordered to leave the capital. Among them was the British military mission, headed by Colonel Adrian Carton de Wiart, which had found its progress eastward hampered by a ‘slowly moving mass of heart-rending humanity, pushing and pedalling their incongruous forms of transport, clutching their children and their pitiful bundles, and trudging no one knew where’.140
Once the order for a government evacuation had been given, those conditions deteriorated still further, with many ordinary Varsovians also abandoning the city, despite appeals from the police for volunteers to help dig trenches in the western suburbs. One eye-witness described joining a stream of human traffic, crossing Warsaw’s Poniatowski Bridge. ‘This was a real Exodus,’ he wrote.
The trams were plastered with people and soldiers like fly papers; the big horse wagons were packed; there were large lorries, small delivery vans, military convoys, and masses and masses of pedestrians all moving out towards the suburbs of Praga on the right bank of the river. They thronged every road leading away from Warsaw.141
Another refugee recalled the crush on the bridge. It was ‘an innumerable multitude’, Zofia Chomętowska wrote, ‘confusion, horses, wagons, soldiers and civilians. We finally move on, we have priority as “evacuees”. But still, it took us five hours to cross the Vistula!’142
Once beyond the city centre, the caravans of refugees were exposed to the full fury of the Luftwaffe, being bombed and strafed at will by the Stukas. The road to Wawer in the south-eastern suburbs presented a vision of horror, one refugee recalled: ‘Now and then the rhythmical and characteristic humming sound of the aeroplane engines could be heard. These steely monsters dived on their chosen targets and without any hindrance dropped their loads, spreading death and destruction.’ Nonetheless, in the aftermath of each attack, the scattered mass of people would re-form and continue its desperate journey: ‘like a rolling sea of humanity, steadily increasing and continually moving forward’.143
One prominent Warsaw citizen was thoroughly unimpressed by the headlong flight of so many of his compatriots. Wacław Lipiński was a historian and veteran of the First Word War, who had been brought out of retirement with the German invasion, and made head of propaganda for the Warsaw Command. Broadcasting daily to the people of the capital, he must have felt the decision of so many of the city’s inhabitants to leave as a personal blow. ‘Thousands of people continue leaving the city,’ he wrote in his diary.
The evacuation of the government, carried out in such an indecent hurry, created in Warsaw an atmosphere of panic which has been spreading like an epidemic. Everyone who holds any public office is racing across the Vistula, sped on by some kind of psychosis of fear and terror. I cannot understand this, it is beyond my comprehension. Weren’t they all, only a few days ago, so heroic and willing to fight and endure? A few bombs, a few explosions, the proximity of the Germans has turned those people into a pack of cowards. Are we really worth so little?144
Aside from the human consequences, the military result was chaos. Whereas in Warsaw Śmigły-Rydz had at least enjoyed a tenuous grip on events, beyond the capital he and his staff were effectively blind and deaf, unable to lead the continued defence of Poland. If field commanders received any orders at all now, they rarely reflected the reality on the ground. The situation was no better in Warsaw itself. On 8 September, the decision was taken to defend the capital by establishing an improvised ‘Warsaw Army Group’, under the command of General Juliusz Rómmel, who was fresh from his failure as commander of the Łódź Army and was accused of having abandoned his troops on the battlefield. Worse still, in the abject chaos that now typified the Polish High Command, Rómmel’s precise position in Warsaw remained undefined: no one seemed to know what role he was to take, or what forces he had at his disposal. When the head of Warsaw’s Defence Command, General Walerian Czuma, was asked what Rómmel was doing, he replied that he didn’t know: ‘He has visited my headquarters,’ he said, ‘but that’s all.’145
Though Rómmel might not have been an inspired appointment, that of Warsaw’s mayor, Stefan Starzyński, as civilian commissar to the Warsaw Military Command, certainly was. Starzyński, who had been a hugely popular and effective mayor of the capital through much of the 1930s, took over de facto control of the defence of the city. Right from the start, he brought a fresh dynamism to the city, his actions characterised by a contemporary as ‘noble tenacity’.146 He made daily radio speeches to maintain morale and organised a Civil Guard to replace the evacuated police force. His stoicism was described by the American photographer Julien Bryan, who was in Starzyński’s office during an air raid, in which the mayor remained at his desk, working throughout. ‘Neither danger nor hunger nor loss of sleep’, Bryan wrote admiringly, ‘seemed to have much effect on this man. For two weeks he never left the building, snatching what sleep he could on an office couch or on the floor.’147 Starzyński’s defiant mood was whole-heartedly echoed by his lieutenants, not least among them his propaganda chief, Waclaw Lipiński. ‘Warsaw will be defended to the last breath,’ Lipiński declared in one of his radio addresses, ‘If it falls, it will mean that a German tank has rolled over the last Polish soldier left.’148
Some took that defiance to heart, with mixed results. The head of the High Command’s propaganda department, Colonel Roman Umiastowski, panicked by the arrival of German troops in the south-western suburbs, made a radio announcement in which he demanded that all residents of Wa
rsaw should immediately devote their energy to building barricades.149 Quickly, countless makeshift barriers and obstacles were raised across the city, utilising buses, trams, paving stones and earth, all of which seriously hampered the flow of traffic and with that the city’s effective defence. Marta Korwin discovered ‘rocks, upset street cars and automobiles, and piles of rubbish’ strewn across her street, and wondered which fool had asked the people to erect barricades. Her displeasure stemmed from the fact that, having spent two days trying to establish a makeshift medical centre, her field hospital was now effectively inaccessible.150
Such medical facilities were sorely needed. Not only was Warsaw attempting to cope with the tens of thousands of displaced soldiers and civilian refugees who had poured into the city from the provinces, it was also under almost constant attack from the air. For one diarist, the warning procedure was already grimly familiar:
The wireless was interrupted by a voice announcing the approach of enemy machines and a minute or two later long blasts from sirens and hooters all over Warsaw sounded the alarm. At the same time, the familiar stern voice of the announcer was heard: ‘Air-raid alarm for the town of Warsaw, for the town of Warsaw …’ followed again by the continuous warbling of sirens. Didn’t we know that sound! It was the music which accompanied the destruction of so many lives.151
First to Fight Page 16