First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  According to the rather euphemistic language of Einsatzgruppe IV’s own report, the operation in Szwederowo was to be a ‘cleansing action’, in which ‘entire suburbs of Bromberg’ were to be ‘systematically searched’. Where weapons were found, or resistance encountered, ‘harsh measures’ were to be employed.33 At 6.30 a.m., when the men of the Einsatzgruppe mustered for a pep talk from their commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Bischoff, they were informed that they were to avenge their fellow Germans, who had been murdered by the Poles on ‘Bloody Sunday’, and that they now had an opportunity to ‘prove themselves as men’. In case those listening did not grasp the subtext of his speech, Bischoff told them that they would not be reprimanded if they ‘shot unarmed Poles who looked somehow suspicious’.34

  What followed was a thorough sweep of Szwederowo in which the men of Einsatzgruppe IV, supported by Order Police and Volksdeutsche, purported to identify those who had targeted Germans earlier that week and searched for weapons. By mid-afternoon, around sixty Poles had already been shot and a further 900 taken prisoner, to be held – as Himmler had ordered – as hostages ‘to be shot in case of the slightest insurrection or resistance’.35 In one instance, eighteen Poles – including one woman – were shot in the local cemetery. In another, an eighteen-year-old youth was shot in front of his mother, after an axe was found in a pigsty.36 By the end of the day, some 120 Poles had been executed. Of those taken as hostages, a further 150 or so were identified as ‘suspect’ by the Volksdeutsche and murdered in the forests outside of the town.37

  In total, between the German entry into Bydgoszcz on 5 September and the departure of the Einsatzgruppen a week later on the 12th, at least 1,306 Poles are thought to have been murdered.38 In the weeks and months that followed, a further 545 would be tried in the town’s new German Sondergericht (‘Special Court’), of whom around 200 would be sentenced to death and executed in the grounds of the town prison.39

  Further to the east, more conventional methods of warfare still prevailed. There, German forces were advancing southward from East Prussia towards the line of the river Narew, where bridgeheads had already been secured at Pułtusk and Różan, north of Warsaw.40 At the suggestion of General Guderian, the operational plan for the 3rd Army had been altered, however, and now a more eastward crossing of the Narew was foreseen, aiming not to the immediate east of Warsaw, but in the direction of Brest (200 kilometres east of the capital). The intention was not only to outflank the Polish forces north-east of Warsaw, but to deny the opponent the chance of establishing a new defensive line on the river Bug.41

  Standing in Guderian’s way, along the southern bank of the eastern Narew, were extensive defences – bunkers and field fortifications – which had been hastily begun earlier that year and were complete in their essentials. In the sector around the town of Nowogród a complex of a dozen bunkers had been constructed, mainly situated along the river bank; while to the east, near Wizna, there were a further nine, perched on higher ground and dominating the wide Narew valley, where wetlands and the numerous channels of the river made for a formidable natural obstacle. If the German 3rd Army wanted to cross the valley, it had to deal with those fortifications and the men who crewed them.

  Among the latter was Władysław Raginis, a slight, softly spoken, 31-year-old captain in the Border Defence Corps (Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, or KOP), who was in command of the Wizna Fortified Area. Facing the German advance across the valley beneath him – and some 20 kilometres away from the nearest Polish garrison – Raginis sought to galvanise the 700 or so men under his command. He and his deputy, Lieutenant Stanisław Brykalski, swore an oath that they would not give up their positions alive.

  The German attack progressed agonisingly slowly. First, the bridge at Wizna was destroyed by Polish sappers on 7 September, just as the vanguard of the 10th Panzer Division arrived, meaning that while the infantry were able to cross the river they were now without armoured support. They soon discovered that, as one Wehrmacht colonel noticed, ‘on the far side of the wide, marshy Narew valley, there are Polish defensive bunkers. We are now forced to stand idly by, until the division has secured the crossing.’42 So, while pioneers and pontoon-building detachments were brought up, the infantry attack on the Wizna defences proceeded in a rather haphazard and piecemeal fashion. When Guderian arrived on the morning of 9 September, he was told that the Polish positions had already been taken, but later that day he discovered to his dismay that the report had been mistaken. Crossing the river, he found that ‘nothing was happening’ on the south side of the Narew, and ‘the troops knew nothing about any order to attack’. ‘I cannot pretend’, he wrote, ‘that I was anything but disappointed by what had so far happened.’43 To make matters worse, the pontoon bridge ordered for Wizna had been commandeered by another unit and so the task of getting German armour across the Narew was further delayed.

  Once the German assault got under way in earnest, however, on the morning of 10 September, the defenders quickly felt the effects. After an hour of ‘softening up’ with artillery fire and air attack, the infantry assault began. By evening, the bunkers – too far apart to provide mutual fire support – had begun to fall to the Germans. ‘At about 3.00 p.m. I lost the first heavy machine gun and was blinded,’ one defender recalled.

  By 6.00 the enemy had destroyed all the machine guns in our bunker and seriously wounded myself and 5 men. As conditions in the single pitch-dark room were deteriorating, we no longer had heavy machine guns or anti-tank rifles to defend ourselves, and because we were running out of air … I decided to surrender the bunker. Every soldier who exited through the emergency exit, including the wounded, was severely kicked and beaten by the German soldiers. As for me, while leaving the bunker second to last, I was shot in the head with a pistol.44

  Unsurprisingly perhaps, some of the defenders refused to surrender even when they were surrounded. As one German account recalled:

  The Polish defenders would not give up the fight for anything. Our detachment was again pelted with machine gun fire. Still, another sapper crawled up to the machine gun position, the explosive charge was detonated and the gun fell silent. The attempt to enter the shelter, however, came to nothing, because the dome was still undamaged and from it the Polish machine gun kept us under fire … Two machine guns, which had until then maintained savage fire, were destroyed. But the Poles still would not surrender.45

  When the ammunition was finally exhausted, and the last of the Polish positions could no longer be held, Raginis ordered his men to leave the remaining bunker. The last out was rifleman Seweryn Biegański. ‘Captain Raginis ordered us to take off our webbing and to lay down our arms,’ he recalled. ‘In a few words he thanked us for the defence, for carrying out our soldierly duty so well and then … opened the door.’ As Biegański was about to leave, he looked back expecting to see Raginis behind him, but from the darkness of the bunker came the blast of an exploding grenade. True to his word, Raginis had ‘chosen death over captivity’.46

  Downstream from Wizna, engagements at Łomża and Nowogród also served to hold up Guderian’s advance. At Łomża, a bitter Polish defence, led by elements of the 33rd Infantry Regiment, centred on the former Tsarist forts on the north bank of the river. Here, a complex of earthen embankments and barrack blocks, reinforced with trenches and barbed wire, was vigorously defended. As the local commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Stanek, recalled, the Poles made up in martial spirit what they lacked in materiel:

  Deprived of practically everything; help, ammunition, food and rest, the only thing we do not lose is our tenacity. Tenacity that will last as long as the task continues. To guard the crossings, to guard them at all costs. To keep the Germans from breaking through to the south – this is what fills the mind of every soldier, and this relentless thought keeps the regiment fighting.47

  After enduring some three days of frontal infantry assault, as well as air attack and flanking assaults across the river itself, the Polish garrison withdrew on the nigh
t of 10 September, wary that the fall of Wizna might leave them cut off.

  Further west at Nowogród, it was a similar story. There, the Germans faced a dozen newly constructed bunkers, strung along the southern bank of the river, amid a network of slit trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. After their first attempts to cross the Narew on 5 and 6 September were rebuffed with heavy losses, the German 21st Infantry Division attempted to force a crossing under cover of darkness, deploying anti-aircraft guns – the famed 88s – in an attempt to destroy the Polish bunkers. When this failed too, and after a Polish counter-attack, the focus of the assault changed, and the Germans were finally able to cross the river in the town itself, supported by intense artillery fire and aerial bombing. As at Łomża, the Polish garrison executed a fighting withdrawal that night after finding itself encircled. One company commander recalled: ‘We flanked the German detachment … and moved to attack. They had not expected us to come from that direction and ran off, allowing us to break through. By the time they opened fire on us, we were already 300 metres away.’48

  Though the engagements on the Narew were intertwined and all equally effective, it is often only the defence of Wizna that receives any popular attention. Perhaps because of the circumstances of Władysław Raginis’ death, it is portrayed as a heroic last stand: Poland’s Thermopylae. Indeed, the memorial at the bunker site consciously echoes the Greek epitaph with the words ‘Go tell the Fatherland, Passer-by, that we fought to the end, obedient to our duty.’49 The heroism of Raginis and his men, their determination and self-sacrifice, is undoubted, particularly as they were effectively abandoned to their fate by their superiors.50 Whether they appreciated it or not, the crossings on the upper Narew were crucial to the success of Guderian’s plan to drive further east towards Brest, and the few days’ delay that were inflicted upon the Germans there were of vital assistance to the wider Polish withdrawal southward.

  However, the more breathless claims attached to the Wizna story are rather harder to justify. Wizna alone did not – as some accounts suggest51 – halt the 40,000 men of the German 3rd Army in their tracks; that accolade must be shared with the men who defended Łomża and Nowogród further to the west. Neither did the battle last for three days. Though the Germans first arrived at the river on the 7th, there was evidently little genuine combat in the sector until the morning of the 10th, when the assault on the fortifications began in earnest. It is perhaps telling in this regard that contemporary German sources give Wizna very little mention, beyond complaining of the ‘weak bridgehead’ there and the resulting slow progress.52 To them, it seems, it was little more than a skirmish during the frustrating wait to cross the river.

  The death toll in the Narew battles is unknown, but it would have run to hundreds on each side. Many more Poles were taken prisoner by the Germans. If they were lucky, they would be treated as prisoners of war. However, that did not necessarily mean that their ordeal was over. The Polish army doctor Walerian Terajewicz, who was taken prisoner south of Łomża, was held with other PoWs at a former barracks in Zambrów. He recalled:

  On the night of 13 September, I was awakened by rifle shots and machine-gun fire. As it turned out, when some commotion arose among the prisoners … the guards opened fire on them without warning and kept on firing for several minutes. I went to take care of the freshly wounded – there were a few dozen of them. They told me they hadn’t been trying to escape; some were asking for water, others needed to relieve themselves – and the Germans responded by opening fire on those who lay on the ground.53

  Such atrocities were fast becoming the norm. A few days before the Zambrów massacre, the town of Kłecko, west of Warsaw, had felt the full force of a German ‘reprisal’. There, a local priest, Father Mateusz Zabłocki, had taken the lead in organising a civil guard, armed with rifles and shotguns, to oppose the invasion. When the town surrendered, on 11 September, German retribution was swift. Zabłocki was taken away by the Gestapo (an experience he would not survive), and soldiers went from house to house to round up the town’s menfolk, who were then corralled in the market square. They were divided into those deemed innocent and those considered racially or politically suspect: Jews and any who put up resistance or had been found armed. The suspects were then marched off in small groups to the town’s sports stadium, where they were shot. In all, more than 300 males were murdered in Kłecko over two days, many of them teenagers. The youngest was eleven years old.54

  At the same time as the men and boys of Kłecko were being slaughtered, at Końskie, south of Warsaw, another atrocity took place, which, unusually, left a mark in the photographic record. As chance would have it, Leni Riefenstahl, one of Hitler’s most famous propagandists, had arrived at Końskie with a film crew. Riefenstahl, who had made the propaganda films The Triumph of the Will and Olympia before the war, had been granted war correspondent status in 1939 and had put together a film unit that was subordinated to Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. She had come to Końskie, a small town 90 kilometres south east of Łódź, on 10 September, to visit the nearby headquarters of the German 10th Army and its commander, Walther von Reichenau. Instead of glad-handing the Nazi elite, however, she would witness some disturbing events.

  On 12 September, Końskie saw the funeral of four German soldiers, who had been killed in combat some days earlier. Rumour had it that their bodies had been mutilated, so tempers among German troops were running unusually high. Groups of soldiers began combing the town for Jews, forty of whom were set to work digging graves for the soldiers. Only a few of them were given shovels; the remainder dug with their bare hands, while they were beaten and abused by the German mob. A Wehrmacht officer attempted in vain to maintain order.

  Watching the scene, Riefenstahl was doubtless horrified by the yawning chasm between Nazism’s pristine propaganda image, which she had helped create, and the bloody reality. When the officer departed, the violence increased with the Jews being kicked and punched. According to her own account, Riefenstahl attempted to intervene, berating the men and imploring them to follow the order to disperse. In response, she claimed, she was herself abused and had a rifle pointed at her. It was at that moment that her distress was captured in a photograph taken by one of the soldiers: tears rolling down her cheeks, an anguished grimace on her face.55 Soon after, a brutal attempt to restore order – with an officer firing at the fleeing Jews – triggered a wholesale massacre, with soldiers shooting blindly into the crowd. Twenty-two Jews were killed.56 Riefenstahl was so upset that she asked that her war reporting engagement be cancelled and returned to Berlin.57

  As the massacre at Końskie showed, racism was one of the primary motivating factors in the German army’s slide into barbarism. Memoirs and letters of Wehrmacht personnel from 1939 are full of sneering contempt for the country that they were invading and its unfortunate people, many of them describing Poland as ‘Asiatic’, ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’. Typical, perhaps, was this soldier’s description of the villages and civilians he encountered during the German advance north-west of Częstochowa:

  The houses in these villages are crammed with filth, outside and inside. Tiled roofs are apparently unknown in Poland; one sees nothing but thatched cottages. The people who stand outside their huts and gape at us appear never to have heard of the word ‘culture’; they all look dirty and bedraggled, the women as well as the men. It seems to me that these ‘representatives of civilisation’ are in a competition to be the dirtiest.58

  Some commentators allowed their anti-Semitic conditioning full expression. Passing close to Łódź, one soldier mockingly noted among the refugees clogging the roads ‘members of the Chosen People, of all, mostly revolting, shades’. Referring to the crude cartoons of Jewish stereotypes often shown in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, he commented that such pictures, ‘which once appeared to us to be exaggerated, were eclipsed by the reality that we saw and smelled’.59 Another soldier, noting the Jews’ ‘dirty, grease-smeared kaftans’ and ‘lice-ridden hats’,
suggested that ‘those who do not know of the Jewish Question, or don’t want to know about it, should be sent here. Here they can study it thoroughly and they will be converted.’60 Even the later hero of the German resistance – and Hitler’s attempted assassin – Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg appeared to share the racist zeitgeist. Serving with the 1st Light Division, part of the German 10th Army, he wrote home on 14 September from Kozienice on the Vistula, having fought his way through much of western Poland. He was damning, describing the country as ‘desolate, all sand and dust’, displaying ‘infinite poverty, clutter and shabbiness’. The population was little better: ‘an unbelievable rabble, very many Jews and very much mixed population. A people which is surely only comfortable under the knout.’61

  Inevitably, petty humiliations and brutal persecutions followed on from such assumptions. Where Jews were not shot outright, they could be forced to clean the streets on their hands and knees, have their beards publicly clipped or parade in market squares while being abused or beaten with rifle butts. One example must stand for the numberless instances of everyday tyranny. When, west of Bełchatów, two German infantrymen confronted a Jewish shopkeeper,