Soon after that, the Polish headquarters in Oksywie was finally overrun. A signals officer on Hel listened in as the switchboard room fell: ‘I heard the sounds of a struggle, gunshots, and the operator said: “The Germans are here! Long Live Poland!” [“Niemcy wchodzą! Niech żyje Polska!”] A second later another voice spoke in Polish, but with a strong guttural German accent.’17 With that, the connection to Oksywie was lost. Hel now held out alone.
Two days later, Hitler – who was still quartered in Zoppot – was doing a good impression of the ‘first soldier of the Reich’, just as he had promised in his speech before the Reichstag on the first day of the war.18 According to Heinz Linge, he ‘behaved as though he were on manoeuvres in the field’, travelling to the front almost daily, inspecting the aftermath of battle and meeting his generals. In Danzig, on 21 September, he was ferried by minesweeper to the city harbour, where he boarded the Schleswig-Holstein to congratulate her crew on the role they had played in crushing Polish resistance on the Westerplatte. He then visited the battlefield itself, pacing pensively amid the shell holes and broken trees. According to Linge, Hitler was most interested in assessing the damage that the Schleswig-Holstein’s guns and the Stuka attacks had caused.19
In the afternoon, he was returned to Gdynia and Oksywie to see the aftermath of the fighting there. According to the account of General Walter Warlimont, who was part of Hitler’s staff, the journey to Oksywie was to be the cause of some considerable friction. Unusually, given the large number of top brass present for Hitler’s speech, the Führer’s convoy – excluding his own six-wheeled Mercedes-Benz G4 – comprised as many as thirty limousines, containing senior personnel, as well as their adjutants and bodyguards. As it set off for Oksywie, this travelling circus aroused Warlimont’s indignation when he noticed that the various vehicles were forming up two abreast, so as to best satisfy the precise requirements of protocol. Aghast at such vanity, Warlimont then witnessed Martin Bormann fly into a rage, cursing those present ‘in outrageous language’, as he felt that he had been slighted.20 In the dog-eat-dog world of Nazi politics, such petty matters could evidently take on huge significance.
While senior Nazis jostled for position, further along the coast, on the Hel peninsula, real fighting was still raging. In order to defend the Hel naval base at the eastern tip of the spit, a ‘fortified area’ had been established in the mid-1930s, which, though incomplete by September 1939, still consisted of four heavy artillery emplacements, as well as a further three anti-aircraft batteries, with an independent power supply and a garrison of over 3,000 men.21 This ‘Hel Fortified Area’ was under the command of Rear-Admiral Józef Unrug, who, despite having been born in Germany, having commanded a U-boat in the Imperial German Navy during the Great War, and speaking better German than he did Polish, remained true to his Polish roots and reportedly ‘forgot how to speak German’ on 1 September 1939.22
The battle for Hel was one of the longest of the campaign. It began in earnest on 11 September, when the town of Władysławowo, at the neck of the peninsula, was taken by elements of the German 207th Infantry Division, leaving those remaining Polish forces cut off from the mainland. What followed was a land offensive, with German units pushing their foes into a slow fighting retreat along the 35-kilometre peninsula, accompanied by an aerial assault that employed dive-bombers as well as naval artillery to soften up the defenders. After Hitler’s arrival in Zoppot, his entourage could enjoy watching the spectacle of Hel being shelled from the hotel terrace, the Schleswig-Holstein having been joined in the Bay of Danzig by the Schlesien on 20 September. Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt recalled that ‘with their high funnels and superstructure’, the old German cruisers ‘made the whole scene look like some old picture of a naval engagement, especially when the Polish artillery retaliated and waterspouts shot up round the ships’.23
On Hel, the effects of the bombardments were not as great as the gentlemen in Zoppot might have hoped. The raids were certainly impressive, however. One Polish naval officer described an attack by the Schleswig-Holstein thus:
First, a flash, then after a few seconds came the sound of an incoming shell, and then two detonations in quick succession; the delayed report of the discharge, followed by the louder blast of the exploding shell. The earth seemed to sway under my feet. Next a pillar of smoke 30–50m high.
Given the slim target that the peninsula presented, however, many of the shells fell in the water and those that hit the beach and foreshore were largely ineffective. Even on land, the sandy ground tended to nullify the full explosive effects, with many shells failing to detonate. As the naval officer noted, ‘in spite of the terrific detonations, they caused no significant damage’. Even the psychological effect, he suggested, was minimal: ‘the men have grown accustomed to the bombardment’.24
Morale was more of a problem for the defenders. A lack of food sapped the will to resist. Already by 23 September, potatoes had run out and there was no meat to be found, except for whatever could be scavenged from horse carcasses. Moreover, with no prospect of victory, there was little will to continue the unequal fight, particularly when rumours spread of Poland’s plight beyond the bay and beyond the horizon. One eye-witness explained the problem with brutal honesty. The defence of Hel, he said, was more ‘a show of despair’ than a practical proposition, and ‘we cannot expect every soldier to die a hero’s death for an idea’.25 Nonetheless, Hel fought on.
*
While the Kasino Hotel in Zoppot offered its guests war as a spectacle, further along the coast the German ‘New World Order’ was proving anything but entertaining for the Polish inhabitants of Danzig. Many of the city’s Poles had already been rounded up in the first days of the war and brought to collecting points, such as Victoria School, where they would be ‘processed’. They included priests, teachers, lawyers, politicians: all those who might feasibly provide a focus for resistance to the German occupation. Already upon arrival, the new regime was brutally clear: ‘the Poles entering the courtyard were pummelled with batons by a row of storm troopers,’ one prisoner recalled. Once inside, their identification cards and all valuables would be confiscated. ‘After registration, I was directed to a cellar so crowded that there was only standing room. Among the victims of the beating I noticed Father Komorowski. His mouth was a bloody pulp. Near him stood Mr Tejowski with his face swollen from the blows. Nobody felt like talking. Silence reigned.’26
According to the German newspapers in Danzig, such individuals were ‘unreliable elements’ – ‘traitors, arsonists, looters and enemies of the state’ – and their internment was a necessary counter-measure against ‘Polish aggression’. They would be ‘sieved’ at Victoria School, as well as ‘deloused, debugged and disinfected’; after all, one newspaper reminded its readers, ‘it is unimaginable how filthy these Poles are’.27 On 15 September the camp in the school was closed, and the inmates were taken to a number of makeshift internment camps, where they would be made to pay for their supposed crimes with a spell of hard labour. On the way, they were obliged to march through the streets of Danzig, where they were jeered and abused by the civilian population. The sight of the prisoners, bruised and limping, should have aroused pity but, as one of their number recalled, it just generated more hatred: ‘Torn, beaten up, haggard, they staggered along … cursed by passers-by.’28
Among the camps to which the unfortunate prisoners were sent, Stutthof (Sztutowo) – a former resort some 30 kilometres east of Danzig – would be the most enduring. There, conditions were brutal from the outset. Arriving prisoners were systematically broken with a barrage of blows and insults. When Ryszard Dudzik had the temerity to tell the SS officer that he had fought in the defence of the Westerplatte, he was beaten unconscious with a pistol, losing most of his teeth in the process.29 ‘From now on’, the camp commandant informed them, ‘you are no longer people, just numbers. You have lost all rights, you left them at the gate.’30 Stutthof was no place for the sick, or malingerers, they were tol
d; there were only the living and the dead. Every inmate was expected to be able to recite their prisoner number, clearly, in German. Failure to do so would result in punishment, as one inmate discovered when she forgot her number during her first roll call: ‘I received a terrible beating. When I fell, my friends helped me stand up in my spot. I was called out again and had to tell my number, but I couldn’t. Another pummelling. Unconscious, I was thrown into the block.’31
The new inmates were immediately set to work, clearing trees from the swampy ground and constructing the wooden barrack blocks that would house the new arrivals. One prisoner from that first transport, Wacław Lewandowski, remembered that ‘the pace of the work was murderous. If one stopped to stretch for a moment, or worked slowly, one was immediately kicked, hit or otherwise tormented.’32 Some inmates were taken to the Westerplatte, where they cleared the site of munitions and the debris from the earlier fighting, under the contemptuous gaze of their SS guards:
We were served our first meal – coffee, bread. We had no cups. We drank from our caps, berets. That’s how it went for a few days. We would sleep outside, in the ruins. They didn’t even give us any tents or blankets. Most of us had only summer clothes, some were in their pyjamas. And so, many of us got ill. One time a few guys reported sick to the Germans. Instead of medical help, they got a beating.33
For the prisoners that remained in Stutthof, conditions were little better. While the barracks were being built that autumn, the prisoners were housed in tents, with only a single tap for washing. One inmate recalled that ‘the water trickled so slowly that one had to wait a long time to get a handful … But we only had limited time, as all the prisoners had to wash in an hour.’34 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the exhausted prisoners would often forgo washing, hurrying instead to get some food, usually a thin, indeterminate soup and a piece of stale rye bread. One of them was dismayed to note that the dogs of the SS guards received better food than the inmates.35
Even when they lay down to rest, there was little comfort to be had. Ryszard Dudzik recalled that
there were no beds: we lay on straw that was soaked with urine, and sometimes with excrement … We lay all on one side, like herrings in a barrel, and there was no possibility even to turn over, unless everyone turned over at the same time. If someone went to the toilet at night, he would have great difficulty retaking his place in the straw. Inside, there was the most incredible stink.36
The prisoners were being systematically degraded, weakened to the point of collapse. ‘Even the mentally strong among us were broken,’ one inmate recalled, ‘crying from pain, humiliation and exhaustion.’37
By the time of Hitler’s arrival in Danzig, Stutthof was already ‘home’ to some 400 prisoners and was fast emerging as the hub of a network of internment camps in the Danzig region that would soon contain thousands more unfortunates. It demonstrated that the realities of German rule were brutally simple: Poles were to be reduced to the status of slaves, with no purpose except to serve their German masters – or die in the process.
*
Of course, Hitler never visited Stutthof, just as he never visited any of his concentration camps. The purpose of his visit to Danzig was primarily that of propaganda. Beyond that, he was keen to visit the front lines, savour the whiff of cordite in his nostrils and spur his troops on to new successes. After Danzig, his next logical destination was Warsaw, where Polish soldiers and civilians were still doggedly holding out in a living refutation of Hitler’s claim that the war had already been won. Hitler boarded his private plane – a modified Focke-Wulf Fw-200 Condor – on the morning of 22 September, landing some time later in a field outside the Polish capital. After a short visit to Łochów, to the east of Warsaw, to see the wreck of the Polish armoured train Generał Sosnkowski, which had been derailed in an air attack and become something of a tourist attraction,38 Hitler was taken to a German command post in Praga, on the east bank of the Vistula. As his pilot, Hans Baur, remembered, from there he wanted to witness ‘the final bombardment of Warsaw’, believing that it would lead to the city’s surrender.39 He was to be disappointed.
As Hitler observed the Polish capital from a church tower on 22 September, he would have been unaware that the city was not quite as stricken and defeated as he might have imagined. It was only on that day, for instance, that the Germans had succeeded in cutting Warsaw off from the fortress to its north, Modlin.40 Despite the loss of the connection to Warsaw, the area defended around Modlin was still considerable; encompassing some 30 square kilometres with the formidable red-brick fortress at its heart. It was manned by 15,000 soldiers, primarily of the 8th and 28th infantry divisions, and still held a similar number of civilians. In addition, around 100 artillery pieces were present, as well as nearly 5,000 horses, 62 heavy machine guns and a small number of tankettes.41 In a throwback to the days of Polish–Soviet War of 1920, the defence of Modlin also relied on the armoured train Śmierć, a 70-metre-long agglomeration of artillery platforms and assault cars, with a crew of around 150. As well as being used to transport munitions within the Modlin sector, it provided artillery support to Polish infantry at the eastern end of the sector. Remarkably, on 19 September, the Śmierć also engaged in an artillery duel with a German counterpart – the Panzerzug 7 – which was patrolling the line beyond the front.42
Modlin would be bitterly defended. Sporadic German ground assaults had gained some territory, but the majority of the offensive had been carried out by artillery and air attack, aiming primarily at the fortress complex and the bridges over the rivers, by which the three areas held by the Poles maintained contact. German air attacks, primarily by Stuka bombers, were not always guaranteed success. As one pilot recalled: ‘18 bombs of 500kg each, 12 bombs of 250kg and 48 bombs of 50kg, in each sortie – and the bridge didn’t even sway.’43 Elsewhere, however, they could be devastatingly effective. As the garrison commander, Brigadier-General Wiktor Thommée, recalled: ‘We stopped trying to put out fires when the task became completely futile. The fortress was in flames, houses and barracks were collapsing. Rubble, unexploded bombs, shrapnel littered the streets and square, bomb craters were everywhere.’44 One of Modlin’s defenders anticipated the grim fate of Zakroczym, a historic town once built to guard the crossings on the Vistula, now facing destruction. ‘Perhaps in a few short days’, he wrote, ‘it will fall victim to German bombs and artillery shells … not a house of it will be left standing.’45
And yet the defenders fought on, bravely emerging from their shelters to meet the ground assault that inevitably followed every air raid. As one of them remembered:
After a few minutes the Germans attacked. We remained silent at first. The Germans must have thought that after such an intense artillery barrage and with a possible shortage of ammunition, our crew was ready to surrender. But they were sorely disappointed. At the first burst from our light artillery squadron, our machine guns – which had only been waiting for that moment – exploded into a powerful song. I noticed that the Germans instantly dropped to the ground, many of them likely never to get up again. Our accurate gunfire did not allow the enemy to move forward even in isolated leaps. The barrage proved to be impassable.46
After a series of such, often ineffective, ground attacks, the Germans attempted negotiation. Rochus Misch, then an Unterscharführer (sergeant) in the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler – and later to join Hitler’s personal bodyguard – was part of a four-man group that approached Polish lines to try to negotiate a surrender. Being from Upper Silesia, he was thought to speak sufficient Polish for the task, though as he confessed, his knowledge of the language extended only to ‘trying to make German words sound like Polish’. For this reason perhaps, the talks with the Poles failed, and having spent ‘a few hours’ wandering around the defences, the group opted to return. However, just as they were negotiating some barbed-wire obstacles, 80 metres from the Polish lines, the Poles opened fire. Misch was hit in the arm and the chest, a bullet passing only 2 centimetres from his heart. Cl
early, the Poles were in no mood to surrender.47
In the stalemate that followed, the Germans resorted to leafleting raids, as they did in Warsaw, hoping to break the defenders’ spirits by stressing the pointlessness of the fight, and the betrayal by Poland’s ‘Western Friends’. It was an approach that seemed to hold some promise of success, playing as it did on the Poles’ gnawing sense that they had indeed been sacrificed by the British and the French. As one of the defenders lamented:
Lovely phrases broadcast by Western radio stations, such as ‘You are an inspiration to other nations’ or ‘History will forever remember your heroism’, are taken by the men as a bitter mockery of our current situation. We are not fighting for ‘inspired nations’ to calmly watch our tragedy from a distance. We are fighting for the very existence of our nation. We have no use for lofty words from our allies, but need specific actions to prove that our allies deserve that name and are truly on our side.48
Sadly, in that demand, the Poles were to be disappointed.
Despite their dire strategic situation, the Poles were still capable of springing a surprise on their opponents. A few days before Hitler’s arrival in Praga, Polish efforts to force a passage into Warsaw by some surviving elements of the Poznań Army had resulted in the Battle of Wólka Węglowa, to the north of the capital. It was a rare Polish victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one. Here, Polish cavalry repeatedly charged German positions near Mościska before being engaged by armour. One of the participants, Colonel Klemens Rudnicki, commander of the 9th Uhlan Regiment, described the engagement as ‘an assault on an enemy taken by surprise’. Initially the Poles made good progress: ‘both squadrons attacked in a series of rushes. Several tanks and cars left behind by the enemy were captured, and small groups of Germans were quickly annihilated. After a few minutes the whole village had been occupied.’49 It was a skirmish that would be immortalised in the breathless account of an Italian war correspondent, Mario Appelius:
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