First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  For all the hardships, travelling in such a large group, with a substantial military component, did at least offer some semblance of security. Only a few kilometres away, two units that were struggling to catch up with Kleeberg would experience the new, dark realities. On 26 September, the day that Chomętowska entered Włodawa, soldiers of the Pińsk Riverine Flotilla were taken captive by the Soviets some 20 kilometres to the north-east, near the village of Mokrany (Makrany). They had been marching westward since they had scuttled their river monitors on 20 September. Some of their number had managed to find Kleeberg, others had joined with a mixed 8,000-strong group made up mainly of KOP border troops, under the command of Brigadier-General Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann. However, a third group had failed to keep pace with the others and, after being strafed by Soviet aircraft, found its progress blocked by Red Army tanks. ‘We realised that we had no ammunition,’ one of their number recalled. ‘An officer approached our group, asking if we wanted to continue fighting or surrender. We answered that we wanted to cross the Bug. The Soviet officer replied that our choice was only to fight on or surrender.’ The men complied, handing over their weapons and reporting for a roll call, at which the officers and NCOs – over 100 of them – were ordered to step out of the line and were then stripped of their coats and equipment. As the ordinary ratings were marched away a while later, they heard the sound of gunshots. ‘We asked the Soviet officers if another Polish detachment was still fighting,’ one recalled. ‘In response, we were told, “Those were your masters, shot dead in Mokrany Forest.”’38 Some thirty Polish officers and NCOs are thought to have been murdered that day at Mokrany. Barely a dozen of them are named.

  Two days later, the group headed by Orlik-Rückemann faced a similar situation outside the town of Szack (Shatsk), south-east of Włodawa. Sources differ as to the precise circumstances. Soviet accounts suggest that the Red Army moved forward expecting to accept a Polish surrender, while the Polish accounts speak of Orlik-Rückemann’s men finding their passage west blocked by Soviet troops.39 Either way, battle was joined on the morning of 28 September, and the Polish force quickly made progress, exploiting the apparent lack of combat experience of the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division facing them. Expertly utilising the marshy ground, the Poles destroyed eight T-26 tanks before taking Szack with an infantry assault, and then holding it against a sustained Red Army counter-attack. It has been suggested that Orlik-Rückemann had wanted a confrontation to raise the morale of his men. If so, it seemed to have worked. As one officer recalled: ‘In every way, Szack was a memorable place for us.’40 Departing westward the following day, warily shadowed by the Soviets, the group left some 300 dead as they hurried to catch up with Kleeberg’s ‘Independent Operational Group’. Behind them, meanwhile, in the village of Mielniki (Melniki), thirty officers of the KOP were executed by their Red Army captors.41

  Orlik-Rückemann’s odyssey came to an end two days later at Wytyczno, 30 kilometres to the west, beyond the river Bug. Facing a superior Soviet force with tanks, artillery and air support, the KOP group fought until they ran out of ammunition. Orlik-Rückemann then ordered his men to disperse; they should return home, find Kleeberg or – like him – go underground and try to get to Warsaw. In the aftermath, the wounded were shown little mercy by their captors. As one eye-witness recalled, they were collected from the battlefield by locals and brought to the town hall of Wytyczno, where the Red Army locked the doors and refused them any medical assistance. By the time a medical unit arrived the following day, every one of them had bled to death.42

  Yet, while Kleeberg’s forces were still heading west towards Warsaw, the Polish leadership in the capital was already negotiating the city’s surrender. After Rómmel decided to capitulate, in the early afternoon of 27 September, a ceasefire quietened the shattered streets of the city to allow terms to be negotiated. Following the cacophony of the preceding days, it was a peculiar experience, Marta Korwin recalled. ‘Two o’clock, suddenly – silence … The planes are not seen any more; the artillery fire ceased. Our hearts stopped for a moment. What did it mean?’43 Maria Komornicka had only rumours to report in her diary: ‘The news spread that a ceasefire has been announced for twenty-four hours,’ she wrote. ‘Some say it is to collect the wounded and bury the fallen, others that the Russians and the Germans are discussing who will get Warsaw. But nobody knows the truth.’44

  The truth was that General Kutrzeba was negotiating terms for the city’s surrender. That afternoon, he travelled out to Sulejówek, a small town 15 kilometres east of Warsaw, which was now the headquarters of the German 1st Corps. There, in a primary school building, Kutrzeba received the surrender terms, read to him by the German commander, Lieutenant-General Walter Petzel. In his memoir, Kutrzeba recalled his feelings as Petzel spoke the words ‘unconditional capitulation’: ‘A stifled pain tears the soul … I must clench my teeth, nail my thoughts to some secondary fact, dull my spirit, to swallow that burst of tears … I’m choking on pain, I can barely contain the tears.’ Kutrzeba’s second in command, Colonel Alexander Pragłowski, was unable to match his superior’s stoicism, and fled the room in distress. After agreeing the terms, Petzel offered Kutrzeba his hand with the words: ‘The fortunes of war favoured our side more. We were adversaries, but we are not personal enemies.’45

  Returning to Warsaw, through the chaos of the front lines, Kutrzeba noted that the streets were already filling with civilians fetching water or viewing the destruction around them. ‘I got the impression’, he recalled, ‘that the state of morale in the city would deteriorate significantly if these impoverished and exhausted people were to be driven back into their cellars, or if the fighting flared up again.’46 He was right. Many of those emerging from their shelters that day were astonished at how low the city had sunk. When the guns fell silent that afternoon, Stanisław Sosabowski found only a world in which ‘everything was destroyed or damaged, dead or dying’.

  I had seen death and destruction in many forms, but never had I seen such mass destruction, which hit everyone, regardless of innocence or guilt. Gone were the proud buildings of churches, museums and art galleries; statues of famous men who had fought for our freedom lay smashed to pieces at the bases of their plinths, or stood decapitated and shell-scarred. The parks, created for their natural beauty, were empty and torn, the lawns dotted with the bare mounds of hurried graves. Trees, tossed in the air with the violence of the explosion, lay with exposed roots, as if they had been plucked by a giant hand and negligently thrown aside.47

  Over it all, he recalled, hung the stench of putrefaction.

  The following morning, Kutrzeba made his way to the suburb of Rakowiec, on the south-western fringe of the city, where the command of the German 8th Army was situated in the remains of a Škoda factory. There, in the comparative comfort of an Opel Blitz bus, he met with General Johannes Blaskowitz and his staff, and was presented with the terms that he had agreed the previous afternoon:

  All units to lay down their arms in specified areas

  Disarmed units to gather in indicated sectors

  Barricades, road blocks, trenches etc. on the main roads to be destroyed and mines removed

  Polish units to march out of Warsaw along certain routes according to a programme, under their own officers

  Privates and NCOs to be released from camps and returned home after a few days

  Officers to go to Prisoner of War camps, but to retain their sabres

  Officers not surrendering would, on capture, be treated as criminals and not accorded rights under the Geneva Convention

  Troops to carry enough food for three days48

  After some perfunctory discussions, Kutrzeba signed the formal surrender of the Polish capital. ‘The end is painful – we did not deserve it,’ he remarked bitterly. When asked about the fate of the city, he answered simply: ‘Warsaw is no longer recognisable.’49

  With that, the fighting for the Polish capital drew to an end. Rómmel issued an address to its inhabitants, explain
ing that the city could no longer be defended, but that it had given an ‘example of endurance, fortitude and a spirit of brave sacrifice’, and had thereby won the respect of the free world. ‘Warsaw has fulfilled her duty,’ he said. ‘The war continues and I believe deeply that victory will be ours.’50 Meanwhile, military officers had the onerous duty of relaying news of the surrender to their men. For Sosabowski, it was a dreadful task. Some of the men, he recalled, were sunbathing on the top of their former positions, ‘smoking and washing and eating in the open for the first time in fourteen days’. Each one of them, he explained, had greeted the end of the battle with thanks for his life. But what came next?51 For some, it was despair. One eye-witness remembered an officer coming down the stairs of his command post, dancing and singing ‘Capitulation! Capitulation!’ before drawing his pistol and shooting himself.52

  Over the days that followed, some 140,000 Polish troops gathered at the designated assembly points and marched into captivity, and into an uncertain future. In many cases, ordinary soldiers were duly released after processing, and returned – if possible – to their homes and families. Some were less fortunate. The demands of the German Reich for forced labour meant that many would ultimately find themselves dragooned as slave labourers and deported to Hitler’s Germany, where they would endure a punishing existence on farms and in factories, in conditions that often mimicked those in the concentration camps.53 The prominent among them, meanwhile, could fall into the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, which were armed with a list – the Sonderfahndungsbuch (Special Investigation Book) – of those 61,000 eminent Poles who were considered detrimental to German interests, including priests, professors, activists, politicians, lawyers and writers, and were slated for extermination.54 With the surrender of Warsaw, the process of the decapitation of Polish society, which had been foreshadowed in the slaughter at Bydgoszcz, accelerated. Among those who fell victim to the executioners was Stefan Starzyński, Warsaw’s redoubtable mayor, who was arrested by the Gestapo in following month and sent to the city’s Pawiak prison. It is thought that he was murdered by the SS, shortly before Christmas 1939, in or around Warsaw. His body was never found.55

  Following Starzyński’s example, others refused to surrender. The day before the capitulation, Śmigły-Rydz’s order for the creation of an underground resistance organisation had been entrusted to 46-year-old General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski, who already had a plan of action set out, drawing on Poland’s long, painful experience of foreign occupation. Taking the pseudonym ‘Torwid’, Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski gathered about him a group of some fifteen officers who were ordered to set up active resistance cells to secure and secrete weapons, funds and ammunition, prepare methods of covert communication, and establish facilities to forge essential documents. Recruitment was simple. As one colonel recalled, though his men were to put on civilian clothes, they would remain soldiers of the Polish Republic, ready to receive the orders of their superiors: ‘Have no doubts,’ he said to them in his valedictory address. ‘We shall meet again to fight shoulder to shoulder to victory … I am not saying “Adieu” – only “Au revoir”.’56 The plans certainly did not lack ambition. Under ‘Torwid’s’ leadership, the Służba Zwycięstwu Polski or SZP – ‘Service for Poland’s Victory’ – aimed to encompass the whole country, despite the two occupation regimes, and extend beyond purely military resistance into the political sphere, with a Supreme Defence Council to direct its actions. As such, it would be the forerunner of the formidable Armia Krajowa, the ‘Home Army’ or AK, the largest and most effective underground resistance movement of the entire war.57

  At that moment, of course, for many Varsovians, such ideas must have appeared as so much ‘pie in the sky’. Many soldiers were inclined to believe German promises of good treatment and considered that the risks of continued resistance outweighed the benefits.58 There were also more urgent priorities to be considered, such as clearing the dead and making the city’s ruins habitable once again. It would be no easy task. When he dared to venture out of his shelter, Władysław Szpilman returned home in a depressed state. ‘The city no longer existed,’ he later recalled. ‘At every corner I had to make detours round barricades constructed from overturned trams and torn-up paving slabs. Decaying bodies were piled up in the streets. The people, starving from the siege, fell on the bodies of horses lying around. The ruins of many buildings were still smouldering.’59 Even the victors were dismayed. When SS-Major Walter Schellenberg arrived in Warsaw, the city made one of the most disturbing impressions of his entire wartime career: ‘I was shocked at what had become of the beautiful city I had known – ruined and burnt-out houses, starving and grieving people … everywhere the sweetish smell of burnt flesh. No running water anywhere.’ Warsaw, he remembered, was ‘a dead city’.60

  In such circumstances, many in the capital were justifiably more concerned with the everyday necessities of life and death, rather than politics and grand strategy. But for those able to raise their eyes to the horizon, critical questions remained, not least among them how the collaboration between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union would develop, now that their common foe had been destroyed, and where Warsaw would sit within that new constellation of power. They could not have known, but just as Varsovians were emerging from their cellars and shelters into a fragile, nervous peace, that very question was being decided in Moscow.

  *

  Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s vain, pompous foreign minister, had arrived in the Soviet capital on 27 September. Whereas his earlier visit had been one overwhelmingly characterised by nervous tension, his return had an air of celebration about it. The invasion and destruction of Poland – the ‘territorial and political reorganisation’ anticipated in the Secret Protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact – was almost complete, and the cooperation between German and Red Army forces, though minimal, had nonetheless proceeded without major incident. Barely a month after its establishment, the strategic relationship between Berlin and Moscow had borne significant fruit: overturning the old status quo in Europe and providing a territorial windfall to both parties. Little wonder, then, that Ribbentrop was treated to all the ceremonial that the Soviet state could muster, including a gala performance of Swan Lake and a 24-course celebratory banquet.61

  After the mutual congratulations, there was serious work to be done when the two sides convened in the Kremlin that night. The looming defeat of Poland meant that some of the provisions of the Secret Protocol were due for revision – loose ends had to be tied up. The mood was thoroughly congenial, however, even ‘friendly’. Ribbentrop described being back in Moscow as like being in a ‘circle of old comrades’, while Stalin was, if anything, even more effusive, promising that if Germany were to get into difficulties, Hitler could rest assured that ‘the Soviet people would come to Germany’s aid’.62

  There were a number of items on the agenda, including the fate of the Baltic states – which were still independent, though under increasing pressure from Stalin – and the further shaping of the German–Soviet relationship. The ‘friendly collaboration’ between Hitler and Stalin had achieved much already, Ribbentrop explained, but there was more to be done. Given that Germany and the Soviet Union shared a common enemy – Britain – the foreign minister went on, it would be desirable to issue a joint declaration to document ‘before the whole world’ the cooperation between the two states and their agreement on the basic questions of foreign policy. With a flourish, Ribbentrop then produced a draft for Stalin’s consideration.

  A central point for discussion was the issue of the final delineation of the German–Soviet frontier – what Ribbentrop called the ‘solution of the Polish question’. In this matter, the German foreign minister had a particular request. While acknowledging that the line agreed in the Secret Protocol was that along the rivers Pisa, Narew, Vistula and San,fn1 he asked that a revision of that might line be considered. Given the relative sizes of Germany and the USSR, he argued, and the fact that Germany lacked f
orests and oil reserves, he asked if the frontier line might be revised eastward to the river Bug, which would leave the forests around Białystok and the oilfields of Galicia in German hands. In addition, he suggested that the idea of leaving a rump Polish state – which had been left open by the Secret Protocol – should be formally abandoned. Any autonomous Polish territory would only be a source of constant disruption, he said, so a ‘clear division’ of Poland was more desirable.63

  In response, the following day, Stalin showed himself very amenable to Ribbentrop’s ideas. He had long been a convinced advocate of closer collaboration with Germany, he declared, and ‘one need only read the works of Lenin to recognise that England was always hated and cursed by the Bolsheviks’. Regarding Poland, he agreed that any rump state would inevitably be a source of friction and would do everything it could ‘to play Germany and the Soviet Union off against one another’. He concurred, then, that Poland should – once again – disappear from the map. That led to the question of the German–Soviet frontier, which, like Ribbentrop, Stalin viewed as unsatisfactory, as it would divide Poland’s ethnic core territory, and thereby provide yet another potential source of difficulties. It would be preferable, he suggested, to leave what he called ‘ethnic Polish territory’ in German hands, and move the frontier to the river Bug. The Galician oilfields, however, would remain under Soviet control, though he promised to sell Germany half of the region’s oil production, or exchange it for coal. Finally, he added that, by way of compensation for the lost territory in Poland, he would accept the transfer of Lithuania into the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’.64