Although their British and American allies could afford to have illusions about Stalin, Polish officers and politicians could not. They had not forgotten that the Soviet Union had been an ally of Nazi Germany in 1939-1941, and that its occupation of eastern Poland had been ruthless and oppressive. Poles knew about the deportations to Kazakhstan and Siberia; they knew about the shootings at Katyn. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government over the Katyn discovery, which was one more reason not to trust the Soviet Union. If Stalin would use his own massacre as a reason to end relations with the Polish government, how could he be expected to negotiate in good faith about anything? And if the Soviet Union would not recognize the legitimate Polish government during a common war against Nazi Germany, what were the chances that it would support Polish independence when the war was over and the Soviet position much stronger?
The British and the Americans had larger concerns. The Red Army was winning the war against the Wehrmacht on the eastern front, and Stalin was a more important ally than any Polish government. It was more comfortable for the British and the Americans to accept the mendacious Soviet version of the Katyn massacre and blame the Germans. It was much easier for them to encourage their Polish ally to compromise than it was to try to prevail upon Stalin. They wanted the Poles to accept that the Germans rather than the Soviets had killed the Polish officers, which was false; and would have preferred that Poland grant the eastern half of its territory to the Soviet Union, which was an unlikely action for any sovereign government.
For that matter, London and Washington had already agreed, in late 1943, that the Soviet Union would reclaim the eastern half of prewar Poland after the war. The western Soviet border accorded Stalin by Hitler was confirmed by Churchill and Roosevelt. London and Washington endorsed the Molotov-Ribbentrop line (with minor changes) as the future Soviet-Polish frontier. In that sense Poland was betrayed not only by the Soviet Union but also by its western Allies, who urged Poles to make compromises at a time when less was to be gained by them than Poles might have thought. Half of their country had already been conceded, without their participation.44
Left alone by its allies, the Polish government in London ceded the initiative to the Polish fighters in Warsaw. Seeing little other hope to establish Polish sovereignty, the Home Army chose an uprising in the capital, to commence on 1 August 1944.
The Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 took place within the framework of Operation Tempest, a long-planned national uprising that was meant to give Polish forces a prominent role in the liberation of prewar Polish territory. By late July, however, Operation Tempest had already failed. The Home Army had planned to engage German units as they retreated from the Red Army in what had been eastern Poland. It had been impossible to make prior political arrangements with the Soviet Union about the terms of this cooperation, since Stalin had broken diplomatic relations. Polish commanders did make local agreements with Soviet counterparts in summer 1944, but at a heavy price. Negotiation meant leaving hiding places and revealing identities, and the Soviets exploited Polish vulnerability to the maximum. Poles who revealed themselves to join the common fight against Germans were treated as people who might resist future Soviet rule. The Soviet Union never had any intention of supporting any institution that claimed to represent an independent Poland. The Soviet leadership and the NKVD treated every Polish political organization (except the communists) as part of an anti-Soviet plot.45
In July 1944, Polish units were allowed to assist the Red Army in attacks on Vilnius and Lviv, the major cities of prewar eastern Poland, but were then disarmed by their ostensible Soviet allies. The Polish soldiers were given the choice of Soviet command or prison. After the disarmaments, the NKVD arrested everyone with a political past. Soviet partisans were allowed to take part in the victorious campaign against the Germans; Polish partisans were not. Indeed, in some cases Soviet partisans were turned against the Polish fighters. The partisan unit of Tuvia Bielski, for example, took part in the disarming of the Home Army. The tragedy of Operation Tempest was triple: the Home Army lost men and its arms; Poland’s government saw its military strategy fail; and Poles lost their lives or their freedom fighting for lands that Poland could not regain in any event, since Churchill and Roosevelt had already ceded them to Stalin.46
Still, news from Germany gave some hope to Polish commanders in Warsaw. On 20 July 1944, German military officers tried (and failed) to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The news led some Home Army commanders to believe that Germany had lost the will to fight, and thus that a bold blow might drive them from Warsaw. On 22 July the Soviets gave another prod to the Polish resistance by unveiling, in Lublin, their own provisional government for Poland. The laboratory of Nazi exterminatory policies now became the center of a future communist puppet government. Stalin was claiming the authority to determine who would form the Polish government. If the Home Army did nothing, his clients would be installed in Warsaw, and Poland would shift directly from Nazi to Soviet occupation. As in 1939, so in 1944, the fact that the Poles had Western allies meant little or nothing. It was clear by July 1944, with the Red Army already occupying more than half of prewar Poland, that the country would be liberated by Soviet force of arms. In late July the Americans were a month away from Paris (where they would support a French uprising); there was no chance that US forces would liberate any of Poland. Any political resistance to Soviet plans would have to come from the Poles themselves.47
On 25 July 1944, the Polish government granted the Home Army in Warsaw the authority to begin an uprising in the capital at a time of its choosing. Warsaw itself had originally been excluded from the planning for Operation Tempest; the Warsaw district of the Home Army had sent many of its arms to the east of the country, where they were now lost to the Soviets. The logic of an immediate uprising in Warsaw was not easy for everyone to follow. The command structure of the Polish Army fighting on the western front, under General Władysław Anders, was excluded from the discussions. Given German anti-partisan tactics, an uprising looked like suicide to many. The Germans had been killing Poles in massive reprisals throughout the war; if an uprising failed, reasoned some commanders in Warsaw, the entire civilian population would suffer. The argument in favor of the uprising was that the rebellion could not fail: whether or not the Poles defeated the Germans, the Red Army was moving fast and would arrive in Warsaw in a few days. On this logic, which prevailed, the only question seemed to be whether Poles would first make an effort to liberate their own capital.48
The Poles were caught between an approaching Red Army and occupying German forces. They could not defeat the Germans on their own, so they had to hope that the Soviet advance would prompt a German retreat and that there would be some interval between the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal and the Red Army’s arrival. Their hope was that the interval would not be too brief, so that they could establish themselves as the Polish government before the Soviets arrived.
In fact, the interval was too long.
Polish soldiers in uniforms and armbands began their assault on German positions in the afternoon of 1 August 1944. The vast majority were from the Home Army; smaller units of the far-right National Armed Forces and the communist People’s Army also joined the fight. On this first day of the Warsaw Uprising, the Home Army secured a great deal of the downtown and Old Town of the city, but failed to capture most of the essential military targets. The Germans had made few preparations, but were not caught completely by surprise. It had been hard to disguise the mobilization going on within the city itself. German forces had gone on alert at 4:30, half an hour before the uprising began. The Poles chose to attack in daylight on a long summer afternoon, and for that reason took many casualties. The inexperienced and lightly armed troops had an especially difficult time with guarded and fortified objectives. Nevertheless, the mood among the fighters and in the city itself was euphoric.49
When and where Polish power replaced German power in those early days of August 1944, surviving Jews
emerged from their places of shelter among Poles. Many asked to be allowed to fight. As Michał Zylberberg recalled: “A Jewish perspective ruled out passivity. Poles had taken up arms against the mortal enemy. Our obligation as victims and as fellow citizens was to help them.” Other combatants in the Warsaw Uprising were veterans of the ghetto uprising of 1943. Most of these Jews joined the Home Army; others found the People’s Army, or even the anti-Semitic National Armed Forces. Some Jews (or Poles of Jewish origin) were already enlisted in the Home Army and the People’s Army. Almost certainly, more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943.50
In early August, as the Home Army failed to take the important German positions in Warsaw, its soldiers did register one victory. Officers gathered volunteers for a dangerous attack upon a heavily guarded position. On 5 August, Home Army soldiers entered the ruins of the ghetto, attacked Concentration Camp Warsaw, defeated the ninety SS-men who guarded it, and liberated its remaining 348 prisoners, most of them foreign Jews. One of the Home Army soldiers in this operation was Stanisław Aronson, who had himself been deported from the ghetto to Treblinka. Another recalled a Jew who greeted them with tears on his cheeks; yet another, the plea of a Jew for a weapon and a uniform, so that he could fight. Many of the liberated Jewish slave laborers did join the Home Army, fighting in their striped camp uniforms and wooden shoes, with “complete indifference to life or death,” as one Home Army soldier recalled.51
Now Himmler again saw an opportunity, as he had during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to demonstrate his strength and to win a symbolic victory. Despite Polish expectations, the Red Army had ceased its rapid advance. With the Wehrmacht stubbornly holding its positions at the Vistula River, just east of downtown Warsaw, the uprising would be a matter for the SS and the German police. These were Himmler’s institutions, and Himmler wished to make this his uprising, to show Hitler one more time that he was the ruthless master of the situation.52
Unlike the Ghetto Uprising, however, this campaign would require reinforcements. Following the German withdrawal from Belarus, experienced anti-partisan units were available. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the chief of German anti-partisan formations and a veteran of the partisan warfare in Belarus, was given overall command in Warsaw. Other veterans of the anti-partisan warfare in Belarus were also summoned. The SS Commando Dirlewanger was dispatched from northeastern Poland, the Kaminskii unit from southwestern Poland. They were reinforced by a police unit sent from Poznań and a few hundred foreign fighters, mostly Azerbaijanis who had defected from the Red Army. About half of the people who fought in Warsaw in German uniforms did not speak German. This probably made the action that followed no more bloody, but it did make it more confusing, even for the Germans themselves.53
Kaminskii and his Russians were given personal permission from Himmler to loot, and they accepted this part of their assignment with gusto. They entered Ochota, a southwesterly neighborhood of Warsaw, on 9 August 1944. Over the course of the next ten days, they concentrated on theft, but also killed several thousand Polish civilians. As one of Kaminskii’s officers recalled, “Mass executions of civilians without investigation were the order of the day.” The soldiers also became known for systematic rape. They burned down the hospital of the Marie Curie Institute, killing everyone inside, but scrupulously raped the nurses ahead of time. As one of Kaminskii’s men characterized the Ochota campaign, “they raped nuns and plundered and stole anything they could get their hands on.” German commanders complained that Kaminskii and his men were concerned only with “robbing, drinking, and raping women.” Bach had Kaminskii apprehended and executed: not for the killing or the sexual violence but for his habit of stealing for himself rather than for the coffers of the Reich.54
The comportment of the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger was even worse. Its men were now a motley group of criminals, foreigners, and SS-men released from punishment camps. Dirlewanger was indiscipline itself; even Himmler had to order him twice to go to Warsaw. The unit was fresh from its Belarusian campaigns, where it had killed tens of thousands of civilians in the countryside and the towns. Now it would kill more civilians in a large city. The most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Belarus now became the most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Poland. The Dirlewanger unit was the bulk of a combat group under the command of Heinz Reinefarth, the SS and Police Chief for the Warthegau, the largest district of occupied Poland annexed to Germany.55
Reinefarth received an extraordinary three-part order from Himmler: all Polish combatants were to be shot; all Polish noncombatants, including women and children, were also to be shot; and the city itself was to be razed to the ground. The police formations and the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger carried out these orders to the letter on 5 and 6 August 1944, shooting some forty thousand civilians in the course of those two days alone. They had a military objective: they were to march through the west-central Wola neighborhood and relieve German headquarters in the Saxon Gardens. They lifted the Home Army’s barricades on Wola Street by marching Poles in front of them and forcing them to do the work, using women and children as human shields in the meantime, and raping some of the women. As they moved west they destroyed each and every building, one by one, using gasoline and hand grenades. Wola Street ran just south of the terrain that had been the ghetto, and indeed through some of its most southerly extremes, so their work of destruction brought an adjoining neighborhood to ruins.56
The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade burned down three hospitals with patients inside. At one hospital, wounded Germans who were being treated by Polish doctors and nurses asked that no harm come to the Poles. This was not to be. The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade killed the Polish wounded. They brought the nurses back to camp that evening, as was the custom: each night selected women would be whipped by officers and then gang-raped before being murdered. This evening was unusual even by those standards. To the accompaniment of flute music, the men raised a gallows, and then hanged the doctors and the naked nurses.57
As houses burned in Wola, people sought refuge in factories, which then became convenient killing grounds for the German SS and police units. At one factory, two thousand people were shot; at another, five thousand more. Wanda Lurie, one of the few survivors of the mass shootings at the Ursus factory, was expecting a child. “I went in last and kept back, always lagging behind in the hope that they would not kill a pregnant woman. However, I was taken in the last group. I saw a heap of bodies about a meter high.” She lost her children. “The first salvo hit my elder son, the second me and the third my younger children.” She fell wounded, but was able later to dig herself from the pile of bodies. She later gave birth to a healthy baby. The mass killing slowed on 6 August, possibly because bullets were short and were needed elsewhere.58
The massacres in Wola had nothing in common with combat. The Germans lost six dead and killed about twenty Home Army soldiers while murdering at least thirty thousand people. The ratio of civilian to military dead was more than a thousand to one, even if military casualties on both sides are counted. On 13 August Bach countermanded Himmler’s killing orders, and the organized shooting of civilians in large numbers came to a halt. Many more Poles would be killed, however, in more or less unplanned ways. When the Germans took the Old Town, they killed seven thousand wounded in field hospitals by gunfire and flamethrowers. Some thirty thousand civilians would be killed in the Old Town before the uprising was over.59
In the Wola neighborhood, where the worst of the killing took place, the bodies had to be found and removed. The Germans assembled a group of Polish slave laborers, whom they called the Cremation Commando. Between 8 and 23 August 1944, these people were ordered to pick through the ruins of the Wola neighborhood, extract the rotting bodies, and burn them on pyres. In Wola, the remnants of the ghetto were all around them. The laborers marched along Wola, Elektoralna, and Chłodna Streets, now from east to west, following in reverse the route the German police and the Dirlewanger Briga
de had taken. Their first five pyres were just to the east of the ghetto, their next thirteen just to the west. The Polish slave laborers (one of whom was Jewish) burned the bodies while their SS guards played cards and laughed.60
The Warsaw Uprising did not defeat the Germans, and it was little more than a passing annoyance to the Soviets. The Red Army had been halted, by unexpectedly strong German resistance, just beyond Warsaw. The Germans were making a last stand in Poland, the Wehrmacht at the Vistula, the SS and the police in Warsaw. Despite what some Poles had hoped, the Nazi regime had not collapsed after the assassination attempt on Hitler. Instead, the Germans had consolidated the eastern front. Operation Bagration had broken Army Group Center, but not the Wehrmacht itself. It had brought Vasily Grossman to the site where Warsaw’s Jews were killed, but not to Warsaw itself. Meanwhile, the Red Army’s Ukrainian Front was engaged in major operations elsewhere, to the southeast. Stalin had no pressing need to take Warsaw just then, in August 1944.
It made perfect Stalinist sense to encourage an uprising, and then not to assist one. Right to the last moment, Soviet propaganda had called for an uprising in Warsaw, promising Soviet assistance. The uprising came, but the help did not. Though there is no reason to believe that Stalin deliberately halted military operations at Warsaw, the delay at the Vistula suited Stalin’s political purposes. From the Soviet perspective, an uprising in Warsaw was desirable because it would kill Germans—and Poles who were willing to risk their lives for independence. The Germans would do the necessary work of destroying the remnants of the Polish intelligentsia and the soldiers of the Home Army, groups that overlapped. As soon as the Home Army soldiers took up arms, Stalin called them adventurers and criminals. Later on, when the Soviet Union gained control of Poland, resistance to Hitler would be prosecuted as a crime, on the logic that armed action not controlled by the communists undermined the communists, and that communism was the only legitimate regime for Poland.
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