Bloodlands

by Timothy Snyder

  The British and the Americans were all but unable to provide meaningful help to the Poles in Warsaw. Winston Churchill, whose own personal obstinacy was a crucial element of the war, could do little but urge Britain’s Polish allies to compromise with the Soviets. In summer 1944 Churchill had been advising the Polish prime minister, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, to visit Moscow and seek some arrangement that would allow the restoration of Soviet-Polish diplomatic relations. When Mikołajczyk arrived in Moscow in late July 1944, he was told by the British ambassador to concede everything: to give up the eastern half of the country, and to accept the Soviet version of the Katyn massacre (that the Germans, not the Soviets, were guilty). As Mikołajczyk knew, Roosevelt also preferred not to question the Soviet account of Katyn. The beginning of the Warsaw Uprising found Mikołajczyk in Moscow. In this unexpected position, Mikołajczyk was forced to ask Stalin for help, which Stalin refused to give. Churchill did then ask Stalin to aid the Poles. On 16 August Stalin brushed him off, saying that he had no intention of helping a “foolish adventure.”61

  Great Britain had gone to war five years earlier on the question of Polish independence, which it was now unable to protect from its Soviet ally. The British press often echoed the Stalinist line, presenting the Poles as adventurous and wayward, rather than as British allies seeking to take back their own capital. Both George Orwell and Arthur Koestler protested: Orwell speaking of the “dishonesty and cowardice” of Britons who denied the responsibility of the Allies to help the uprising, and Koestler calling Stalin’s inaction “one of the great infamies of the war.”62

  The Americans had no better luck. If American planes could be refueled on Soviet territory, then they could fly missions from Italy to Poland, bombing German positions and supplying the Poles. On the same day that Stalin rebuffed Churchill, 16 August 1944, American diplomats added Polish targets to Operation Frantic, the bombing campaign in eastern and southeastern Europe. Stalin denied his American ally permission to refuel for such missions. An American junior diplomat, George Kennan, saw where the logic led: the refusal was “a gauntlet thrown down with malicious glee.” Stalin had in effect told the Americans that he would be taking control of Poland, and preferred that the Polish fighters die and the uprising fail. A month later, when the uprising was effectively defeated, Stalin showed his strength and intelligence, and muddied the historical record. In mid-September, when it could make absolutely no difference to the outcome in Warsaw, he finally allowed American bombing runs and carried out a few of his own.63

  By then, the Home Army controlled so little of Warsaw that supplies fell to the Germans. Polish troops had fallen back to a few pockets of resistance. Then, like Jewish fighters before them, they tried to escape through the sewers. The Germans, prepared for this by their own experiences of 1943, burned or gassed them out.

  In early October 1944, Himmler told Paul Geibel, the SS and Police Chief for Warsaw, that Hitler had no fonder wish than to destroy the city. Stone should not be left upon stone. The wish was also Himmler’s own. The war as such was clearly lost: the British had liberated Antwerp, the Americans were approaching the Rhine, and the Soviets would soon besiege Budapest. But Himmler saw an opportunity to fulfill one of his own war aims, the destruction of Slavic and Jewish cities integral to Generalplan Ost.

  Himmler issued orders, apparently on 9 and 12 October, that the entire city of Warsaw be destroyed, building by building, block by block. At this point huge swaths of the city were already in ruins: the ghetto, the adjoining Wola neighborhood, and buildings hit by German bombs in September 1939—or for that matter in August 1944, when German planes bombed Warsaw from its own airport. But most of the city was still standing, and many of its inhabitants were still present. Now the Germans evacuated the survivors to a temporary camp at Pruszków, whence some sixty thousand people would be sent to concentration camps, and some ninety thousand more to forced-labor assignments in the Reich. German engineers equipped with dynamite and flamethrowers, and aware of the experience of the destruction of the ghetto, would burn down their businesses and schools and homes.64

  Himmler’s decision to destroy Warsaw served a certain vision of the Nazi East, but it did not serve the German military cause in the Second World War. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski did show signs of wanting to recruit the Home Army as a future ally in a final struggle against the Soviets; he reversed Himmler’s killing orders in mid-August without (it seems) having the proper authority to do so, and then agreed to negotiate with the Home Army command as with a defeated adversary in late September. By the terms of the surrender of 2 October 1944, Home Army officers and soldiers, men and women alike, were to receive the rights accorded to prisoners of war by international law. For the same reasons, Bach opposed Himmler’s preferred conclusion of the uprising, the total destruction of the city.

  It is very unlikely that Bach could have found many allies in Warsaw, for the same reason that he found few in Belarus: the actions of Dirlewanger’s men and other German anti-partisan formations had been too unforgettably bloody. The German reaction was so unbelievably destructive that Polish fighters had no alternative but to await Soviet liberation. As one Home Army soldier put it in his poetry: “We await you, red plague / To deliver us from the black death.” Like Bach, the Wehrmacht opposed Himmler’s policy. German troops were holding the Red Army at the Vistula River, and hoped to use Warsaw as a fortress, or at least its buildings as shelters. None of this mattered. Bach was transferred; the army was ignored; Himmler had his way; and a European capital was destroyed. On the day before the Soviets arrived, the Germans torched the last library.65

  No other European capital suffered such a fate: destroyed physically, and bereft of about half of its population. Perhaps 150,000 Polish noncombatants were killed by the Germans in August and September 1944 alone, during the Warsaw Uprising. A similar number of non-Jewish Poles from Warsaw had already been killed in concentration camps, at execution sites in the ghetto, by German bombing, or in combat. Warsaw Jews died in higher absolute numbers and in much higher proportions. The percentage of Jews from Warsaw who died, more than ninety percent, exceeds that of non-Jews, which was about thirty percent. Only the fate of cities further east, such as Minsk or Leningrad, bore comparison to that of Warsaw. All in all, about half of the inhabitants of the city perished in a city whose prewar population was about 1.3 million.66

  The distinction between Poles and Jews was for some victims artificial. Ludwik Landau, for example, might have been killed by the Germans because he was a Home Army officer and an effective propagandist for an independent Poland. As it happens, he was killed as a Jew. Some fates were permanently entangled. The Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum secretly created archives in the ghetto, on the basis of which a future history of Jews in wartime Warsaw would be possible. He was taken to a concentration camp after the defeat of the Ghetto Uprising, but was then rescued with the help of a Home Army officer. He was sheltered in Warsaw by Poles, until a Pole gave him away to the Germans. Then he and the Poles who had given him refuge were shot in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. The Home Army hunted down and killed the Pole who had betrayed them.67

  Nevertheless, when the uprising was over and German power replaced Polish, the plight of the Jews was again distinct. After the destruction of the city, they had, quite literally, no place to hide. They did their best to disappear within the columns of exiled civilians or, in some cases, to find and join Soviet forces. Before the Warsaw Uprising, there were probably still some sixteen thousand Jews hiding with Poles beyond the walls of the former ghetto. Afterward, perhaps twelve thousand were still alive.68

  The Germans had won the second battle for Warsaw, but the political victory fell to the Soviets. The Germans had applied the same tactics they had used in Belarus, ordered by much the same chain of command: Himmler-Bach-Dirlewanger. This time, anti-partisan warfare worked: not because the patriots of the Home Army were less determined than the Belarusian partisans but because they were more isolated.
The Soviet Union supported communist partisans whom it could control, and opposed noncommunist fighters whom it could not. Polish troops were fighting against the Germans, but also for their own liberty. This was their doom. Stalin was happy to support the much smaller People’s Army, a communist force that also fought in the uprising. Had it been the People’s Army rather than the Home Army that had led the uprising, his attitude might have been entirely different.

  Yet that would have been an entirely different Poland. The People’s Army did have some popular support, but far less than that enjoyed by the Home Army. Polish politics had shifted to the left during the war, as was the case throughout occupied Europe. Yet communism was not popular. Poles had experienced Soviet communism during the war itself, in the eastern half of the country. No sovereign Poland would become communist. The Warsaw Uprising, destroying as it did many of the brightest and the bravest of a generation, did indeed make further resistance much more difficult. But the Warsaw Uprising also, as some of its more clearsighted (and coldblooded) commanders expected, brought Stalin’s ruthlessness to the attention of the Americans and British. The American diplomat George Kennan was right: Stalin’s cynical treatment of the Home Army was a slap in the face to his British and American allies. In this sense the Warsaw Uprising was the beginning of the confrontation that was to come when the Second World War was over.

  While the Red Army hesitated just east of the Vistula River from early August 1944 through mid-January 1945, the Germans were killing the Jews to its west. During those five months, the Red Army was less than a hundred kilometers from Łódź, by this point the largest concentration of Jews left in occupied Poland, and less than a hundred kilometers from Auschwitz, where Polish and European Jews were still being gassed. The Red Army’s halt at the Vistula doomed not only the Polish fighters and the civilians of Warsaw but also the Jews of Łódź. Their numbers had been much reduced by a series of deportations to Chełmno between December 1941 and September 1942. But in 1943 and 1944 the number of Jews had been relatively stable: some ninety thousand Jewish laborers and their families. The German civilian authorities, who sometimes preferred death through labor, had a longer hold here than elsewhere. Łódź Jews were building weapons, so the Wehrmacht also preferred that they survive.

  Most of the remaining Łódź Jews died in the interval between the beginning of Operation Bagration and the final Soviet advance over the Vistula. The day after Operation Bagration, on 23 June 1944, the civilian authorities in Łódź yielded to Himmler and the SS, and allowed the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto. For a brief period the gassing facility at Chełmno was reopened, and some 7,196 Jews from Łódź were asphyxiated there between 23 June and 14 July. Then the facility at Chełmno was finally closed. The Jews of Łódź, meanwhile, knew that the Red Army was close by. They believed that if they could just remain in the ghetto for a few more days or weeks, they would survive. On 1 August, the day that the Warsaw Uprising began, the Łódź Judenrat was informed that all Jews would be “evacuated.” The German mayor of the city even tried to persuade Jews that they should hasten to board the trains before the Red Army arrived, because the Soviet soldiers would take revenge on people who had spent the war making weapons for the Germans. As the Warsaw Uprising raged, and the Red Army waited, some sixty-seven thousand Jews of Łódź were deported to Auschwitz in August 1944. Most of them were gassed upon arrival .69

  When Soviet soldiers finally crossed the Vistula and advanced into the ruins of Warsaw on 17 January 1945, they found very few buildings still standing. The site of Concentration Camp Warsaw, however, was still available. The Soviet NKVD took over its facilities, and used them for familiar purposes. Home Army soldiers were interrogated and shot there by the Soviets in 1945, as they had been by the Germans in 1944.70

  On 19 January 1945, two days after reaching Warsaw, Soviet soldiers were already in Łódź. On 27 January they reached Auschwitz. From there it would take them a little more than three months for them to reach Berlin. As the Red Army moved forward, SS camp guards were driving Jews from Auschwitz to labor camps in Germany. In these hurried and brutal marches, thousands more Jews lost their lives. These marches, which left surviving Jews in Germany itself, were the last of the Nazi atrocities. The Belarusian Front of the Red Army began to shell Berlin on 20 April 1945, Hitler’s birthday; by early May it had met the Ukrainian Front in the German capital. Berlin fell, and the war was over. Hitler had ordered subordinates to apply a scorched earth policy to Germany itself, but he was not obeyed. Although much young German life was wasted in the defense of Berlin, Hitler could effect no further policies of mass killing.71

  In these last few months of war, from January to May 1945, the inmates of the German concentration camps died in very large numbers. Perhaps three hundred thousand people died in German camps during this period, from hunger and neglect. The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler. As the Jews and Poles of Warsaw knew, and as Vasily Grossman and the Red Army soldiers knew, this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.

  The Red Army liberated all of these places, and all of the bloodlands. All of the death sites and dead cities fell behind an iron curtain, in a Europe Stalin made his own even while liberating it from Hitler.

  Grossman wrote his article about Treblinka while Soviet troops were paused at the Vistula, watching the Germans defeat the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising. The ashes of Warsaw were still warm when the Cold War began.

  CHAPTER 10

  ETHNIC CLEANSINGS

  By the time the Red Army reached the remains of Warsaw in January 1945, Stalin knew what sort of Poland he wished to build. He knew where its borders would run, who would be forced to live within them, who would be forced to go. Poland would be a communist state, and an ethnically homogeneous country. Although Stalin would undertake no policies of mass killing in the east European empire he foresaw, Poland was to be the center of a zone of ethnic purity. Germany would be for Germans, Poland for Poles, and the western part of Soviet Ukraine for Ukrainians. He expected Polish communists, including those who personally represented a national minority, to cleanse their country of national minorities. Stalin had revived a Polish communist party, and chosen its leaders, and sent them to Poland. He knew that he would have support not only from Poles but from the Americans and the British for the removal of a large number of Germans. Hitler’s own policies of moving Germans during the war suggested how Germans might be treated thereafter. German wartime colonization made a certain amount of forced population transfers seem inevitable. The only questions were how many Germans, and from which territories. Stalin had precise answers, even if his American and British allies did not.1

  At the conference with his British and American allies at Yalta in February 1945 Stalin made himself understood, and had no reason to expect opposition. Roosevelt and Churchill would not object as Stalin took again the lands that he had received from Hitler: half of Poland, as well as the Baltic States and northeastern Romania. Stalin would compensate Poland, his communist Poland, by punishing Germany. Poland would be shifted to the west, absorbing German territory to a line defined by the Oder and the Lusatian Neiße Rivers. In the lands that Stalin foresaw as Polish lived no fewer than ten million Germans. Moving them out, or keeping them out, would be the task of a government dominated by Polish communists. They would profit from the desire of many Poles to remove the Germans, and take credit for the achievement of a goal, ethnic purity, that seemed self-evident to most leading Polish politicians by the end of the war. Communists would gain support among Poles by distributing the lands left by Germans, and keep it by reminding Poles that only the Red Army could prevent the Germans from coming b
ack and claiming their lost property.2

  Poland’s communists had accepted these borders, and knew that they were to remove the Germans. “We have to throw them out,” said Władysław Gomułka, general secretary of the Polish party in May 1945, “since all countries are built on national, not multinational, principles.” Moving Poland to the west would not in itself make Poland a “national” state in this sense: the shift in borders simply replaced large Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities with a very large German minority. Poland would require a massive displacement of millions of Germans to be “national” in the way that Gomułka had in mind. Perhaps 1.5 million of them were German administrators and colonists, who would never have come to Poland without Hitler’s war. They lived in houses or apartments that they had taken from Poles expelled (or killed) during the war or from Jews who had been killed. More than half a million more were Germans who were native to Poland, and had lived within Poland’s prewar borders. The remaining eight million or so were to lose their homes in lands that had been in Germany even before Hitler’s expansion, and had been predominantly German in population for centuries.3

  In creating his Poland, Stalin turned Hitler’s Generalplan Ost on its head. Germany, rather than expanding eastward to create a huge land empire, would be confined in the west. The Soviets, Americans, and British occupied Germany together, and its immediate political future was not entirely clear. What was obvious was that it would be a Germany for the Germans—but not in Hitler’s sense. It would be a compact area in the middle of Europe, separated from Austria, separated from the Sudetenland taken from Czechoslovakia, collecting Germans from the East rather than sending them there as colonists. Rather than a master race commanding slaves along a brave new eastern frontier, Germans would be one more homogeneous nation. Yet unlike Hitler, Stalin did not understand “resettlement” as a euphemism for mass killing. He knew that people would die in the course of mass population transfers, but the destruction of the German nation was not his goal.