Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (52 page)
Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
By 21 August, the Germans had lost over 9,000 soldiers killed in Warsaw, with still more wounded or missing. They clearly had cause for reflection. Their tactics were not working. They were not making rapid inroads into the insurgent-held districts; and they were paying a heavy price. [
NIGHT PATROL
, p. 285]
All standard accounts of the Warsaw Rising present the picture of a deeply polarized conflict between two sides – ‘the Germans’ and ‘the Poles’. If they discuss the third, but largely passive, party in the conflict, they usually talk about ‘the Russians’. Each of these generalizations calls for examination.
On the German side, a large if not predominant part of the soldiery was made up of what were often called ‘collaborationist forces’. By 1944, both the Wehrmacht and the SS were accepting recruits from almost any source available. (The two obvious exceptions were Poles and Jews.) In Warsaw, the largest single group of non-Germans were Russians from the RONA Brigade, whose origins lay in the province of Briansk. The Azeris of the 111th Regiment formed a distinct formation, as did the Oriental Muslim Regiment. The two Cossack units came from the 15th Cossack Cavalry Corps, which consisted of Tsarist émigrés of post-1917 vintage and which, having been largely raised in the Balkans, contained a smattering of Bulgars, Serbs, and other Orthodox. (They were eventually handed over to the Soviets by the British in Austria.) The 2nd Hungarian Corps were particularly reluctant to serve. Indeed, they seriously considered joining the insurgents. They were told by their Government in Budapest, ‘not to join the Poles, but . . . not to fight them.’
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On this issue, two major misconceptions can be identified. It is often said that the collaborationist forces in Warsaw included ‘Vlassovites’ and also Ukrainians from the 14th
Waffen-SS Galizien
Division. Neither statement is true. Vlassov was not in Warsaw. Indeed the Vlassov Army was not formally constituted until the winter of 1944–45. The source of the mistake seems to derive from the fact that part of the RONA Brigade, which was broken up after the Rising, was transferred to the Vlassov Army and fought with them to the end of the war. The term ‘Vlassovites’ was used by the post-war Communists as pejorative shorthand for all Russians serving in the German military. What is true, therefore, is that the ‘Vlassovites’ of 1945 did include men who had served under Kaminski in Warsaw.
NIGHT PATROL
A member of the Home Army’s Information Department is asked to witness a vital operation
On Wednesday 30 August, I was summoned to Monter, who announced that our forces were going to retreat from the Old Town that same night. All the elite formations in the City Centre had been concentrated for an attack on the German-held corridor, which ran from the Saxon Garden to the Iron Gate Square. The Germans were to be pinned down by two lines of fire. We were to give cover to units crossing over to us from the Old Town. ‘I want to have you with me as a reporter,’ said Monter, ‘to broadcast about it in English and Polish.’ He was in a good mood, confident of success.
Around ten at night, we moved off . . . The closer we got to the target, the more difficult it was to find our bearings. I was brought up in this town. I knew every corner. But we were advancing through a forest of stone ruins along twisting paths trodden into the rubble, climbing over mounds of bricks. Somewhere not far from the Square, we stopped in a courtyard surrounded by the burnt-out remnants of its walls. Soldiers sat by the wall waiting for action to begin. Officers were reporting to Monter every few minutes . . .
Sometime after midnight Monter ordered the firing of a green flare, the agreed signal for those in the Old Town to commence. For a long time we looked up into the sky, watching for the reply, which did not come. I asked the Colonel about enemy strength. ‘Three battalions,’ he replied, ‘and probably seven or eight tanks.’ He explained how the plan was to work. There would be a diversionary attack in the Saxon Garden. During that time our men would smash holes in the walls of the tenement houses facing onto Iron Gate Square and the Mirov Hall, and would carry out a raid in the direction of Elector Street where they would meet up with the others. So as not to mistake each other for Germans, they were to use the password
sosna
, meaning ‘pine tree’. The most dangerous moment would come when they broke into the Mirov Hall.
About one o’clock, shots were fired in the region of the Saxon Garden. Bursts from machine pistols could be heard, and exploding grenades. An orange flare roared into the sky. The Germans were summoning help. They were answered by the thunder of their tanks arriving from the direction of Cool Street.
All the time I was at Monter’s side, listening to reports being delivered and orders being issued. After half an hour the Colonel grew uneasy. For some reason, our main attack could not get started. He decided to go forward to see what was happening.
We climbed up fire-damaged stairs; we jumped from one piece of wall to another . . . Eventually we reached a line of destroyed houses [on Starch Street], right opposite the Mirov Hall. In front of the Colonel loomed the silhouette of a young officer, Lieutenant ‘Yanush’ Z.
‘Colonel. Our girl sappers are blowing a hole in the wall. [But] there is no way out. The German howitzers have found the range both of the opening and of the courtyard.’
Monter, who till that point had been silent, spoke up.
‘Execute the order. You are to attack immediately. We will not leave our people on the other side without support.’
‘Understood, Colonel,’ replied the lieutenant grimly.
Again, I climbed behind Monter up something that was once a stairwell, and we stood on a scorched window, which looked out to the left onto the Mirov Hall. Two floors below was a courtyard gradually filling with youngsters round the well. I recognized the group of girls from the sapper patrol. Suddenly, a mortar landed in the crowd, followed by a second and a third. They set off our petrol bombs. I heard the screams of shock and pain, mainly from girls’ voices. Flames lit up a hellish scene of wounded and burning bodies . . .
I crossed the whole sector with Monter . . . In the morning, the units returned to their jumping-off points. I was with him when he received their reports. That night around one hundred young people had died.
1
J. ‘Novak’
A similar misunderstanding surrounds the Ukrainians. The
SS-Galizien
was never in Warsaw, and cannot be fairly accused of atrocities there. Nonetheless, a certain number of ethnic Ukrainians
were
present. Some served alongside Russians in RONA. Others served in a variety of German police units, both as distinct formations and in conjunction with policemen of other nationalities. It was said that the Nazi execution squads commanded by
SS-Hstuf.
Spilker, for example, were largely manned by Ukrainians. The Volhynian Self-Defence Legion made a brief appearance late on. What
is
true is that one or more of the Ukrainian police units were transferred to the
SS-Galizien
after the Rising. In this way, the
SS-Galizien
came to include men who had earlier served in Warsaw.
On the Polish side, discussions can be found on the role of Jews in the Rising. In the eyes of most Jewish insurgents this is a non-issue, since they were accustomed to regard themselves as patriotic Poles like anyone else. They have no sympathy for the post-war Zionist convention which regards ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews’ as two completely separate ethnic or national groups, and which tries to magnify the friction between the two. They are particularly incensed by the false accusation that the Home Army did not accept Jews, and by even wilder talk about it being an ‘anti-Semitic organization’. The fact is, Jews with various religious or political connections served with distinction both in the Home Army and in the People’s Army. The latter, which was particularly short of recruits, agreed to organize a separate Jewish section that was mainly composed of surviving Ghetto fighters. There was also an assortment of foreign Jews, especially Hungarians, who had been liberated from their German captors and who volunteered to join their Polish liberators.
This is not to say that occasional problems did not arise. Many years after the war, certain Jewish historians produced the accusation that Jews had been murdered during the Rising by the AK and NSZ. On reflection, the accusation was duly modified and redirected against individuals who may have belonged to the AK or the NSZ. Close examination revealed both a large number of misunderstandings and a small number of rapes and murders of which Jews had been the victims. The difficulty was to know whether these ‘black pages of the Rising’ were racially motivated and whether they were qualitatively different from the numerous other crimes which occurred as a matter of course in a starving city of nearly a million people. Certainly, they were not ignored by the Home Army’s security organs. What the investigations did underline was firstly that Warsaw in 1944 still harboured a very sizeable Jewish community and secondly that Jews served with distinction in the insurgent ranks. Samuel Willenberg, for example, who was a survivor of the rising in Treblinka, contrived to serve during the Warsaw Rising both in the AK’s ‘Brooke’ Battalion and in the socialist PAL group.
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Like any major pre-war city, Warsaw contained a large variety of foreign communities. As a result, the Home Army attracted a corresponding variety of non-Polish fighters, among them Turks, Serbs, Georgians, Slovenes, Russians, Britons, Irish, and even Germans. One AK battalion contained a distinct platoon of Slovaks who had fled from the fascistic regime in their own country.
40
On the Soviet side of the front, the array of nationalities was
particularly diverse: and the ingrained habit of calling everyone a ‘Russian’ was particularly inappropriate. Russians formed only slightly more than half of the Soviet Union’s population. The rest were drawn from seventy official nationalities, most of whom would have been represented in Rokossovsky’s armies approaching the Vistula. [
MAGYAR
, p. 289]
Despite later legends, the civilian population did not support the Rising with uniform enthusiasm. It is probably accurate to say that the majority of Varsovians felt common cause with the insurgents, yet there was a significant sector which held aloof, seeking merely to survive. And, as always, there were groups and individuals who expressed opposition. After all, Poland’s insurrectionary tradition had never failed to provoke a chorus of critics who mocked the record of lost causes and romantic catastrophes. In consequence, the civilian mood in Warsaw rose and fell considerably, according to time and place. Nonetheless, one can state with confidence that there was no substantial group of Varsovians actively prepared to assist the Germans against the insurgents.
Objectively, one would have thought that it was in the German interest to discourage civilian sympathy for the insurgents. Yet the mass killings of tens of thousands of innocents during the early days had exactly the opposite effect. What is more, the recurrent flight of people from their homes either to the insurgent enclaves or to the evacuation points provided by the Germans tended to concentrate the supporters and to disperse the discontented. Home Army propaganda, which ridiculed German promises of humane treatment, was more credible than the German appeals constantly urging civilians to leave. So long as the food stocks remained, therefore, most Varsovians were prepared to sit it out.
On 24 August, one of the few British observers of the Rising, John Ward, sent a radio message to London trying to explain the nature of the conflict:
Today, a battle is going on that I think is very difficult for the British nation to understand. It is a battle that is being carried on by the civilian population as well as by the AK . . . It is total warfare. Every street in the city has been a battlefield . . . The enemy minethrowers, artillery and aircraft are taking a heavy toll of human life. The damage to property is incalculable. Normal life . . . is at a complete standstill.
41
MAGYAR
It is evident that relations between the Germans and their allies are not ideal
The approaching column of Hungarian infantry was beset by passers-by, and was forced to stop. We were standing right on Krashinski Square and from all sides we threw questions at the soldiers in different languages. Earlier they had smiled at us rather sheepishly. But lately, they expressed their sympathies quite openly. Traditional Polish–Hungarian cordiality was breaking through the walls of the enemy camp, and the chasm that had divided the enemies of Hitler, like us, from his allies, was crumbling.
‘Long live Poland!’ shouted one of the Hungarian soldiers. He was a Slovak and had correctly mastered the Polish language. ‘Keep yourselves hale and hearty, the devils have already taken Hitler . . .’
We were able to discover the details of the latest events on the Eastern Front. The Red Army was less than fifty kilometres from Warsaw. The German army had been shattered. Garrisons, administrators, and the German civilian population were rapidly retreating to the west.
At this moment, I saw a [German] gendarmerie patrol approaching from Long Street. Heavy blows from metal rifle butts rained down on the backs of the people who had been talking to the Hungarians. Fear of German brutality, which had kept a strong grip on us throughout the Occupation, had been recently replaced by greater boldness . . . In the eyes of the whole of Warsaw, the Germans had lost their victors’ strength.
One of the furious gendarmes fell upon the Slovak and began to tug at his uniform. The Hungarian soldiers and the German gendarmerie stared at each other, sizing each other up. But the stand-off did not deteriorate into open hostilities, because a Hungarian officer appeared [from Honey Street] on a beautiful dun horse, rode towards the group at a light gallop, and without a word whipped the German gendarme until bloody stripes ran along the length of his hands. The Hungarians immediately marched forward, and the gendarme stepped back onto the pavement.
1
From the log of the German Ninth Army
The Hungarian Corps has been transferred to the north wing of the SS Panzer Corps. However, the general commanding the Hungarian Corps has reported quite openly to Ninth Army that no purpose is served by using his reserve division to block the
flow of Polish reserves into Warsaw. The Polish population has always had very warm relations with the Hungarians thanks to their centuries-old tradition of friendship. The general’s troops are inclined to fraternize with the locals; and it cannot be said how long they will remain under their officers’ control. Their equipment is minimal, and consequently their effectiveness in combat is virtually nil. The Ninth Army command has taken the decision not to employ the 12th Reserve Division in a security role.
2