Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (53 page)
Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Still harder to describe to outsiders was the scene in which every part of the city controlled by the insurgents possessed its own self-governing administration. Each municipal district had its mayor, just as each street had its self-help committee and each tenement block its prefect. These organizations sprang to life spontaneously in a society whose loyalty had in large measure been won before the Rising by the secret ‘Underground State’. They ran communal kitchens, built barricades, cleared rubble, buried the dead, cared for the sick, extinguished fires. In close association with the Home Army and the Government delegates, they maintained a postal service, a widespread system of press distribution, and a fully fledged Public Security Corps (PKB) with police, judicial, and investigatory functions.
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Each of the main political groupings organized its own district militias.
Insurgent justice was supposed to follow strict procedures, with regular court trials and verdicts. Executions of convicted spies, murderers, traitors, looters, and informers were carried out by AK police units. But lynchings were not unknown.
Volksdeutsche
were in constant danger, as were prostitutes who serviced the German military. German sources complained, among other things, that German civilians were robbed and murdered.
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Civilian morale was affected by a wide variety of factors, both political and material, and it passed through several phases. It was high after the outbreak, gradually declined during August, survived a crisis in early September, and revived again thereafter. Like military morale, it was strongly influenced by the hopes and fears surrounding Western aid and Soviet intervention.
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Nonetheless, it is a simple fact that a large body of Varsovians chose to stay, and to share the fate of the fighters. It was their unstinting support that enabled the insurgents to keep fighting. The Rising would have collapsed at any point if the civilians had decided en masse to heed
German orders and surrender. The leading study of the subject concludes by describing insurgent Warsaw as a ‘city of contrasts’:
Alongside the superhuman sacrifice and selflessness, there was selfishness and shirking; where many gave everything they possessed, others hoarded and capitalised; unprecedented communal solidarity was marred by intrigue and betrayal. Whilst some people treated the insurgents as faultless heroes, others regarded them as the instigators of their suffering and the murderers of their families and children.
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F-M Montgomery’s account of the Battle of the Falaise Gap, in August 1944, is a wonderful piece of post-hoc self-justification. Readers of his memoirs may be forgiven for thinking of the battle as a melange of superlative planning and masterly execution. Participants tended to think the opposite. They remember it more as a fine example of Clausewitz’s remark about ‘the fog of war’. Allied units were bombed by their own side. Others got lost, after confusing French villages with similar names. Coordination between Montgomery’s armies to the north and Omar Bradley’s American forces to the south was virtually non-existent. At one point, offended by the future Field Marshal’s habitual arrogance, Bradley remarked: ‘Montgomery can have our support if he
asks
for it.’ The decisive conjunction of the British and American offensives on 18–20 August 1944, which sealed the fate of the German Seventh Army and ended the campaign in Normandy, seems to have happened as much by good fortune as by design. [
REFLECTIONS
, p. 292]
In those crucial August days, a key role fell to the 1st (Polish) Armoured Division of Maj.Gen. M., which formed the spearhead of the 2nd Canadian Corps on the flank of Montgomery’s command. Probing southwards from Falaise, the division linked up with the Americans, who were moving north from Argentan, and, by occupying a strategic ridge, blocked the Seventh Army’s line of retreat. It has been described as ‘the cork in the bottle neck’. Maj.Gen. M.’s tankmen found themselves in the very hottest cauldron of the battle. Whilst fending off the ever more desperate attacks of the German divisions who were trapped on one side of the ridge, they wrestled with similarly desperate rescue attempts mounted by German units from the other side. But they held out; and Montgomery was able to claim the Falaise Gap as one of the greatest victories of his career. Indeed, it was the victory which preceded his promotion to field marshal. In the course of the action, Maj.Gen. M.’s division suffered 20 per cent casualties.
REFLECTIONS
A German officer and former schoolteacher posted to Warsaw enters desperate thoughts into his diary
The National Socialist revolution seems half-hearted in every way. History tells us of dreadful deeds and appalling barbarities during the French Revolution. And the Bolshevik Revolution too allowed terrible atrocities to be perpetrated . . . Both the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks butchered the ruling upper classes and executed their royal families. They broke with Christianity and waged war on it, intending to wipe it off the face of the earth . . .
The methods of the National Socialists are different, but basically they too pursue a single idea: the extermination and annihilation of people who think differently from them. Now and then a certain number of Germans are shot . . . People are imprisoned in concentration camps . . . The public hears nothing about it.
On the one hand, they ally themselves with the ruling classes in capital and industry . . . on the other they preach socialism. They declare themselves in favour of the right to personal and religious freedom, but they destroy the Christian churches and conduct a secret, underground battle against them. They speak of the Führer principle and the rights of capable people to develop their talents freely, but they make everything dependent on party membership . . .
And look at the National Socialists themselves – see how far they really live by National Socialist principles . . . Who faces the enemy? The people, not the party. Now they are calling up the physically infirm to serve in the army, while you see healthy, fit young men working in party offices and the police, far from the firing line. Why are they exempt?
They seize Polish and Jewish property to enjoy it themselves. Now the Poles and the Jews have nothing to eat, they live in want, they are freezing, and the National Socialists see nothing wrong in taking everything for themselves . . .
If you read the newspapers and listen to the news on the radio you might think everything was going very well, peace was certain, the war already won and the future of the German people full of hope. However, I just can’t believe it, if only because injustice cannot prevail in the long run . . .
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The last year has been one setback after another . . .
No one in Germany believes we will win the war any more either, but what way out is there? There’ll be no revolution at home because no one has the courage to risk his life by standing up to the Gestapo . . . And we can’t expect an army coup. The
army is willingly being driven to its death, and any idea of opposition that might set off a mass movement is quickly suppressed there too. So we must go on to the bitter end. Our entire nation will have to pay for all these wrongs and this unhappiness, all the crimes we have committed . . .
11 August 1944
The Führer is to issue a decree that Warsaw is to be razed to the ground. A start has been made already. All the streets liberated in the Uprising are being destroyed by fire. The inhabitants have to leave the city, and are going westward in crowds of many thousands. If the news of this decree is true then it’s clear to me that we have lost Warsaw, and with it Poland and the war itself. We are giving up a place we held for five years, extending it and telling the world it was a forfeit of war. Monstrous methods were used here. We acted as if we were the masters and would never go away. Now we can’t help seeing that all is lost, we’re destroying our own work . . . Our policy in the East is bankrupt, and we are erecting a final memorial to it with the destruction of Warsaw.
Captain Wilm Hosenfeld*
* The officer who saved Władysław Szpilman, ‘The Pianist’.
Thanks to the radio link via London, the Home Army leaders in Warsaw were kept abreast of their comrades’ fortunes in Normandy. Their view of the matter was simple. It held that, since Poles were laying down their lives for the Allied cause in the West, the Allies should find a way of assisting the Poles who were fighting the same German enemy in the East.
In London, reliable news about Warsaw’s predicament was in short supply. The exiled Government received daily bulletins from Gen. Boor, who was the principal source of information for all and sundry. But his comments were generally thought to be exaggerated and (to critics) motivated by the desire to extract large amounts of Western aid. The official German broadcasts were worse than useless. The
Deutsche Nachrichten Bureau
news agency did not even mention the Rising until 15 August, and then only to say that it had collapsed. Soviet sources were little better. They also kept silent about the Rising for many days, and once they had admitted its existence, they limited their comments to political denunciations. They
simply did not discuss the key question, whether Soviet forces would or would not come to the insurgents’ rescue. British commentators largely took their cue from Moscow.
Officials of the Polish Government and army continued to rush to and fro in their efforts to shake up what seemed to them like British ‘passivity’. On 8 August, after returning from Italy, the Commanderin-Chief signalled to Boor that Churchill had agreed to restart RAF relief flights. He had spoken to Gen. Ismay, F-M Brooke, Air Vice Marshal Wilson, and the Secretary for Air, Archibald Sinclair. He reported ‘considerable resistance’. When he read out Boor’s earlier telegram about the balance sheet of Allied cooperation showing nothing except Polish sacrifices on behalf of the West, he received ‘a violent and sharp protest about insulting the Empire’.
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Eden, the Foreign Secretary, attempted to calm the troubled waters, but without making specific commitments.
The position of the Commanderin-Chief, however, had been seriously damaged. He now found out that his advice about the Rising had been ignored or overruled by his own collegues and that his telegrams on the subject had been tampered with. Not surprisingly, he protested very forcefully to the President.
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His closest followers were aghast. The National Council was riven with splits, and spent hours in fruitless attempts to pass the simplest of resolutions.
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[
TRADER
, p. 295]
When the Premier arrived back in London from Moscow, he, too, joined the fray. He thought he had benefited from Stalin’s apparent promise of aid, but his difficulties grew when he made a full report to his Cabinet. The political dimensions of the looming disaster were fast becoming apparent. Intense negotiations began both within the Government and between the Government, the ‘National Council’, and the underground authorities in Warsaw. One way or another, a definitive response had to be made to Stalin’s demands. The aim was to thrash out a plan, which, with the backing of the Western Allies, would finally reconcile Polish and Soviet positions. It would obviously be required to address all the main criticisms of the pre-war Republic; it would have to find a place for the Communists in the new order; and it could not possibly avoid far-reaching territorial concessions to the USSR. The discussions were fierce. Some observers believed that the Premier was being pushed not to a genuine compromise but to an ill-disguised sell-out.
In those same weeks, intense lobbying was directed at all known and potential friends of Poland. A delegation of Polish socialists went to see Clement Attlee. Polish Jews lobbied British Jews. A group of Polish trade unionists addressed the British TUC. Grandees like Vansittart and Lord Selborne spoke up in Parliament, or wrote to the Foreign Office. The impact was negligible. Resentments inevitably grew.
TRADER
A man with marked commercial talents manages to escape from the Rising, and to take his Jewish girlfriend with him
Knowing the dangers, I had arranged to meet Christine and her mother, Helen Rozen, in Warsaw, to help them get Aryan identification papers. I had some connections in the Underground, and was able to get them genuine birth certificates of people whose deaths had not been recorded. Her mother, who was very Jewish-looking, became Sophie O., while Sara, who didn’t look Jewish at all, became Christine P. Sophie became my ‘aunt’ and Christine my ‘wife’. We even had a false marriage certificate. Whilst waiting for their papers, Christine and her mother stayed with a woman who was making some very nasty remarks about the Jews being killed by the Germans ‘like bedbugs’. Perhaps she said that intentionally, to warn me; I don’t know . . .
In August people came around asking for helpers for a makeshift hospital they were setting up in the basement of the Foreign Ministry building. They took Christine, a few other women, and me. We stayed there a couple of days, until a fellow came along whom I’ll always remember: an SS man, tall, cross-eyed, carrying a basket loaded with fine crystal glassware, obviously stolen; the Germans were looting all the houses. He looked at me and said, ‘You Polish swine, why are you looking at me like that?’ I replied in German, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not Polish.’ ‘Oh, forgive me. What are you doing over here?’ I told him my business story, that I got caught by the Rising. Then he said, ‘Look, every day at four o’clock we take our packages for Germany to Jablonna. You and your wife can come with us tomorrow.’ Well, it was a chance to get out.
The next day at four o’clock they showed up, drunk. ‘Come on!’ they yelled. They gave me a bottle, and I had to have a drink too. Then they warned us, ‘When the truck turns the corner, duck as low as you can. They are going to shoot.’ They explained that the partisans’ guns were aimed at a certain height; if we got down, they couldn’t hit us.
They made a stop about 25 kilometres from Warsaw, in a place called Bielany. Everyone in the village was scared; they didn’t know what was going on in Warsaw. They had set up beds in the church basement and were all staying there. The next day we decided to strike out on our own.
Walking through the woods we came upon a large villa. Everybody there wanted to know our story – how we got out of Warsaw. Some of them thought we were traitors, not because we didn’t stay to fight, but because I was not in favour of the
Rising. I said that it was unwise, in fact suicidal, for the Poles to attempt a Rising; we didn’t stand a chance; we should let the Russian army finish the Germans off.
We stayed on for a week or two. One day, in the daytime, someone called to me, ‘Mr Damski! Germans are coming! Try to talk to them.’ They were a group of German officers – medical doctors – who were looking for a place to put a hospital. They were all from Bavaria, from a regiment that had retreated from Stalingrad. Hitler had blocked all promotions in their division for not fighting. They said something to me about ‘Polish bandits’. I said I didn’t consider them outlaws, just Home Army fighters . . .
After they had gone, I found why the people in the villa had wanted me to stall the Germans: they were operating a secret hospital for Polish partisans hiding in the nearby forest. While I was talking to the Germans in the front, they were taking the wounded partisans out of the back door.
A few days later, one of the doctors came back, saying they were organizing the collection and delivery of farm produce and needed a translator. So Christine and I moved to the little town of Ozharov, where I organized a wholesale business which grew very quickly. We employed 119 people and at peak time we were selling 4,000 tons of vegetables. I could get the trucks from the Germans . . . Every month we loaded between twelve and fifteen railway carriages with vegetables that were shipped to Hamburg, to Brussels, everywhere. It was a terrific success.
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John Damski