Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (96 page)
Sentences followed a tariff that did not appear to conform to the gravity of named offences. In the Soviet system, they included a wide range of punishments starting with administrative exile or internment under a milder penal regime. In Poland, they consisted largely of incarceration with or without solitary confinement, or with or without hard labour. Terms of punishment were routinely harsh. Five, ten, or fifteen years were run-of-the-mill. Death sentences, by shooting or hanging, were common, and were far less frequently commuted for political convicts than for others. But analyses of the major trials reveal no discernible policy or pattern. The condemned lived or died at random or at the whim of Comrade Bierut and his underlings.
One last distinction, however, is necessary. The judicial and security strictures of ‘People’s Poland’ were divided into separate civilian and military sectors. The Security Ministry, though supposedly concerned with non-military affairs, frequently directed its cases, after interrogation, to military courts. The Ministry of National Defence operated its own parallel system. The innocuously named Chief Bureau of Information was the resort of the special military services, which included security, intelligence and counterintelligence branches. It possessed its own interrogators, its own prisons, its own procurators and its own courts. It was particularly zealous in rooting out ex-insurgents, because, where convenient, as former members of the Home Army, ex-insurgents could be claimed by the military as distinct from the civilian sphere.
Most of these horrors were hidden from public view, and were only revealed many decades later. All media were strictly censored; and no critical reporting was permissible. The press reported some trials and verdicts, but it could not criticize them. So, after 1947–48, the democratic opposition lay low or went into hiding; and many oppositionists were
confirmed in thinking how right their instincts to oppose had been. For, as many ex-insurgents knew in their hearts, lost causes are not necessarily wrong.
One of the most penetrating insights into the realities of political relationships during and after the Second World War was written by a survivor of the Warsaw Rising, who spent eleven years in Communist jails after 1945. Lt. ‘Badger’ was a graduate of the
Institut des Hautes Ecoles Internationales
in Paris, and had worked for the Home Army’s BIP. During the Rising had edited the
Insurgent News.
Arrested in August 1945, he was subjected to two trials – one in 1946, when he was given ten years, and another in 1952, when he was sentenced to death. Yet the most peculiar experience of his imprisonment began one day in March 1949, when he was pushed into a cell in Block XI at Mokotov Jail. There were already two prisoners inside. One of them said, ‘We’re the so-called war criminals, Germans.’ The other said, ‘My name is Stroop, with two o’s, Christian name Jürgen. Rank of lieutenant general.
Enchanté, Monsieur.’
Here was Communist theory being put into practice. Fascist and democratic prisoners were both ‘anti-Communist’. Therefore, they were equally guilty. The SS man and the Home Army soldier may conceivably have fought each other. But
objectively
, as the Marxists might say, they had been collaborating. Therefore, they deserved to rot in the same cell.
Badger decided to benefit from the opportunity. For 255 days, he had limitless time and leisure to interview his cellmates at length and to examine the mind of a totally unrepentant and unreconstructed Nazi. He asked endless questions and memorized the replies. For Stroop had been SS and Police Chief of Athens and Warsaw and was the liquidator of the Warsaw Ghetto. ‘He officially received double rations’. ‘He was carefully dressed in a well-tailored deep wine-red jacket, white cravat, . . . fawn trousers and beautifully polished brown shoes.’
47
Stroop was eager to relate his adventures, especially in the Ghetto:
The fighting was so intense that day that my troops were beginning to falter. I decided the time had come to burn every house still standing . . . The Jews dashed through the flames like devils, appearing in windows or on balconies, sometimes teetering on ledges. Some shot at us; others sang what might have been psalms, or chanted in unison
‘Hitler Kaputt’
or ‘Death to the Germans’, or ‘Long live Poland’.
CAVIAHUE
The former commander of the Zoshka Battalion makesa new life in the New World
Capt. ‘George’ sailed for Buenos Aires in July 1948. Three years earlier, after release from German imprisonment, he had joined the Polish Parachute Brigade in Britain. And in 1946, at the head of a relief mission to Poland, he had succeeded in bringing out his wife and children, who had passed the war in Cracow. But the travails of post-war Europe were not for him. A graduate of Warsaw Polytechnic and a qualified civil engineer/ architect, he possessed readily exportable skills. So he headed for happier climes.
In Argentina, however, the captain’s family ran into the troubles fomented by the regime of General Perón. Buenos Aires was a city of political turmoil, strikes, and street-fights. So they started a further stage in their long journey to the West. They travelled 1,300 kilometres to the end of the railway line in the province of Neuquen, and then into the foothills of the Andes. They eventually settled in the wilderness, by the lake of Quillen below the high Cordilleras, in the former kingdom of Araucania, in the land of the Mapuche Indians. It was the native home of the
Araucaria araucana
, the ‘monkey puzzle tree’. They built their own house, like the Swiss family Robinson. They hunted for food, as Capt. George had once hunted for Germans in the Old Town. They lived with the Indians, and learned their ways. They only moved to the city of Zapata in 1961, when their children were in urgent need of schooling.
Like many Polish exiles, in the mould of Malinowski, Przewalski, or Bronisław Pilsudski, Capt. George turned to anthropology. A founding member of the Araucanian Society, he made numerous studies and collections of the language, lore, and natural religion of the Mapuche Nation and of associated tribes. These ‘People of the Earth’ had resisted both the Incas and the Spaniards before coming under the unrequested rule of Chile and Argentina. They are one of Latin America’s many indigenous peoples fighting for survival and recognition. Like the Varsovians under German and Soviet rule, they simply wanted control of their own destiny.
Yet, as a scout and an engineer, Capt. George sought above all to create something permanent. Working for the provincial Energy Department, he planned and helped build the new mountain resort of Caviahue, nearly 2,000 metres high at the foot of a volcano. By the time that he retired in 1983, he had seen the settlement grow into a year-round health and ski station, powered by its own hydro-electrical system, graced by hotels and lakeside promenades, and serviced by a tourist airport. A refugee from the ‘city of destruction’ had left the most constructive of marks on the map of his adoptive continent.
1
It was total pandemonium. Flames. Smoke. Showers of sparks mixed with dust. The stench of scorched flesh. Explosions which almost drowned out the shrieks of the ‘parachutists’ . . .
‘What do you mean by parachutists?’ [Badger] enquired.
‘That’s what my SS men called the Jews, Jewesses, and children who leaped from the windows of the houses that had been ignited below . . . the fun sometimes lasted all night.’
Stroop, highly excited, mimed a duck shooter hunting his prey. Striding around the cell pointing an imaginary shotgun, he shouted, ‘
Paf, paf, paf, paf . . .
’A glance [at our faces] caused Stroop’s cheeks to lose their glow. With a shrug he turned to the window and began humming the Horst Wessel song.
48
Stroop took a keen interest in all aspects of the Polish resistance, confirming that in his last job, where he had been ordered to coordinate a German resistance organization against the advancing Americans, he had tried to imitate Polish methods:
‘Herr Mocharski,’ he said, ‘don’t you agree that the Poles are the world’s best schemers? It’s in their blood!’
‘History has forced us to become a nation of plotters,’ I admitted.
Stroop did no soul-searching. He had seen his utopia, and regretted nothing but its passing:
‘We should have started the liquidation programme sooner,’ he said emphatically. ‘As I learned in the Warsaw Ghetto, a contaminated forest must be uprooted and burned to the ground. Heinrich Himmler knew this, of course. If only we could have convinced all Germany in 1933 of the need for racial and spiritual purity. . . . the Reich would have been impervious.’
49
Stroop’s reflections were expressed without any inhibitions. He thought quite literally that ‘German history is the most beautiful in the world.’ Then he moved on. ‘Goodbye, Herr Mocharski. See you soon at St Peter’s Gate.’
50
The NKVD removed tens of thousands of people from circulation. Serov’s successors, Lt.Gen. N. Selivanovsky and Minister S. Kruglov, wrote report
after report about the elimination of this group or that group, about the numbers of people and weapons seized, about the sum total of Poles held in various parts of the NKVD’s underworld. Not until October 1946 did Moscow feel sufficiently confident to reduce the number of its internal ministry troops.
Of course, the profile of ex-insurgents gradually decreased within the tides of the repressed. In the course of 1945, the specific category of ‘bandit-insurrectionary’ fades away. But there undoubtedly were significant groups of ex-insurgents within the various categories of ‘fascists’, ‘illegals’, ‘bandits’, ‘members of NIE’, ‘members of AK’, and ‘members of WiN’ whose arrest was recorded.
Among the published documents, some of the most interesting relate to the manifest failings of the security services in the immediate post-war period. On 11 October 1945, for example, Adviser Selivanovsky writes to Beria to tell him that ‘the organs of public security in Poland are littered to a high degree with traitors, members of Underground organizations, bribe-takers, marauders and other criminal elements.’ In the previous three months, 333 security officers had been arrested, and 365 relieved of their posts:
The criminal element, which has penetrated the security organs, exploits its position in the service: by forming anti-state groups within the organs . . .: by giving information to the Underground and other active bands . . .: by cooperating with the bandits in attacks on the militia and on prisons: by issuing death threats against security agents: by selling agency reports for bribes, by destroying interrogation reports, by releasing prisoners: and by engaging in robberies and muggings.
The Minister, together with our instructors, has taken steps to recruit a better sort of agent and to improve their material benefits. Bierut has been informed.
51
Obviously, there were problems.
In July 1947, Minister Kruglov reported to Molotov on hunger strikes among two groups of Polish prisoners in Russia – in camp nr. 454 at Ryazan and in camp nr. 27 at Krasnogorsk.
52
The camps were classed as having a ‘light regime’, the former held 5 generals, 894 other Home Army soldiers, and 567 Home Army ‘supporters’. The latter was a special camp for Polish aristocrats, its prisoners possessing an array of titles as princes, barons, and counts. In both cases, the strikes had been largely provoked
by uncertainties concerning the date of return. And in each case, the leader of the action had links to the Warsaw Rising. Gen. ‘Arrow’, otherwise Ludwik Bittner (wrongly identified by the Russians as Winter), had been appointed by the Home Army to liaise with the Peasant Battalions and had been arrested by the NKVD on 14 August 1944 as he prepared to assist the Rising. Prince Yanush R. had been arrested by the Gestapo in the first week of August, following the outbreak of the Rising, and taken to Berlin. Returning to his estate near Warsaw in October, he was promptly whisked off to Moscow by the NKVD. He was consigned to the camp by Beria in person, for refusing to compose an appropriate statement about the situation in Poland. Both men went home at the end of 1947. For the rest of his life, Prince R. lived in a two-room flat in Mokotov.
Among the unpublished files, there are vast quantities of relevant documents that were to remain unseen and unread to the end of the century. But some curious items have surfaced, especially from 1945. The NKVD made great efforts, for example, to check up on the progress of every single political party or grouping, including the Communist Workers’ Party (PPR). An acid report from Lt.Gen. Selivanovsky tells Beria that the PPR’s membership figures are much inflated. They were claiming to have 45,000 members in the Warsaw District, whereas only 14,000 had registered.
53
Much time was also devoted to the Jewish issue. An extensive, undated report from late 1945 reviews the overall situation. It starts, somewhat tendentiously, with the statement: ‘Throughout the entire course of history, the existence in Poland of hostile attitudes towards the Jews has been a permanent phenomenon.’
54
After reviewing the revival of Jewish parties and organizations of post-war Poland, it summarizes the distribution of Jews in the various branches of the Government service:
In the Ministry of Public Security, Jews constitute 18.7% of the employees. Jews occupy 50% of directorial posts.
In the 1st Department of this Ministry, 27% of the employees are Jewish: 7 persons have directorial duties.
In the Personnel Department (Special Inspectorate), there is 33.3% of Jews, all holding responsible positions. In the Health Department, the figure is 49.1%: in the Finances – 29%.
In the central apparatus of press control, Jews constitute up to 50%, in the branch at Radom – 82.3%.
55