The Second World War (80 page)
Polish patriotism was perhaps romantic in some ways, but it remained astonishingly resolute through the darkest days of both Nazi and Soviet oppression. In addition to the mass and individual killings which followed the German invasion, over 30,000 Poles were sent to camps, many to the new camp of Auschwitz. Although Poland’s army was crushed in September 1939, a new underground resistance movement was created very soon afterwards. At its height, the Home Army reached nearly 400,000 members. The extraordinarily resourceful Polish intelligence services, which had provided the first Enigma machine, continued to help the Allies. Later in the war, the Poles even managed to spirit away a trial V-2 rocket which had landed in their marshes, and disassemble it. A specially adapted transport C-47 Dakota was flown to Poland and brought it back for examination by Allied scientists.
Both the Home Army and the intelligence networks reported to the Polish government-in-exile in London, which Stalin recognized reluctantly in August 1941 after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Home Army was always desperately short of weapons. At first it concentrated on releasing prisoners and sabotaging rail communications, which provided great but unacknowledged assistance to the Red Army. Armed attacks came later.
The Poles, released from Soviet labour camps to join the forces commanded by General W
adysaw Anders, never ceased to loathe their oppressors. And the London government-in-exile’s distrust of Stalin increased when it heard he was asking the British to recognize the frontier he had agreed with Hitler following the Nazi–Soviet pact. In April 1943, a crisis developed when the Germans announced to the world that they had discovered in the forest of Katy
the mass graves of Polish officers, executed by the Soviet NKVD.
The Soviet regime had always denied that it knew anything of the
whereabouts of these prisoners, and at the time even the Poles had not believed Stalin’s regime capable of such a massacre. The Kremlin insisted that the discovery was a German propaganda trick, and it must have been Nazis who had killed the victims. The Polish government-in-exile demanded an investigation by the International Red Cross, while the British were acutely embarrassed. Churchill suspected that the Soviets were capable of such an act, but he felt unable to confront Stalin, especially at a time when he had to admit once again that an invasion of France was impossible that year. Further disasters for the Poles soon followed in June. The Germans in Warsaw managed to arrest the commander and other leaders of the Home Army. But far greater tragedies for Poland lay ahead.
The summer of 1941 had seen some early attacks on German troops in the Soviet Union by Red Army soldiers cut off by the Wehrmacht’s advance. However, the first uprising against Nazi rule came in Serbia following the launch of Operation Barbarossa. This took the complacent German forces of occupation by surprise. Soon after their victory in the spring, a Leutnant had boasted in a letter home: ‘
We soldiers are like gods
here!!’ The rapidity of the country’s surrender that April had led them to expect little trouble, but they had not considered how many Yugoslav soldiers might have retained and hidden their weapons.
Serbia came under the overall command of Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List’s headquarters in Greece. The three divisions of Generalleutnant Paul Bader’s LVI Corps were badly trained and under equipped. Ordered to respond with reprisals, they resorted mainly to shooting Jews who had already been rounded up. But executions of villagers close to the site of an ambush played straight into the hands of the Communist partisans, whose numbers rapidly swelled with those who wanted to take revenge for the death of family members.
Generalfeldmarschall Keitel at Führer headquarters demanded savage reprisals. The ratio was raised to a hundred Serbs for every German killed, in the belief that the ‘
Balkan mentality
’ only understood violence. In September, a major punitive offensive took place reinforced by the 342nd Infantry Division. The local German commanders again decided to start by shooting Jews who had been interned. So in mid-October 1941, some 2,100 Jews and ‘Gypsies’ were shot in retaliation for the killing of twenty-one German soldiers by Communist partisans. It was the first mass murder of Jews away from Soviet or Polish territory.
The partisan attacks were led by Josip Broz, alias Tito, an effective Comintern organizer during the Spanish Civil War. Tito, a strong figure of brutal good looks who had revived the Yugoslav Communist Party,
believed in the need for Communists everywhere to help their comrades in the Soviet Union. The internationalism of the Party managed to avoid the worst ethnic and religious fault-lines in Yugoslavia, with Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians.
The rival resistance organization of
tniks led by General Draža Mihailovi
was almost exclusively Serb. The bespectacled, bearded and gloomy Mihailovi, who looked more like an Orthodox priest than a military man, could not hope to rival Tito’s charismatic leadership. He believed in building up his force ready for the day when the Allies would land, so that he could join them and restore the kingdom to young King Peter. He had rightly foreseen that Tito was going to use the partisan war to seize total power when the Red Army arrived. Mihailovidid not want to provoke reprisals, yet contrary to Communist propaganda his forces did take on the Germans at times. Other groups also calling themselvestniks co-operated closely with the Germans and the puppet government of General Milan Nedi, a confusion which later helped the Communists to blacken Mihailovi’s name in the eyes of the British.