Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 13

When Oskar Dirlewanger, the leader of one of the most notorious SS units in the war, was asked why he was behaving in such a brutal fashion in Warsaw in August 1944, he laughed. ‘This is nothing,’ he said proudly. ‘You should have seen what we did in Byelorussia!’⁴ He was right: the people of Byelorussia endured one of the most cruel and murderous occupations of the Second World War. The number of victims, particularly helpless civilians, is staggering. Nine million people lived in Soviet Byelorussia when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, and two million of them, at the very least, were killed – by shooting, gassing, hanging, burning, drowning. A further two million were deported to the Reich as forced labour. Although there were exceptions, most were treated little better than livestock. On 21 August 1942 Hitler told the Nazi racial theorist Achim Gercke: ‘[Fritz] Sauckel [head of the deployment of forced and slave labour] told me a very curious fact. All the girls whom we bring back from the eastern territories are medically examined, and 25 per cent of them are found to be virgins.’⁵

The Germans killed civilians in 5,295 different locations in Soviet Byelorussia, with many villages being burned to the ground. The victims included around 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews and 320,000 ‘partisans’ or ‘bandits’, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians. The Germans deliberately mixed these groups together, killing Jews under the guise of the ‘anti-bandit’ war, or murdering peasants accused of ‘helping Jews and partisans’. One German commander admitted that ‘the bandits and Jews burned in houses and bunkers were not counted’. The victims were slaughtered with pitiless cruelty, and those not murdered outright often died as the result of cold, disease or starvation brought about by the German scorched-earth policy and the creation of ‘dead zones’, in which all living things, including people, were to be destroyed on sight.

The men who directed and oversaw the mass murder in Byelorussia included Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronisław Kaminski. Although they subsequently became best-known for their roles in the Warsaw Uprising, they learned their skills long before the summer of 1944. Indeed, in order to understand what happened in Warsaw one has first to look at the history of the killing fields of Byelorussia. It was precisely because Operation ‘Bagration’, the Soviet invasion of Byelorussia, was so rapid and successful in the summer of 1944 that so many of these hardened murderers were uprooted and suddenly available when Hitler and Himmler decided to put down the ‘Schweinerei’ in the Polish capital. In that sense the Warsaw Uprising became an extension of the policies that had been carried out in Byelorussia between 1941 and the summer of 1944. The personnel and the methods were the same; only the location had changed.

The sheer idiocy of German racial policy from a purely strategic point of view was never more clear than in Byelorussia and Ukraine. When they first arrived in the summer of 1941, the Germans were seen as liberators. Local people lined the dusty village tracks offering them bread and salt and boiled eggs, and winding flowers around the barrels of the advancing tanks. ‘Women often came out of their houses with an icon held before their breast, crying, “We are still Christians. Free us from Stalin who has destroyed our churches.”’ The inhabitants were relieved to be rid of Stalin, of the NKVD, of engineered famine and forced collectivization. Life under the Germans simply had to be better. Hans Fritzsche, who worked in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, was able to drive through villages near Kiev and Kharkov in German military uniform, ‘alone, unguarded … I slept peacefully in farmhouses and was fed by the population … Yet three-fourths of a year later, that whole country through which I had travelled was full of partisans – villages were burned, people shot, hostages taken, and general terror ensued.’⁶ Ukrainian Archbishop Count Andrij Scheptycky wrote to Pope Pius XII on 29 August 1942: ‘When the German army first appeared to liberate us from the Bolshevik yoke, we experienced at first a feeling of some relief. But that lasted no more than one or two months. Step by step, the Germans introduced their regime of terrible cruelty and corruption … It simply appears that a band of madmen, or of rabid dogs, have descended upon the poor population.’⁷ It is a testament to the brutality and barbarity of the Nazis’ policy that they were able to turn entire populations against them in such a short time. But this racial element could not be tempered; it was the very basis of the Nazi ideology.

Hitler was obsessed by the idea of ‘Lebensraum’, and the need to conquer huge territories in the east for the resettlement of the German people. In ‘Generalplan Ost’ Himmler described how the conquered lands were to be ‘Germanized’. The local inhabitants were to be either killed, transported to western Siberia, or kept as slaves. The Jewish population was to be completely annihilated – or, in Nazi terminology, given ‘special treatment’ – and the Slavic population was, according to von dem Bach at the Nuremberg Trials, to be reduced by around thirty million human beings. The conquered land was to be settled by Germans in new, romantic, medieval-style villages and towns, with officials set up in local palaces and ex-soldiers and deserving families given their own farmsteads in which to live out the pastoral idyll of Nazi mythology. There was no room for human empathy or compassion towards the victims of this massive undertaking.

Both Hitler and Himmler believed that cruelty and domination was a better way to control the east than any kind of benign rule: collective punishment and mass murder would intimidate the local populations, and the instilling of terror would make the conquered people malleable and submissive.

In a secret speech of 30 March 1941, recorded in his diary by Army Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder, Hitler told his officers to forget old notions of honour and decency in the east. ‘The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion,’ he said. ‘This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness.’ In the terrible ‘Commissar Order’ of 6 June 1941, Hitler stated that Jews, Soviet officials and Red Army political commissars were to be executed on sight. Enemy civilians would not be protected by law, guerrillas were to be ‘relentlessly liquidated’, and all attacks by ‘enemy civilians’ were to be suppressed at once by the military ‘using the most extreme methods’. The Barbarossa Decree outlined by Hitler during a meeting with military officials on 30 March 1941, and officially issued by Field Marshal Keitel, had called for a war of extermination of the political and intellectual elites of Russia. All normal codes of war were to be forgotten when it came to the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe. German officers were entitled to order the execution without trial or any formalities of any person suspected of ‘having a hostile attitude’ towards the Germans, ‘collective responsibility’ could be applied to the residents of an area where an attack had occurred, and German soldiers were to be ‘exempted from criminal responsibility’ even if their acts contravened German law. It was, in effect, a licence to commit murder. A Wehrmacht officer wrote: ‘Today we had to take all of [the males] from the village that were left behind last time … You can imagine the wailing of the women as even the children were taken from them … Three houses in a village were set on fire by us, and a woman burned to death as a result. So it will be uniformly along the front in all the villages … It was a fantastic sight for the eye to behold, as far as you could see, only burning villages.’⁸ Of all those involved in creating the terrible ‘landscape of horror and death’, one of Hitler’s most willing and enthusiastic disciples was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.

‘Skunk!’ Hermann Göring would scream from the dock, to the surprise of all in the courtroom at Nuremberg. ‘Swine!’ Göring would erupt in a fury after listening to the testimony of his erstwhile colleague von dem Bach, who had turned witness for the prosecution. ‘He is the bloodiest murderer in the whole damn setup!’ Göring screamed again, waving his fist. Von dem Bach said nothing. ‘He is selling his soul to save his stinking neck,’ Göring went on, getting louder and louder. Jodl, equally angry, chimed in: ‘Ask the witness if he knows that Hitler held him up to us as a model partisan-fighter. Ask the dirty pig that!’ As von dem Bach stepped down, it seemed as if Göring was about to have a heart attack. His face was red and he could barely breathe. ‘Schweinhund!’ he screamed. ‘Verräter!’⁹

Göring, though not one to talk, had a point. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski became a master at rounding up civilians and killing them, and later, when labour was needed back at home, at sending selected people off as forced labour in the Reich. Byelorussia taught him how to control large civilian populations, a lesson he would put to devastating use in Warsaw. It is testimony to his ability to lie, to deceive and to appear respectable that he managed to convince the Allies to allow him to act as a witness at Nuremberg. This saved his life, although he had earned a place in the dock alongside Göring, Frank, Kaltenbrunner and the rest.

The chubby, jovial, bespectacled Erich von Zelewski, with his impish smile and dimpled chin, was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania in 1899. His mother was of Polish descent, a fact von dem Bach tried to hide in the Nazi years, and his father, Otto von Zelewski, was from a poor Junker family. His father died young, and the uncle who was meant to bring the boy up was in turn killed in the First World War; the young man himself joined up in 1915, becoming one of the youngest recruits in the German army. When the war ended he spent some years fighting against Polish nationalists in Silesia, and distanced himself from his Polish roots by changing his name in 1925 to the more Germanic-sounding ‘von dem Bach-Zelewski’. He would, tellingly, change his name twice more: in 1940, when as one of Himmler’s favourites he rid himself of the hated ‘Zelewski’ altogether; and again in 1946 in Nuremberg, when in his attempts to paint himself as a pro-Polish activist and the ‘saviour’ of Warsaw, his name returned to von dem Bach-Zelewski.

Changing his name to suit the circumstances was typical of von dem Bach. He was a pathological liar, adept at ingratiating himself with those in power, whether Himmler or the prosecutors after the war. Walter Schellenberg, head of SS military intelligence, said of him, ‘He has the kind of personality that can’t differentiate between the truth and lies. He gets himself so much into the whole thing he can’t differentiate … Originally it was not the truth, but he so convinces himself – he’s ready to die for it.’¹⁰

Bach joined the SS in 1930, and quickly became friendly with powerful colleagues including Kurt Daluege, Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich. On 7 November 1939 Himmler made him Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom in Silesia, where his duties included mass deportations of Poles to make room for ethnic Germans being resettled in the east. In order to deal with the large number of now homeless ethnic Poles in his area, he proposed to Himmler that a concentration camp be built for the non-German inhabitants of the region. Obergruppenführer Arpad Wigand proposed a place called Auschwitz, and the camp was duly created in May 1940, initially for Polish Catholic prisoners. Von dem Bach visited the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss there shortly afterwards, dispensing advice on how many prisoners should be shot in reprisal for attempted escapes. After the war von dem Bach claimed that Auschwitz had been nothing more than a ‘troop training centre’ at the time; in reality he had been one of its creators, and was fully aware of what was done there.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler made von dem Bach HSSPF – ‘Higher SS and Police Leader’ – in the region of Army Group Centre, which was pushing east through Byelorussia. It was an amazing elevation. Had the Germans conquered Moscow, as von dem Bach fully expected them to do, he would have reached the lofty heights of being HSSPF in the Russian capital itself. Vain, ambitious and anxious to keep in with Himmler, he embarked on an exhaustive series of journeys to execution sites throughout Central Europe in order to prove his worth. By August 1941 he had travelled from Minsk to Mogilev to Starobin – a total of nine sites at which mass killings took place.¹¹ He travelled even more the following year, doggedly going to the ravines and pits and trenches in which the innocent were shot in cold blood; men, women and children. He competed with his fellow HSSPFs to ‘win’ the ‘killing score’ in his region: in 1941 he proudly wrote to Berlin that he had ‘passed the figure of 30,000 in my area’. On 28 July that year, after a meeting with Himmler, von dem Bach mounted an operation to comb the Pripyat marshes for ‘partisans’. Himmler’s oral instructions had left no doubt: ‘All Jews must be shot. Drive the females into the swamps.’ This Aktion lasted from 2 to 12 August, with 15,878 people killed and 830 prisoners captured. One of the most vicious and efficient officers in the Aktion was Himmler’s protégé and Bach’s friend Hermann Fegelein, who worked closely with von dem Bach throughout. His cavalry brigade were ruthless when it came to rounding up and shooting civilians: they reported killing 699 Red Army soldiers, 1,100 partisans and 14,178 Jews in one sweep alone. The women and children who did not drown in the shallow waters of the marshes were shot. At Nuremberg Bach claimed that he had ‘personally saved … 10,000 Jewish lives by telling them to hide in the Pripyat marshes’. The reality had been quite different.

Von dem Bach saw Himmler in Byelorussia on 15 August 1941. Film footage of this visit gives a hint of the power that Himmler must have felt in those heady, victorious days. He and von dem Bach were joined by Karl Wolff, chief of his personal staff, Otto Bradfisch, leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B, and Hermann Fegelein. Himmler, tanned and relaxed, processed through the streets of Minsk in an open Mercedes like a famous film star, every inch the conquering hero. On his arrival at the tall, white, modernist SS headquarters, with its enormous flag curling over the roof, he waved to the adoring employees who had lined up, cheering and smiling, on the balconies to greet their boss.

Von dem Bach took Himmler to a Soviet PoW camp on the outskirts of Minsk. Some of the emaciated prisoners tried to catch a glimpse of Himmler, while others lay on the ground, unable or unwilling to move. The Reichsführer SS started a conversation through the wire with a tall, handsome young man, but then, as if suddenly realizing that he was talking to a ‘sub-human’, turned quickly away, rubbing his nose with the back of his gloved hand.

The brutal treatment of Soviet PoWs is one of the least-known, and most terrible, crimes of the Second World War. Once captured, the prisoners were marched or forced to run to gathering points, or were transported in open freight wagons, 150 at a time; the wounded who could not keep up were shot immediately. ‘What do you do with 90,000 prisoners?’ asked one Wehrmacht soldier who filmed such a group. ‘The majority were badly wounded, in a bad state, half-dead with thirst, resigned to their fate. Worst was the lack of water … Many many soldiers, what became of them? I don’t know and it is better not to know.’¹² His amateur footage shows column after column of men, most of whom were destined to die of starvation or disease, trudging in columns stretching for kilometres in the hot, dusty landscape. ‘Many of those without caps wore wisps of straw or rags tied to their close-cropped heads as protection against the burning sun, and some were barefooted and half-dressed … a long column of misery,’ remembered one Wehrmacht soldier.¹³

Upon arrival the prisoners were herded into barbed-wire enclosures like the one Himmler visited with von dem Bach, perhaps with a few wooden huts or old barns as shelter from the extreme heat and cold. Sometimes, as in Stalag 352 near Minsk, they were crushed together so tightly that they simply could not move. There were no latrines, so they had to scoop up their own excrement and put it into barrels. Over 100,000 died there, their bodies dumped into pits. The Dulags, Stalags and Oflags of Byelorussia were centres of slow, agonizing death for hundreds of thousands of human beings who were essentially left in the open with no medical care, no protection and hardly any food. At Dulag 131 at Bobruisk, thousands of prisoners burned to death when one of the outbuildings caught fire; those who tried to escape were mown down. The guards tortured and humiliated the men, sometimes beating and shooting them for fun. At times they would throw a dead dog into the compound: ‘Yelling like mad the Russians would fall on the animal and tear it to pieces with their bare hands. The intestines they’d stuff in their pockets – a sort of iron ration.’¹⁴ Often fed only the entrails of horses, the starving men ate grass down to the earth, and chewed on wood. Some were reduced to ‘lyudoedstvo’ – cannibalism. One German soldier wrote that the Russians ‘whined and grovelled before us. They were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human.’ But dehumanizing the victims was, of course, the point.

After the PoW camp Himmler was taken to see an Aktion for himself. Einsatzgruppe B commander Artur Nebe had organized a small execution of ninety-eight men and two women for Himmler’s personal viewing. An open grave had been prepared, and the victims were forced to lie in it in rows. When one group had been shot, the next had to climb down on top of those already killed. Von dem Bach recalled Himmler asking to talk to one of the prisoners, ‘a young Jewish boy of twenty who had a Nordic appearance, with blue eyes and blond hair. Himmler called that boy aside from the pit where he was to be shot and asked him if he were Jewish.’ When it became clear that the boy’s entire family was Jewish, Himmler said, ‘In that case I cannot help you.’ The boy was executed along with the others. ‘You could see,’ von dem Bach added, ‘how Himmler tried to save the boy’s life … he was undoubtedly soft and cowardly.’¹⁵

Karl Wolff would claim that Himmler had been spattered by the brains of one of the victims of this Aktion, and had nearly fainted, but von dem Bach later denied this story. Even so, Himmler, having spent so much time in the distant luxury of Berlin, was clearly shaken by this encounter with actual killing. Von dem Bach pointed out to him that he had witnessed a ‘mere hundred people’ die, and that he had to try to imagine the pressures on those who had to kill thousands. When Himmler had collected himself he gave a speech to the executioners, praising their courage and appealing to their sense of patriotism in carrying out the hard tasks required of them. Although he had been touched by what he had seen, the action had been ‘necessary’ for Germany’s future. The men should turn to the natural world for their model. Bedbugs and rats were living creatures, after all, but human beings had the right to defend themselves against such ‘vermin’. The metaphor was obvious.

Von dem Bach was right to fear for the mental health of his murderers: he himself would have to undergo treatment for the psychological trauma he suffered after witnessing so much killing. In Byelorussia the extermination of the Jews was done in broad daylight, and often in sight of the local population. In one of many reports, a District Commissar in Slutsk described how a police battalion had ‘fetched and carted off all the Jews … With indescribable brutality on the part of the German policemen as well as Lithuanian partisans (under the SS) the Jewish people, including Byelorussians, too, were brought together from their apartments. There was shooting all over town, and corpses of dead Jews piled up in several streets.’ People had been ‘buried alive’, and the police had looted the town. ‘The Byelorussian people, who had gained confidence in us, have been stupefied.’ The SD complained that the Byelorussians were ‘passive and stupid’, so that it was ‘virtually impossible’ to persuade them ‘to stage pogroms against the Jews’. In Minsk in 1942, Einsatzgruppe B decided to give Hitler a present by killing all the Jews in the city by his birthday, 20 April. The plan was stymied by the civilian occupation authorities under Wilhelm Kube, who wanted to save some Jews to be used as forced labour. On 1 March the Germans ordered the Judenrat – one of the councils which Jews were forced to set up in the occupied territories – to provide a quota of 5,000 Jews by the following day; when they did not, the Germans stabbed the children in the Jewish orphanage to death.¹⁶

Gerhard Bast, a member of Sonderkommando B, took part in the murder of Jews in and around Minsk. One eyewitness testified after the war how Bast’s group had brought a group of Jews and gypsies in lorries and unloaded them near a freshly dug trench. ‘It was mainly women and children who were shot, some of them with babies.’ He could still picture the women ‘nursing their children on the way to the pit to calm them down. At the pit the children were torn from their mothers and were generally shot first, in front of their mothers. Very small children were held up by one arm by the SD men, shot in the head, and then carelessly tossed into the pit like a log.’¹⁷ Bast was one of the many from Sonderkommando B who under Artur Nebe had worked closely with von dem Bach, and who would flee Byelorussia in the face of the advancing Red Army in 1944. He ended up in Warsaw in August, just in time for the uprising.

It is almost beyond belief that von dem Bach would declare at Nuremberg: ‘The whole crowd – Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Frank, Rosenberg, just to mention those who were responsible in the east alone – have blood on their hands. But I have none.’ Bach saw himself as a humanitarian family man who called his wife ‘Mutti’ and was close to his six children, to one of whom Himmler was godfather. And yet to mark his first Christmas in Minsk in 1941, this proud father sent 10,000 pairs of babies’ and children’s socks, and 2,000 pairs of shoes, as a gift to children of the SS in Germany, items which had been stolen from the condemned children of the Minsk ghetto.¹⁸ Some measure of his personal ‘hands-on’ participation is revealed in his own medical record. In early March 1942 he suffered a nervous breakdown, and had to be taken to the SS hospital in the erstwhile tuberculosis clinic at Hohenlychen, where he was treated by Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the SS chief medical officer and head of the German Red Cross. In his report to Himmler, Grawitz stated that Bach was ‘suffering particularly from hallucinations connected with the shootings of Jews which he himself carried out and with other grievous experiences in the east’. When Grawitz asked him why he was under such strain, Bach replied, ‘Don’t you know what’s happening in Russia? The entire Jewish people is being exterminated there.’ By the end of 1942, the Germans had killed at least 208,089 Jews in Byelorussia, and Bach had participated fully.

The ‘successful’ treatment of Russian prisoners of war, and the mass murder of the Jews in Byelorussia, led to von dem Bach’s next major promotion. As German brutality increased, so did resistance. The Germans had lost their chance to be treated as liberators, and had quickly turned themselves into loathed conquerors. As such, they were increasingly under attack by partisans. Something had to be done.