Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 28

The first concrete plan for an uprising was released in September 1942, and was to be ordered by the Commander-in-Chief in London when German defeat was imminent. At first the Poles had hoped that victory would come from the west, and that British and American troops would overrun Germany and push into Poland, but as Soviet victories mounted after Stalingrad and the Western Allies delayed the invasion of France, it became clear that they would in fact be ‘liberated’ by Soviet troops from the east. The Poles were rightly wary of Soviet intentions, and much time was put into discussing the potential threat of the Red Army. In February 1943 Stefan Rowecki, whose mantra was that the Soviets ‘will always be our enemy’, drafted a new plan called ‘Burza’, or Tempest, which would unfold in three stages: an armed rising in the eastern cities of Lwów and Wilno, an armed attack in the area east of the Vistula, and finally a national uprising throughout the country. The idea was to harass the German retreat, to prevent reprisals against civilians, and to secure important cities for the émigré government before the Russians could take over. Rowecki’s fears about the Soviets increased when Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile over the murder of 4,410 Polish officers at Katyń – and more than 17,000 elsewhere – by far the largest massacre of PoWs during the war. The graves had been discovered by the Germans in April 1943, and when the Soviets denied that they had committed the murders the Poles, knowing the truth, demanded a Red Cross inquiry. On 26 April Stalin used this ‘insult’ to break off relations with Sikorski’s government, in mock fury at the Polish accusations. Rowecki decided that the Soviet threat to the AK was too great for an open uprising, and that Polish forces should conduct sabotage operations against retreating Germans, but remain under cover.

When General Bór took over command of the AK after Rowecki’s arrest by the Germans in 1943 he reversed this order, deciding that the Poles should reveal themselves, in order to prove that it was they who had legal authority in Poland. General Sosnkowski in London reluctantly agreed, although he had no illusions about Russia’s intentions. ‘In my view,’ he wrote to Bór on 11 January 1944, ‘the final aim of the Soviet Union is to transform Poland into a vassal Communist republic or simply into the 17th Soviet republic.’ He was right. Stalin had already mentally claimed Eastern Europe for himself. Furthermore, the Poles could not count on any real help from the Western Allies. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943 Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had determined the future eastern border of Poland at the so-called Curzon Line, which gave large chunks of Polish territory to the Soviet Union. Churchill suggested that Poland be given swathes of Germany as compensation. It was an ominous precedent. Not only had the Western Allies left the Poles out of the decision-making process, they had made it clear that however just their cause, they cared more about maintaining friendly relations with Stalin than they did about Polish concerns for the future of their country. Roosevelt in particular saw Poland as part of Stalin’s sphere of influence, and his only real concern was to keep the issue of the future border secret from the millions of Polish-American voters until after the November 1944 presidential election. Documents released by the National Archives in September 2012 show that Roosevelt knew that the Soviets had in fact committed the massacre at Katyń, but was so determined to remain on good terms with Stalin that he lied to his own people, and in particular to the Poles. It was harsh treatment of a nation in such peril.

Churchill was sympathetic to Poland, but he was in a difficult situation. British power was waning in the shadow of the two emerging superpowers, and he was desperate to preserve what he could of his nation’s influence. He understood that the West could not defeat Nazi Germany alone, and that one price for Soviet cooperation would be a change to Poland’s eastern border. The sheer scale of the Soviets’ military success led to irritation with the Poles amongst the Western Allies for not accepting the new international reality. The prevailing view was that the Soviets were paying for victory with the blood of millions of men, and that the ‘Polish question’, however embarrassing, could not be allowed to threaten Stalin’s decision to carry on the fight. As Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa, put it to Churchill in March 1944, ‘It would be calamitous if the Polish question were to sour Russian relations with Britain.’³² Most senior officials in the Foreign Office agreed. Sir William Strang, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Europe until 1943, felt that it would be in Britain’s interest to accept Soviet supremacy in Eastern Europe: ‘It is better that Russia should dominate Eastern Europe,’ he wrote, ‘than that Germany should dominate Western Europe.’³³ Stalin was in effect given carte blanche to do as he wished.

Despite their fears of Soviet intentions, the Poles did their best to help the Red Army in its sweep towards Warsaw. The AK attacked the Germans in Wilno, Lwów and Lublin as part of Operation ‘Tempest’, and assisted the Russians where they could. Stalin did not care, as he was determined not to allow the AK any kind of military or political victory. Early contacts between Red Army soldiers and the AK were usually friendly, but once the NKVD arrived – usually within a few hours – AK soldiers who revealed themselves were arrested, murdered, sent to the gulag or press-ganged into the Soviet-run army commanded by General Zygmunt Berling.^fn3 The Soviets used the recently liberated camp at Majdanek to intern ‘dangerous’ Polish nationalists. When the ‘Committee for National Liberation’ was set up in Lublin as the ‘legitimate government’ of Poland on 22 July, the announcement had been followed by a half-hour broadcast of the Polish national anthem. Stalin had laid his cards on the table. The Polish government-in-exile in London was to be undermined in every way possible, and its representatives in Poland eliminated.

As the Soviets’ true intentions became clear, the pressure on the AK in Warsaw grew ever more intense. With the Red Army advancing rapidly towards the city, the fear was that if the AK did nothing the Soviets would liberate Warsaw, and Stalin would broadcast to the world that the Polish Home Army had been ineffectual – or worse, had even collaborated with the Germans. General Bór and a handful of colleagues began to convince themselves that the very proximity of the Red Army might give them the chance to include Warsaw in Operation ‘Tempest’. With the Germans apparently falling to pieces and the Red Army approaching the eastern bank of the Vistula, the calls to ‘do something’ increased. That ‘something’ was to be an uprising in the capital.

There was one big problem. In March 1944 Warsaw had been deliberately excluded from the plans of Operation ‘Tempest’ because, as Bór had put it, ‘we wanted to avoid destruction and suffering of the civilian population and safeguard historical buildings’.³⁴ Some AK units remained in the city, but most of the arsenal had been moved to the main forces waiting in the forests. General Tadeusz Pełczyński, the AK Chief of Staff, said that ‘we wanted not to fight in the towns to save them. A fight in Warsaw was not planned. But the nature of the war changed all that … the decision to fight in Warsaw was taken in mid-July when the front was approaching the capital very quickly. The authorities decided it was essential for Polish soldiers to free Warsaw from the Germans.’³⁵

Pełczyński and his friend General Leopold Okulicki were the main architects of the revised plan. Born in 1892, the son of a sugar-mill technician, Pełczyński had been deeply involved in the AK from the beginning: it was he who handed over the Enigma machines to the British in 1939, and he had commanded numerous ‘Kedyw’ sabotage operations throughout the war. For him the choice was simple: either the AK could depart from Warsaw, leaving a no man’s land in which the Germans and Soviets would fight one another, or it could help free the city and, as its rightful proprietors, extend a formal welcome to the Soviets.

For his part, Okulicki had few doubts about Soviet intentions. Arrested and sent to the gulag while serving in the Polish resistance, he had only managed to escape thanks to General Władysław Anders, who was released by the Russians to form an army made up of Poles captured by the Soviets in 1939 and 1940. Okulicki was parachuted back into occupied Poland in May 1944, and the fact that he had been sent on a special mission from General Sosnkowski in London lent his voice great weight in AK headquarters. But his view bordered on the messianic. Even if the Russians did not come to help liberate Warsaw, he argued, the price of defeat would be worth it, as it would ‘show the world’ that the Soviets were the bearers of an ‘inhuman policy which condemns half of Europe to future slavery’.³⁶ Both Pełczyński and Okulicki believed that waiting for the Germans to retreat would make the AK appear too weak and passive. The Poles had to show the world that they could fight in open combat, and that they had the right to a free and independent country after the war. All they had to do was to storm the German garrison and hang onto the city until the Red Army arrived. It seemed so simple.

On 21 July, General Bór bowed to pressure from Pełczyński and Okulicki and asked Jan Jankowski, the Government Delegate for the Polish government-in-exile, who was based in Poland but was in constant contact with London, to approve the decision to include the capital in the fight. The timing seemed perfect. That very night the German commander of Warsaw had announced that all German women, including those working for auxiliary organizations, should leave the city. The German community was in chaos as panicked civilians tried desperately to get out before the Russians arrived. Even SD units were leaving.

That same day, Bór sent what turned out to be a wildly optimistic telegram to London describing the situation on the front: ‘The Soviet advance on this sector will be rapid and will reach and cross the Vistula in a further advance to the west without any effective or serious German counter-offensive … It appears certain that on the Eastern Front the Germans are incapable of taking the initiative from Soviet hands or of successful opposition. Recently we have observed more frequent signs of the disintegration of the German forces who are tired and show no will to fight. The recent attempt on Hitler’s life, together with the military position of Germany, may lead at any moment to their collapse.’³⁷

The AK High Command were by this time meeting daily at their central headquarters on Pańska Street. Colonel Rzepecki, the head of the Information and Propaganda Bureau, was in favour of an early start to the uprising, not least because he felt it would help Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s negotiating position with Stalin in Moscow. But he also believed that the Nazis were finished. During the meeting on 21 July he gestured to the window and asked his colleagues to look at the empty streets. The Nazis had gone; there were no armed patrols. ‘The German army has ceased to exist,’ he declared.³⁸

A kind of fantasy seemed to grip many in AK headquarters. It was as if they could picture themselves standing in a Warsaw emptied of Germans, waiting on the proverbial red carpet to welcome the Soviets with a gentlemanly salute as a mark of mutual respect, power and goodwill. They had spent the war creating an underground army with the intention of rising up against the Germans, but now the chance had come to win a great political victory over Stalin as well. They did not stop to think that with only a few thousand poorly armed men they had nothing remotely like the military strength to defeat one, let alone two, of the greatest armies ever created should something go wrong; but there was no ‘Plan B’. In those heady July days the AK leaders allowed themselves to believe that the Germans were now all but irrelevant, and that their primary task was to deal with the Soviets, as well as international opinion and the post-war world. The underestimation of German strength would prove to be a terrible and costly error. Worse still, none of the AK High Command could later claim that they had not been told the truth.

There was, in fact, one important dissenting voice at the AK meeting of 21 July. Colonel Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki, the Chief of Intelligence, was one of the most thoughtful and well-informed of the group that gathered daily to discuss and decide on Warsaw’s fate. He was appalled to hear Rzepecki say that the German army was finished, and quickly gave a summary of the military situation gleaned from intelligence personnel around Warsaw. He said that the German units which had crossed the Bug River in the past few days were remnants of four divisions; two others had been surrounded at Brest, which meant that the German 2nd Army had been destroyed, and that the Germans could not defend Warsaw from an attack from the east. Furthermore, in the south the 4th Panzer Army seemed to have been demolished: ‘The command headquarters of the army has sent unciphered dispatches to all units which means that they have either lost touch with them or the divisions have ceased to exist.’ But then Osmecki made one of the most important revelations of the days leading up to the uprising. ‘There is new unverified information that fresh Panzer units, as yet unidentified, have appeared on the right side of the Vistula in the forests between Wyszków and Jabłonna. Also, parts of the Hermann Göring Division, one of the best units of the German army, have arrived in Żyrardów. According to our intelligence the Hermann Göring Division was withdrawn from the Italian Front and moved by train to Warsaw. The first units have been moved in secret into the forests by Wyszków and Jabłonna.’³⁹

Osmecki was asked about the significance of the troop movements, but replied that it was too early to tell. Then General Okulicki, who had no way of knowing any more than Osmecki about the German plans, confidently declared that the new forces were of no importance, because the tanks ‘are simply there to protect the retreat of the 2nd Army’. Osmecki countered with a new piece of information. Intelligence had informed him that the ‘German headquarters in Warsaw had demanded from the railway office the immediate dispatch of 2,000 empty wagons to remove factories from the city’. However, rather than simply send the empty trains from Berlin to Warsaw, as might have been expected, the headquarters announced that ‘a few thousand wagons of ammunition and equipment will be sent in the nearest future to Warsaw’ in those same trains. The wagons were to be unloaded, and only then sent back to Germany with the dismantled factories. ‘A few thousand wagons of supplies and ammunition,’ Osmecki said, ‘suggests that the Germans are going to defend themselves.’⁴⁰ Again Rzepecki and Okulicki downplayed the idea, and referred to the attempt on Hitler’s life the previous day, concluding: ‘The German army could fall apart at any time.’

What they could not yet know was that far from removing Hitler, the attempt on his life had only fuelled his fanaticism and his desire to fight on. In his mind he had been spared for Germany by ‘divine providence’, and in the Wolfsschanze he railed against his generals and wrested even greater control for himself. But General Bór was swayed by Rzepecki and Okulicki, and called a state of alert for Tuesday, 25 July at the very moment Hitler’s luck on the Eastern Front was turning in his favour. Warsaw’s day of reckoning was drawing near.

During the next meeting, on Sunday, 23 July, Osmecki again tried to warn the AK leadership of the threat posed by the Nazis. He now had more information: ‘There is a concentration of German forces to the north and east of Warsaw which is increasing all the time,’ he said. ‘Now we know that the elite Viking SS and Totenkopf Divisions have come.’ Although the Soviets ‘will ultimately defeat the Germans’, he said, decisions about the uprising ‘should be postponed’ until the Germans had launched their counter-attack in the north.

This time, Osmecki’s view was supported by the AK’s brilliant Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel Janusz Bokszczanin, who was in Warsaw for a few days. But Okulicki and Rzepecki again declared that the Germans were in ‘disarray’ and were ‘about to leave Warsaw’. Rzepecki even said that although it would be very bad to start the uprising too early, it would be ‘considerably worse’ to start it too late. ‘In the first case we could hope to improve the situation, but in the second we would be condemned for good, and so would Poland.’

25 July brought a full meeting between Bór and his staff, Jan Jankowski, and General Antoni Chruściel, known as ‘Monter’, Commander of the Home Army units in Warsaw. Born in 1895 of peasant stock, Monter had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and then, after the First World War, in the newly formed Polish army. Józef Rybicki, head of ‘Kedyw’ in Warsaw, found him unsuited to the secret world of the AK. ‘Meetings with Monter were particularly unpleasant,’ he said. ‘He was a typical Zupak – a boorish old soldier – with no understanding of conspiracy and its style of operations.’⁴¹ Monter was ‘always suspicious in an unpleasant way, distrustful and crude … We often exchanged strong words, which I could get away with as a civilian but which would not have been tolerated in the army officers.’ Monter was overly concerned with superficial matters. He cared too much about military protocol and about his personal appearance, having new uniforms made and striking poses in front of onlookers. He was also obsessed by his place in history, and had a highly exaggerated view of his own importance. After the war he wrote to Stanisław Jankowski, who had by then become an architect in Warsaw, to try to get a memorial that he had designed built on one of the most important squares in Warsaw. In the crucial days leading up to 1 August Monter continued to underestimate German strength. His main concern was the weakness of the AK in Warsaw and the location of the Soviets, and he was against starting the uprising until the Red Army was in Praga.

Osmecki tried to emphasize the importance of German strength and the growing evidence that they intended to counter-attack against the Russians from Wyszków, to the north-west of Warsaw. ‘This would have a huge effect on the capital,’ he said, and again urged that the timing of the uprising be made dependent on the outcome of the Russo–German battle. He left the meeting quite dejected, with the feeling that he had not been heard. It was true. Far from heeding his warnings, Jankowski sent a message to London that the uprising was now imminent: ‘We are ready at any time to launch the battle for Warsaw,’ it said. He even requested that the Polish Parachute Brigade stationed in the UK be sent to Warsaw, and that the airfields near the city be bombed by the RAF. ‘I will report the commencement of the battle,’ he wrote. And that was all. There was no real discussion between Warsaw and London about what was about to happen; Bór and Jan Jankowski were effectively dictating policy to their superiors in the UK.

As he walked home after the meeting, Osmecki had a vision of the fate that he was sure awaited Warsaw. ‘The sun was going down over Wola and lighting up the windows of the city. I stood on Sienna Street blinded by the reflection. Suddenly I remembered Bokszczanin’s warning: “Believe me, the Russians will not come, they will leave us alone to the Germans.” I was sure he was right, and that the city would once again be destroyed. As I looked at the sun reflected in the windows I saw a vision of fire consuming the city and heard the crackling of flames. This was very brief, but the feeling stayed with me and I had nightmares that night. I woke up in the morning feeling as if I was in a Greek tragedy. We were watching a horrifying drama unfold around us, but we could not avoid it; it was our tragic fate against which we could do nothing.’⁴²

The point is that the AK could have done something, but they chose not to. Osmecki, Bokszczanin and Colonel Pluta-Czachowski, the AK’s Chief Signals Officer, had warned Bór and the others about the German threat, but they were ignored. ‘Destiny’ had spoken.

Bokszczanin remains one of the unsung heroes of the AK at this pivotal moment in history. More than any other, he consistently spelled out the dangers of underestimating the Germans and above all of pinning their hopes on salvation by the Russians.⁴³ Bokszczanin’s view was very clear and consistent: ‘The first condition to start the uprising is to see the destruction of the Germans in Praga, on the left bank of the river. But that is not enough. You have to wait for the Russians to get the pontoons necessary to cross the river and start artillery attacks on the western side of the Vistula. You have to be very careful and double-check all the information especially to do with the 8th Army. The Russians can send patrols out so we think that they are attacking. We have to make sure that these are main forces and not bait.’ Even Osmecki initially thought Bokszczanin was ‘overdoing it’, only later admitting that his fears about Soviet intentions had been well-founded. ‘Bokszczanin understood everything, but he told us things we did not want to hear because to accept them meant that we would have to resign and not begin the uprising.’⁴⁴

Osmecki wanted to delay the start of the uprising until the situation at the front was more clear, but he was not against it per se. ‘As a man and a Pole I shared their passion and certainty that Warsaw could not be allowed to move from German hands to Soviet hands without us expressing our will to maintain independence, even if it meant we gave a great cry of rebellion and sorrow. Bokszczanin was right, but his arguments were unacceptable as they destroyed our whole raison d’être.’ Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, the Home Army courier who heard Bokszczanin speak in those final days before the uprising, said that he was ‘greatly impressed by this officer’s coolness and assurance’.⁴⁵ But his attempts to warn the others came to nothing in the end, and his role has virtually disappeared from history.