Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 29

The arguments about what to do continued over the next two days, as tension mounted in the city. On 26 July Osmecki again stressed that three SS divisions had been sent into the Warsaw area, but Monter retorted that the German troops were of ‘poor quality’. Given that he was referring to the Waffen SS Viking and Totenkopf Divisions, and Hermann Göring’s own elite Luftwaffe division, he was either incredibly badly informed, or did not understand their significance: these elite units may have been under strength, but to refer to them as of ‘poor quality’ was ludicrous. Monter admitted that his own armoury was in a dire state, and was worried about the strength of the AK.

The mood among the Germans seemed to be changing too. On 27 July Governor Fischer, who had fled the city, suddenly returned, had the street megaphones switched on at 5 p.m. and announced that the next day, 28 July, at 8 a.m., all men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five were to appear at gathering points to dig anti-tank ditches. The AK banned compliance, so only a few hundred people showed up. Even so, Monter was worried that the Nazis would start to round up men by force, thereby destroying the very fabric of the AK in Warsaw. To counter this he took the extraordinary decision to mobilize the armed forces and call the alert for the uprising without consulting the other members of the AK leadership. Orders were sent out, and the young men and women of the AK hurried to their designated areas, convinced that the fight was about to begin.

In reality, the Germans had neither the manpower nor the authority to enforce the order to dig trenches; both Frank and Fischer agreed to ignore the snub to their authority so as not to provoke the very uprising that they wished to avoid. With the Germans not reacting after all, Monter was forced to recall his order. But the false alarm sowed confusion and discontent among those who had struggled to get to their positions on time, and it was also to have a great influence on Bór two days later. To cancel the mobilization order a second time, he felt, would have a disastrous impact on morale. Monter’s rash decision to act alone would therefore have fateful consequences on 31 July.

As for the call to Warsaw’s male inhabitants to dig ditches, the AK High Command failed to ask themselves an important question: why, if the Germans were set to abandon the city, had they called for men to dig anti-tank ditches? This too hinted at a dramatic shift in German policy.

On 26 July the German panic in Warsaw had ceased. The columns of bedraggled soldiers had vanished, and the cars which had left in such haste, packed with belongings, began to return. Bureaucrats and policemen quietly reoccupied their apartments, and German functionaries reported for work as if they had never been away. The SS and police presence on the streets doubled and then tripled, and the pillboxes and bunkers next to important buildings and institutions suddenly bristled with troops. Many Germans who had fled illegally were arrested; Himmler even ordered that the President of the Warsaw court, who had released the prisoners from Mokotów prison without permission, be tracked down and shot. On 31 July all releases were stopped; two days later the thousand remaining prisoners were murdered by the SS.

The real reason for the change on the streets of Warsaw was down to Hitler. The Führer had been appalled by news of the exodus from Warsaw, and on 27 July he had ordered an end to the shameful retreat and declared it a ‘fortress city’. The Germans were going to stay put. On the same day, he summoned Luftwaffe General Reiner Stahel to the Wolfsschanze. Stahel, the ex-Commandant of Rome and ‘Defender of Wilno’, was one of Hitler’s favourites, not least because of his vigorous defence of earlier ‘fortresses’. Hitler ‘gave me the Swords of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and nominated me to the position of Warsaw Kommandant. My tasks were a) to maintain order and calm in the city and b) to support building of fortifications.’⁴⁶

The AK leadership were unaware of Hitler’s decision, and pressed ahead with their plans for the uprising. On 29 July the government-in-exile in London informed the Home Army that Prime Minister Mikołajczyk was on his way to Moscow for talks with Stalin, and that the AK were free to do what they thought best. The Government Delegate, Jankowski, received a message empowering Bór to start the rising at a moment selected by him, without having to consult the Cabinet in London. Mikołajczyk asked Jankowski to inform the government beforehand ‘if possible’, but in effect gave Bór the authority to do as he wished.

On the same day, the Polish Deputy Chief of Staff, General Stanisław Tatar, sent a dispatch to Warsaw informing Bór that his request of 25 July for assistance from Britain had been submitted to the ‘highest authorities’ in London. The response had been discouraging, to say the least. There was only a ‘slight possibility’ that the British would bomb sites in Warsaw, and ‘little chance’ that a squadron of Mustangs would be handed over. The next day Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, the extraordinary courier who had travelled between London and Warsaw throughout the war, reported to AK headquarters with more news from London. Nowak-Jeziorański clearly stated that the AK could not count on large-scale British help or the arrival of the Polish Parachute Brigade. He also said that the effect of an uprising on Allied governments and on Western public opinion would be ‘negligible’.

During the meeting, Nowak-Jeziorański realized that nobody was paying any attention to him. He was constantly interrupted by the arrival of other couriers and messengers, and felt as if his warning about the lack of help from the West had been completely ignored.⁴⁷ He had told the AK leadership in Warsaw point blank that they would not receive any outside assistance should they begin the fight. Later, when the uprising began to go badly, this warning was conveniently forgotten, and the AK would bitterly accuse the West of not having done enough to help those suffering and dying in Warsaw.

A number of factors have been cited to justify the call for an uprising in Warsaw on 1 August 1944. One of the most commonly mentioned is the Soviet radio broadcasts at the end of July, encouraging the people of Warsaw to take up the fight. On the night of 29 July, for example, Radio Moscow announced that ‘the waiting’ was over. ‘Those who have never bowed their heads to the Hitlerite power will again, as in 1939, join battle with the Germans, this time for decisive action … the hour of action has arrived.’ However, such propaganda was commonplace, and there were never any direct instructions to the Home Army to rise up. Furthermore, why should the AK take Soviet propaganda broadcasts seriously when they had decided long before not to make contact with the Soviets themselves? On 26 July Colonel Pluta-Czachowski, the AK’s Chief Signals Officer, had worried that the lack of operational liaison with the Red Army would cause grave complications, but Rzepecki had told him that the establishment of direct contact between the Home Army and the Soviet High Command was ‘impossible’. In fact the AK had decided not even to try to make contact, pinning all hope for Soviet–Polish cooperation on Mikołajczyk’s ill-fated visit to Moscow, and ultimately on Stalin’s good will. To rely on a dictator who had repeatedly proved his animosity towards the AK was illogical, and a measure of the desperate situation the Home Army found itself in at the end of July 1944.

At 9 o’clock on the morning of 31 August the regular AK meeting took place at Pańska Street, and Osmecki was called on to give a detailed account of the situation on the German–Soviet front. His conclusion was simple: ‘The [Soviet] attack on Warsaw will not start for four or five days, and therefore to begin the uprising now would be wrong.’ Osmecki left the meeting with the impression that everyone had been convinced by his report. Bór had clearly said: ‘Under these conditions the fight will not start on 1 or 2 August.’ The next meeting was scheduled for 5 o’clock the same afternoon, but Osmecki genuinely believed that Bór had decided to postpone the uprising until the situation was more clear.

Later that day Osmecki left his flat on Napoleon Square, bound for the 5 o’clock meeting. The Germans had staged a round-up near Marszałkowska Street, and it took him half an hour to cover the few hundred metres to Pańska Street. ‘I had just received information that the German counter-attack would start shortly, but I was calm as I didn’t think any decision would be taken.’ He made his way into the building, fully expecting to report to the AK about developments along the front.

To his surprise, Bór was in the hallway getting ready to leave. There was nobody else there, and Osmecki asked if anyone else had even come.

‘The meeting has ended,’ Bór said. And then, as if as an afterthought: ‘I gave the order to start the uprising.’

Osmecki was shocked. When he asked why, Bór said simply: ‘Monter brought information that Soviet tanks made the breakthrough in the German bridgehead in Praga. He said if we don’t start immediately we will be late. Therefore I gave the order.’

Osmecki later found out what had happened. The meeting had started earlier than planned, with only Bór, Pełczyński, Okulicki and Major Karasiówna in attendance. The atmosphere was relaxed, and they discussed Mikołajczyk’s visit to Moscow. Then Monter appeared. He had ‘information that Soviet Panzer units had entered the German bridgehead and that Radość, Miłosna, Okuniew, Wołomin and Radzymin are in Russian hands’. Monter insisted on the immediate launch of the uprising, otherwise ‘it might be too late’. Bór, who had rejected the idea only hours before, suddenly changed his mind. ‘After a short discussion I came to the conclusion that it was the right moment to begin the fight. The Russian attack could be expected from one hour to the next,’ he said. Jankowski was summoned, and Bór demanded that the operations begin in Warsaw immediately. This would ‘transform the German defeat in Praga into a complete rout, make reinforcement of the German troops fighting on the eastern bank of the Vistula impossible, and in this way would speed up Soviet encircling movements which had started to the east, north-east and north of Warsaw’. Jankowski asked a few questions, and then said, ‘Very well, begin.’ Bór turned to Monter. ‘Tomorrow at 1700 hours precisely you will start Operation “Burza” in Warsaw.’

The problem was that Monter’s information had been wrong. The Soviets were not in Warsaw at all.

Osmecki approached Bór in the hallway. ‘General, you have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘Monter’s information is imprecise. I have the latest dispatches from my people on the ground. There is no doubt that the Praga bridgehead has not been broken. Conversely, they confirm everything I said in the morning. The Germans are preparing a counter-attack.’

In reality, the Germans had started the first counter-offensive of the summer, which stopped Bagration in its tracks. The Soviet offensive had finally been halted, at the very edge of Warsaw.

Bór collapsed on a chair, wiping his forehead. ‘Are you absolutely sure that Monter’s information is incorrect?’ he asked.

Osmecki told him that a few Russian tanks may have moved into Praga, but that the German bridgehead had not been broken.

Bór asked what he should do. Osmecki suggested he send a courier to Monter immediately to revoke the order.

‘Do we have to revoke it again? Revoke the order?’ Bór asked.

‘Yes. You have chosen the exact wrong moment. You have to revoke the order.’ Bór looked at his watch.

‘At that moment Szostak came in. He looked at both of us, Bór in his hat and coat and me standing. When he heard what had happened he was furious that neither he nor Osmecki had been consulted. “This is madness,” he said. “We will let ourselves all be massacred. You have to immediately revoke that order.”’

Bór said only, ‘Too late. We cannot do anything.’ He sat helplessly, exhausted, with a pitiful look on his bloodless face. ‘We cannot do anything more,’ he said for the third time, with what appeared a combination of relief and tiredness. Then he stood up and left.

A few moments later Pluta-Czachowski arrived, and ran into Bór on the stairs. ‘He knew immediately, and looked at us with silent questions and fears. I said: “It’s done, we cannot do anything. Let’s do all we can to reduce the losses. From this moment on every moment counts.” I went to the door and Pluta said in a matter-of-fact voice: “Apropos – the German counter-attack has just begun.”’

Most Poles who had been listening to the sounds of artillery approaching Warsaw believed that they meant certain and imminent Soviet victory over the Germans. But, for the first time since the launch of Bagration, the opposite was true. The Germans were fighting back. General Walter Model had just begun Army Group Centre’s only major counter-offensive of the summer of 1944. The Battle of Wołomin is virtually unknown in World War II history, but it was hugely significant, as it halted Bagration and ended the rout of the Germans in Byelorussia and Poland. It was the largest tank battle on Polish soil in the entire war, with 450 German Panther and Tiger tanks wading into over seven hundred Soviet T-34s. The Germans had air superiority, but still the region between Wołomin and Radzymin was caught in a seesaw of attacks and counter-thrusts; the villages in the area were reduced to rubble, and the Soviets lost over two hundred tanks. The battle also helped determine the fate of the Warsaw Uprising. The German counter-attack made it impossible for the Red Army to take Warsaw in the first days of August; later it would provide Stalin with an excuse not to help the beleaguered city when he could easily have done so. The battle was therefore a pivotal moment in the history of the Second World War.

It is often said the AK leadership’s lack of understanding of Stalin was their biggest mistake, but equally important was their ignorance of the German position at this crucial moment. Bór could not conceive that the Nazis would be able to turn around and fight back. He did not understand that the Germans on the Eastern Front were not going to lay down their arms with the Soviets rolling towards Berlin. In fact surrender was not an option for the average German soldier, and even those who now doubted Hitler fervently believed that the Red Army had to be stopped at any cost. Many German soldiers secretly believed that they would soon be joining forces with the Western Allies to wage war against the Russians.⁴⁸ But for now the feverish desire to protect Germany from the ravages of the Red Army would see the prolongation of the war in Europe for another nine bloody months.

The decision to start the uprising under such circumstances has long been a source of controversy, not least because of post-war politics. Even before the end of the war the Soviets began arresting, imprisoning and murdering thousands of members of the AK, and anyone else who might hinder Stalin’s plan to rule Poland. After the war, mention of the Warsaw Uprising and the AK was forbidden. Former AK members and combatants were arrested and killed, and the official line was that a group of irresponsible bandits had started an ‘adventure’ in Warsaw which had been brutally suppressed by the Nazis. Decades later, after the collapse of Communism, the pendulum would swing the other way, and the AK would be bathed in a heroic light in which these valiant fighters for freedom could do no wrong. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in between.

The Poles were in an impossible situation in August 1944, caught between two of the most brutal and murderous regimes in history. Despite having been stalwart supporters of the Western Allies since the beginning of the war, they were marginalized and treated as a nuisance for standing up for the very freedoms that the West claimed had inspired the fight against Hitler. They were excluded from the Tehran Conference, and had not been told that their country would become the de facto property of the Soviet Union after the war. Roosevelt would do nothing to endanger his ‘special relationship’ with Stalin, while Churchill was too weak to influence the outcome, despite his pangs of conscience about Britain’s loyal ally. And so this freedom-loving and independent nation was condemned by geography, by power and by politics to the mercy of Hitler and Stalin. The novelist Maria Dąbrowska watched, torn, as the Germans attacked the Red Army in August 1944: ‘It is like 1941 all over again – all are going eastward. The Germans have apparently moved ten divisions to the Warsaw front. It is tragic to have to say that we hear of this with some relief, as the thought of a Bolshevik invasion is our utter nightmare.’ It is precisely the hopelessness of the situation that makes the uprising so controversial. The heroism of the fighters and the civilians is not in doubt. But it is clear that many grave mistakes were made.

The greatest problem was that it was first and foremost a political and not a military operation. General Bór’s claim that he had to call for an uprising because Warsaw was in danger of becoming ‘a battlefield between Germans and Russians, and the city would be turned into rubble’ is not borne out by the evidence. Ever since Stalingrad, and indeed in all the battles for cities during the Bagration offensive, including Vitebsk, Orsha, Minsk, Kiev and Lwów, the Soviets did not attack the cities head on, but encircled them, trapping the Germans in giant ‘pockets’ and finishing them off later. There may have been heavy street fighting, as in Vitebsk, but for the most part the civilians and the infrastructure were spared. There is no reason to think that ‘Fortress Warsaw’ would have been any different, particularly as it was so weakly defended.

The AK also misunderstood the Soviet plan of attack, believing that the Russians would take the east-bank suburb of Praga and then launch a frontal assault across the bridges into Warsaw proper, but this had never been Stavka’s intention. Rather than worrying about when the Soviets would enter Praga and begin crossing the Vistula, the AK should have waited for the moment when the northern and southern Soviet pincers to the west of the city snapped shut, cutting off the Germans trapped within.

The AK, however, could not verify Stavka’s plans, because they had no contact with the Soviets. ‘We had to run the great risk of undertaking open action without any coordination with the Red Army command,’ Bór said.⁴⁹ Any links between the AK and the Soviets had ended in the murder or imprisonment of the Poles. It had become clear after Soviet treachery at Wilno, Lwów and Lublin that Stalin wanted nothing less than to annihilate the AK and to put his own puppet government in place. He would destroy anyone who stood in his way. It was a measure of the AK’s desperate plight that in July 1944 General Okulicki argued that if they did take over Warsaw before the Soviets entered the city, Stalin would have no choice but either to recognize AK authority in liberated Warsaw, or to liquidate the AK using military force. Okulicki’s view was that the Soviets might indeed murder the AK fighters, but that it would be impossible for Stalin to hide this crime from the international community. Such an act, he said, would shake the moral conscience of the world. What none of them seemed to realize was that, at the time, the world was just not interested. The Soviets had committed mass murder at Katyń, yet the Western Allies had deliberately perpetrated the lie that it had been a Nazi crime. The Nazis had murdered millions of Jews and others in the occupied territories, but despite the best efforts of Jan Karski, Szmul Zygelbojm and others to expose these crimes, and at the very least to bomb the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz, little was done. The response was always the same: the war must be won, and only then would Nazi crimes be stopped.