Barbarossa (68 page)

[It has been widely contended that the Russians deliberately held
off their attacks to allow the Germans to do a job (the liquidation
of the AK) for them. This seems to be attributing motives (which may
well have been held) to circumstances which were largely accidental.
Rokossovski's attitude to the struggle of the AK was, from the
start, callous and unco-operative. But once he intended to resume a
strategic offensive he would not have allowed its existence to
deter him, and would doubtless have meted out the same sort of
treatment, the E.L.A.S. suffered from the British in Athens, in
1945.]

All the same, the Poles very nearly brought it off. By 6th August
they were in control of almost the whole town, and had greatly
enlarged their armament with captured German material. So confident
were they of victory that the rival splinter groups were already
exchanging fire with one another, and it was proposed to fly in the
first representatives of the London administration on that Sunday.
Then, on 8th August, came the first portent of their eventual fate,
with the appearance of the sinister Gruppenführer SS von dem
Bach-Zelewski.

Bach had been selected for this task because of his special
experience in anti-Partisan operations, and because by making the
suppression an SS affair it was intended to leave the Regular Army
free to face the Russians. It is also clear that the SS wanted to
have a completely free hand—free from observation, much less
interference, by possibly "squeamish" elements. And for
those who may have wondered what, at this late stage in the war and
after so much horrific brutality, could possibly make
anyone
squeamish, the answer was not long in coming.

Bach-Zelewski deployed two formations against the AK, the Kaminski
Brigade, consisting of turncoat Russian prisoners and general
riffraff from Eastern Europe, and the Dirlewanger SS Brigade, made up
of German convicts on probation.

[SS Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger was an old friend of Gottlob
Berger, who had got him a commission in the Kondor Legion as far back
as 1935. When Dirlewanger came back from Spain two years later, it
was still not easy to find employment for him as he had already
served a two-year service for offences against young girls in
Germany. However, some further string-pulling got him a transfer to
the Waffen SS, and the job of training the first battalion of
convicted criminals to be incorporated in the
Totenkopf
Division. As the war progressed, the passage and growth of Dirlewanger's
Kommando
can be traced in SS records, particularly
those of the (hardly oversqueamish) Judge Advocate's office. He had
to be hastily transferred from Cracow, then from Lublin—where
his experiments on Polish girls are hardly printable even today, combining as they did the indulgence of both sadism and necrophilia. He
was awarded the German Cross of Gold for his part in suppressing
the "Partisan Republic of Lake Pelik" in 1943, in which
15,000 "Partisans" were killed but which yielded only 1,100
rifles and 326 pistols as the "Partisans' " armament.
Dirlewanger, incidentally, bribed his way out of the Allied net after
the war, and is living in Egypt (1963).]

The impact of units such as these in street battles, always the
bitterest kind of infantry fighting, and in an area where the whole
civilian population was
in situ
, can be imagined. Prisoners
were burned alive with gasoline; babies were impaled on bayonets and
stuck out of windows like flags; women were hung upside down from
balconies in rows. The object, Himmler had told Goebbels, was that
the sheer violence and terror of the repression would extinguish the
revolt "in a very few days."

The SS had already mounted one "operation" in Warsaw, in
the spring of 1942. Then it had cleared the ghetto with grenades and
flame throwers, and succeeded in killing about fifty thousand Polish
Jews. The despatches of the commanding officer, together with
illustrations, had been sumptuously bound and circulated privately
among the higher Nazis, and the action was classified as an SS
"battle honour." But in August 1944 the SS found the going
very much harder. A considerable quantity of arms had been dropped by
the R.A.F. in the spring of 1944, including piat guns, which could
knock out tanks at close range and were useful for blowing holes in
houses. The Poles were well disciplined, and held their fire until
the last moment. They were adept and industrious at making grenades,
mines, and detonators. The fighting dragged on; days, weeks, passed;
August be-came September. Four extra "police battalions"
were brought from the Reich to stiffen the wavering ranks of the
Dirlewanger convicts in a strange alliance of traditional enemies
united by their taste for cruelty and violence.

With each day that still brought news from their trans-mitters in
Warsaw, the London Poles became more frantic. For besides their
anguish at watching and hearing the slow extinction of their gallant
compatriots, there was the fading prospect of their carefully laid
plans for asserting their own claims to the country. Yet once again,
as in 1939, Britain was powerless to help. A few aircraft from Foggia
could get through each night, but their cargo was limited to the
barest essentials as the Russians refused them refuelling facilities,
and as the AK area gradually contracted it became increasingly
difficult to drop with any accuracy. Approaches by the British in
London and Moscow, urging that some effort be made by Rokossovski to
relieve the pressure on the AK were acknowledged, but nothing was
done. One of the Poles has described how from the tallest building,
when the smoke cleared, they could see German and Russian soldiers
bathing on opposite sides of the Vistula River in apparent amity, or
as if in tacit acceptance of a truce which was to last while Polish
gallantry was extinguished.

But the tenacity of the Warsaw Poles did have one effect. It
caught the imagination of the world, and it began to make a deep and
uncomfortable impression on the Germans themselves. The first to
act had been Guderian, who questioned Bach-Zelewski about the rumours
he had heard when Bach approached him with a request for more heavy
equipment with which to renew the assault. Bach admitted that as a
result of "desperate street battles where each house had to be
captured, and where the defenders were fighting for their lives . . .
[the SS brigades] had abandoned all moral standards," and tried
to excuse himself by saying that he had "lost control" of
them. However, Guderian's sense of chivalry was shocked. He has
written:

What I learned from [Bach-Zelewski] was so appalling that I
felt myself bound to inform Hitler about it that same evening and to
demand the removal of the two brigades from the Eastern Front.

As Hitler had all along been privy to Himmler's intention to
terrorise the Poles into submission, this "demand" must
have been most unwelcome, and it is hardly surprising that ". .
. to begin with he was not inclined to listen." However, SS
Gruppenführer Fegelein, who enjoyed a privileged position at
Hitler's court because (among other reasons) he had married Eva
Braun's sister Gretl, spoke up on Guderian's behalf.

[Some authorities (see Reitlinger,
The SS: Alibi of a Nation
,
376) maintain that Fegelein was the first to draw attention to
Bach-Zelewski's atrocities.]

Fegelein's intention was primarily that of discrediting Himmler,
for he was one of the Bormann-Kaltenbrunner cabal, whose aim was to
extend its own empire at the expense of the Reichsführer; but he
could also claim a certain
ancien camaraderie
with General
Bor, as the two men had competed at horse trials before the war. He
may also, like several other senior Nazis at this time, have begun to
look over his shoulder at the possibility of arraignment for "war
crimes" by the victorious Allies. In the end Bach-Zelewski,
never one to let the grass grow under his feet, changed his
"approach" to the Warsaw battle, removed the Kaminski
Brigade to the rear, and had Kaminski arrested and shot.

By now the Poles in the city were at their last gasp. Ammunition,
food, water, medical supplies, all were withering away. The
suffering of the civilian population was frightful, and the
proximity of the soldiers' families, which had at first been a source
of desperate inspiration, now gave rise to a harrowing sense of grief
and personal responsibility. On 16th September, Rokossovski had
managed to penetrate the German positions at Praga, the suburb of
Warsaw on the east bank of the Vistula. Judging that the AK had shot
its bolt, Stalin had ordered his own force of indoctrinated Poles,
under General Zymierski, to enter the battle and fight their way into
Warsaw. But the Germans had now enjoyed ample time to prepare their
defences, and after a week the Russo-Polish effort died away, with
the attackers having learned, as the Anglo-Saxons were learning that
same time at Arnhem, that the last five or six miles can be critical
when a beleaguered garrison has to be relieved.

With the failure of the Zymierski attack, activity by the AL and
the PAL stopped and its members tried to go back into hiding.
Hopeless shortage of everything required either to fight or to
sustain the population impelled Bor to try to negotiate terms with
Bach. And it was at this point that the Poles drew the first dividend
on the incredible bravery with which they had fought.

Not only did Bach agree to treat the members of the AK as
combatants entitled to the honours of war and to status as prisoners
under the Geneva convention, but he digressed so readily and so
effusively on other subjects that it was plain that further
concessions could be extracted from him. He was keenly interested in
politics, the Gruppenführer told the AK delegates, of which,
after all, war was only the instrument. It was never too late to
correct errors. The menace from the East was, or should be, the
concern of everyone today, "as it might very well bring about
the downfall of Western culture." Further rambling followed
about "the necessity of fitting into the framework of German
relations after the war." The Poles tended to brush aside these
generalities, which were plainly going onto the record with the
Nuremberg Tribunal in mind, and insisted that the status of prisoners
of war be extended to Resistance fighters throughout Poland instead
of being confined to the AK in Warsaw.

[In fact, Bach-Zelewski subsequently became a prosecution witness at Nuremberg, and was thus exempted from extradition to Russia
or the Eastern bloc.]

They also asked for an amnesty on all "crimes" committed
by the AK up to that date. (It was an accepted German practice to
charge prisoners with war crimes when they wanted to alter the
conditions of their detention.) After some days of negotiation,
interspersed with speech-making, the Poles entered the conference to
find Bach in a maudlin and reproachful mood. The BBC had just made a
broadcast naming a number of SS leaders who would have "to
answer for their crimes against the people of Warsaw" at the end
of the war, and—monstrous injustice—he, Bach, had been
named!

Had he not personally ordered the execution of Kaminski? Bach
asked. Was it not by his intervention that the Luftwaffe had been
prevented from saturating Warsaw with a fire storm?

[It was not. The idea was discussed at OKW and rejected because
of the proximity of the front line and the shortage of suitable
aircraft.]

Had he not gone out of his way to express his admiration for the
bravery of the Poles? Bach began a long story of how an AK courier
had been captured, a young girl, whose beauty had so impressed him
that he had ordered her release. She had reminded him of his
daughters, he said; pictures of his daughters were produced and
handed around.

We can be sure that Bach's contrition was neither as complete
nor as sincere as he claimed. Yet his attitude is interesting as
showing the new attitudes that were beginning to develop in the
medium echelons of Nazi leadership, and especially in the SS, under
the shadow of defeat and retribution. The exultant
furor
Teutonicus
of the first years of the war, the
Totenkopf
deification of Germanic violence, were being hastily submerged
beneath a new façade—that of the "defenders of
Western culture."

[After the war former SS Generaloberst Hausser declared, "The
SS was really the NATO Army in prototype, in ideal."]

Hitler, of course, had no time for that sort of nonsense, and had
already drafted an order that Warsaw was to be razed to the ground
the moment the charade of the surrender negotiations had been
enacted. It was the renewal of the Russian offensive and a shortage
of local labour which frustrated this intention rather than any
compunction of the SS officers entrusted to see it through.

After several days of leisurely, almost conversational parleying, the terms were agreed between Bach and the AK, and the
surrender was formalised by speeches from both sides (delivered, it
may be thought, with almost equal fervour) on the need for
magnanimity toward a defeated foe. Fegelein looked after General Bor,
and the brave, starving Poles were herded off into prisoner-of-war
camps, postponing, at least for some months, the hour of their
execution. But the fact remained that the AK had been dealt a blow
from which it never recovered, and thenceforth the Resistance fell
increasingly under the control of the Communist-orientated groups.

Gone, too, was any hope of reconstituting the country under other
than Russian terms.

The story of the Warsaw uprising illustrates many features of
the later history of World War II. The alternating perfidy and
impotence of the Western Allies; the alternating brutality and
sail-trimming of the SS; the constancy of Soviet power and ambition.
Above all, perhaps, it shows the quality of the people for whom
nominally, and originally, the war had been fought and how the two
dictatorships could still find common ground in the need to suppress
them. Professor Trevor-Roper had said, "It is sometimes supposed
that Hitler and Stalin are fundamentally opposite portents, the one a
dictator of the extreme right, the other of the extreme left. This is
not so. Both, in fact, though in different ways, aimed at similar
power, based on similar classes and maintained by similar methods.
And if they fought and abused each other it was not as incompatible
political antipodes but as closely matched competitors. They admired,
studied, and envied each other's methods: their common hatred was
directed against the liberal 19th century Western civilisation which
both openly wished to destroy." No clearer illustration of
this truth can be found than in their joint attitude to Poland from
1939 to 1944.