The German War (75 page)

Lack of reserves meant that the Germans were unable to prevent the Soviets from exploiting their breakthrough. Rokossovsky’s forces drove on from Minsk south-westwards along the few key roads across Belorussia to Baranovichi as well as north-westwards into the Baltic states. The Red Army liberated Vilnius on 13 July, threatening to isolate Army Group North on the Baltic coast. On that day, Konev launched his long-awaited attack on the two German army groups in the south, pushing them back into Hungary and Romania and deploying the full weight of his tank armies to drive towards Lwów, Lublin and the river Vistula in the west.

On 17 July, 57,000 German prisoners were paraded through the streets of Moscow in an unprecedented demonstration of the Soviet victories and mockery of the racist hubris of their enemies. But that summer, many Red Army units simply slaughtered their German captives before they could be registered as prisoners. A young Red Army woman recalled years later how she had watched the men of her unit hack their German prisoners to pieces with bayonets. ‘I waited,’ she remembered, ‘waited long for the moment when their eyes would burst with pain. The pupils. You are appalled to hear that? Is it cruel? If a great fire had been lit in the middle of the village before your eyes and your mother thrown into it? Your sister? Your beloved teacher?’
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On 27 July, Lwów was finally liberated. Over the next three days, the 47th Army under Radzievsky raced on towards Warsaw from the south-east. In a final, exhausted flanking effort, the general sent his 8th Guards Tank Corps and 3rd Tank Corps to spring the city from the north-east. But when the two corps reached Wołomin on 30 July, they were pinned down by German counter-attacks. Warsaw was still 15 kilometres away, but the Soviet troops who had advanced 300 kilometres in five weeks – from the banks of the Dniepr and Dvina to the Vistula – were exhausted and outrunning their own supply lines.

On 1 August, the Polish underground armies launched an insurrection in Warsaw, catching the German garrison off guard. Attacking in full daylight at 4 p.m., the lightly armed insurgents failed, however, to capture key positions. To make matters worse, the rising quickly turned out to have been militarily mistimed. Within an hour of sending out the order for the uprising, General Bór-Komorowski, the commander of the Home Army, learned that the Soviet tanks that had been sighted at Wołomin were not about to liberate the Praga district on the eastern bank of the Vistula. It would take the Red Army until 13–14 September to take the Praga district. With bridgeheads over the Vistula at Sandomierz and Magnuszew, the Red Army could bypass Warsaw, rather than fight a costly battle to dislodge the Germans from the city. It was not obvious what the Soviets had to gain here.
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Bór-Komorowski, acting without the endorsement of the exiled Polish Government in London, had also miscalculated politically. The uprising was intended to present the Polish Home Army as armed liberators rather than passive spectators to a Soviet conquest. But the Soviets had already shown that they would not tolerate any independent, non-Communist forces when they had promptly arrested the Home Army units they found patrolling Lublin on 22 July. Having broken all relations with the Polish Government in London in the aftermath of the Katyn revelations, they were not predisposed to acknowledge their legitimacy now, and had installed their own puppet government, the ‘Polish Committee of National Liberation’. There was no prospect that they would tolerate representatives of the London-based exiled government in Warsaw itself. Whether the Red Army was militarily ready to intervene more vigorously in the first weeks of the uprising is a moot question. As the uprising dragged on into September, it certainly could have done so. Instead, Soviet forces took the Praga district, occupying positions along the eastern bank of the Vistula; there they waited, while Stalin did his best to block British and American attempts to drop aid for the Poles from the air.

Having spent most of the war in the Polish capital, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld suddenly found himself on the commander’s staff, experiencing active service for the first time since September 1939. On 4 August 1944, he wrote home, ‘Till now I have not witnessed the horrors of the war. And that’s why the experiences of these days have shaken me.’ Two days later, he told his family that he expected the Poles to fight stubbornly, noting that ‘even the deployment of tanks and heavy bombardment seems to have made no real impression on the rebels. When streets of houses are deliberately burned down and the civilian population flees somewhere, rebels occupy the rubble and go on firing. Anyone sighted on the streets is shot.’
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As an Army Intelligence officer, it was one of Hosenfeld’s duties to interrogate Polish prisoners. During the first week the Germans did not take any. On 8 August, Hosenfeld noted in his diary that the Germans were clearing the civilians from the cellars as they retook parts of the city: ‘yesterday only the men, in the days before also the women and children were killed’. In the Wola district of Warsaw, the Dirlewanger Brigade – a special unit composed of German professional criminals, poachers and SS men on probation – executed all the civilians it could find, from patients in hospitals to young children, accounting for 30,000–40,000 deaths. As Hosenfeld looked out from the headquarters at the ‘long columns of civilians’ being taken towards the western outskirts of the city, he recorded what a German police officer had told him: ‘the civilians are to be sorted out. There is said to be an order from Himmler to kill all the men.’ The commander of the SS units telephoned the commander of the 9th Army, asking, ‘What should I do with the civilians? I have less ammunition than prisoners.’
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For the first time, Hosenfeld began to censor what he wrote to his wife and daughters, sparing them this particular detail, while trying to give them an accurate overall picture: ‘From hour to hour the city is sinking through conflagrations and bombing into rubble. Streets of houses have to be systematically burned down. You have to close your eyes and your heart. The population is being destroyed pitilessly.’ Struggling to establish a moral scale of comparison, Hosenfeld pointed out that ‘countless German cities also lie in rubble!’ In fact, it all reminded him of the biblical Flood, brought on by ‘human sinfulness and pride’. Duty and red wine with each meal – the alcohol a new addition to his diet – were proving sufficient to relieve the stress for the time being: ‘Come what may, I am in good cheer.’ Meanwhile, the fighting itself had reached an impasse, neither side strong enough to dislodge the other. While most of the officers around him predicted that they would quash the uprising and then hold the Red Army on the Vistula, Hosenfeld remained convinced that the Soviets would soon sweep through the weakened German lines. He entrusted his valuable watch to a fellow officer on his way home to send on to his wife.
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On 21 August, Peter Stölten’s 302nd Panzer Abteilung reached the outskirts of Warsaw, having been pulled out of Normandy and sent east. This was not a good posting for a young man who had just declared his ‘will to merge with beauty’. As soon as he arrived, he wrote to tell Dorothee that ‘the fighting is meant to be particularly hard – scarcely imaginable. Tomorrow’, he added philosophically, ‘we’ll see.’
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Within days of his arrival, Stölten was wounded again and six of his men were killed. One of their miniature Goliaths had detonated its cargo of high explosives near to his own command vehicle. A few days later, the same thing happened again and two more men were killed. ‘The enemy fired at us, detonating a thousand kilos of explosives just three metres from my vehicle,’ Stölten wrote home:

I don’t consider myself at fault. But it makes no difference. If you bring bad luck you’ll be stigmatised, as if you really were guilty. It’s a curse. You can see it in everyone’s faces. After the explosion, I was lying for hours, blinded, among the groaning wounded. Now I’m safe and calm. I believe that ill fortune and responsibility educate a man.

Stölten felt this sudden loss of confidence even more keenly as he busily wrote letters of condolence to the families of his dead men.
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The cruelty and violence of the house-to-house fighting outdid anything Peter had seen before, he told Dorothee on 26 August, even the bombing of the German cities. But he felt able to write about ‘the war in Warsaw, a heroic struggle of the Poles, only satirically and to a woman not at all’. He was not joking. Once again, he turned to writing to dramatise his moral crisis. Amid the battles, losses and anxiety of these first days in Warsaw, he somehow found the time to write a sixteen-page work which he called ‘Satire – Jungle fighting’. Stölten sent it to his father, asking him not to show his writing to his mother, sticking to the code of sparing women details he found truly disturbing.
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Stölten’s ‘Satire’ could not have been less like the elegiac dialogue he had written a mere five weeks earlier. The protagonists were a motley bunch, ranging from old German infantrymen, few with all their limbs intact, and German police units, occupied with ‘setting alight the not completely burnt-out house frontages again’, to ‘cossacks and auxiliaries . . . their arms covered with bracelets and watches like the neck of a female giraffe’. Looting was the order of the day, with ‘soldiers of all nationalities lugging every conceivable object around in bed sheets’. He learned not to interfere with the Kaminski Brigade, who ‘rape women, cut off their breasts or throw them bodily out of the window!’

In the wake of Stalingrad, Bronislav Kaminski’s unit of police auxiliaries had been expanded into a ‘brigade’ of some 10,000–12,000 ‘volunteers’, drawn mainly from camps for Soviet prisoners of war and equipped with captured Soviet tanks and artillery; in June 1944, the unit had been absorbed into the Waffen SS. The ‘Eastern legions’ had grown in a similar way as the Germans relied increasingly on foreign fighters to take over the bitter and brutal struggle against the partisans. The 1st Cossack Division was formed in April 1943, the Estonian SS Division in May 1944: by the end of the war, half of all Waffen SS troops, some 500,000 men, did not come from the Reich. Many – but by no means all – of the atrocities committed in Warsaw were ascribed to such ill-disciplined units.
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As Stölten realised, the Germans were reconquering Warsaw thanks entirely to their ‘tanks, dive-bombers, anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns firing horizontally, artillery, rocket-launchers’ and ‘above all, deserters who reveal the entrances to the underground passages. Then a water main is ruptured and all are drowned.’ Or the Germans threw in Molotov cocktails ‘and let the bodies blow apart in the explosions’. Stölten modelled his prose on the macabre, expressionist poetry of Gottfried Benn, but his ‘Satire’ collapsed under the weight of his own shock. Horror-struck and profoundly ashamed, Stölten was unable to maintain the lightness of tone and ironic distance with which he began and dropped all self-censorship about Warsaw, writing home about what the fighting was really like for the first time. ‘Those [Polish fighters] who surrender are shot – Bandits! Shot in the back of the neck – the next ones lying down – shot in the back of the neck!’ Like Hosenfeld, Stölten witnessed the separation of the captured civilians by sex before they were marched off, and he hinted at yet further atrocities perpetrated on them: ‘Some have also seen other things – but that is no concern of ours – THANK GOD!!!’
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He did not want Dorothee, his mother or sister to see his satire, but on 28 September, after five weeks of fighting in the ruins of the city, he confessed to his fiancée:

One is accustomed to male corpses, they have long belonged to the natural order. But when you still recognise the once radiant beauty among the mangled remains of women, a completely different, loving, harmless life; still more, when you find children, whose innocence draws my most intense love even in the darkest hours irrespective of their appearance or language, . . . You will already see – and say I shouldn’t and oughtn’t to write about it.

Stumbling over his utter breach of self-imposed norms, he argued against those ‘men who forbid their own and women in general from reading books about war’ on the grounds ‘that you also need to have your eyes opened and need to know the danger’, implying already that what the Germans were doing in Warsaw others could perpetrate in Berlin. As he challenged his received notions of male and female roles in this war, Stölten noticed for the first time that such prescribed norms drew their validation from the ‘aura of male heroism’ in which he had grown up – and continued, in many ways, to believe.
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Wilm Hosenfeld also subscribed to the official description of the Polish insurgents as ‘bandits’ who forced the civilian population to shield them. More than Stölten, he claimed that the Wehrmacht had retained its honour in Warsaw and that all the worst deeds were committed by the Russian ‘volunteers’ in the Kaminski Brigade, or by the SS and police units. But, after watching German artillery set the cupola of a large church aflame, Hosenfeld relayed the shocking news that 1,500 people had been sheltering inside. He was also disturbed by the brutal treatment of female prisoners. On 27 August, three girls, mere high-school pupils, were brought in for interrogation for distributing leaflets and maps. He hoped, Hosenfeld wrote home to his wife and daughters, that he could prevent them from being shot. He could get nothing out of the prisoners, and concluded that he lacked the ‘mercilessness which is fitting here and is usually deployed’. All, he noted, had a religious medallion or a picture of the Virgin.
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Stölten enjoyed a brief respite when his commanding officer, an interior designer in civilian life, sent him off to find quarters in the finest apartments of central Warsaw, which he furnished with ‘statues, sofas, Gobelin tapestries, etc.’ ‘Soon,’ Stölten told Dorothee, ‘everything will be burned.’ In his temporary abode, he tried to replicate his parents’ flat in Berlin’s leafy neighbourhood of Zehlendorf and soon ‘furnished a living room in the style of our dining room’. Ransacking the record collection, he danced through foxtrots, tangos, waltzes and polkas in the room on his own, accompanied only by the deep shadows cast by the light of a 1.5-metre beeswax candle. Beethoven also came to the rescue: Stölten was so moved by listening to the
Egmont
overture that he wrote to Dorothee suggesting that it should be broadcast ‘instead of all the National Socialist speeches’ – ‘it is the source of strength’. In between the fighting he and his superior wandered through the half-wrecked apartments, their boots crunching on the glass, the air filled with acrid plaster dust, looking at the extraordinary artworks that had remained oddly intact. More than once, the two men picked up photos of a fair-haired child and found themselves saying in unison, ‘Let’s hope he is all right.’ As Stölten began distractedly ripping the plates out of volumes of art history, hoping to preserve some small part of the cultural heritage of Warsaw from the flames, he became convinced that this was an urban culture which ‘Germany really does not match’. It was an inversion of everything that Germans had been led to believe about Poles.
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