Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

(Chapter XVII)

       The Bandit Wars

      ‘Before battle,’ the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote, ‘there is a period of great stillness – nowhere is there such a stillness as in war.’ In the spring of 1944 Germany waited, knowing that the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were both planning their summer offensives, but not knowing when or where they would come. The tension was palpable.

      In Warsaw, too, people were waiting. Life under Nazi occupation, with the constant fear of an early-morning knock at the door by the Gestapo or the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst – the intelligence service), had led to the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Underground Army, becoming the largest of its kind in occupied Europe. Sheer Nazi brutality and racially motivated crimes – against the Polish Jews above all, but also the hated Slavs – had ruled out the kind of cooperation between occupier and occupied experienced by other peoples deemed ‘racially acceptable’ by the Germans. The AK had spent much of the war attacking and sabotaging the German war effort and planning for further action, and as the tide turned against the Germans after Stalingrad the number of assassinations of German officials on the streets of Warsaw rose steadily. One of the AK’s plans, the most ambitious of all, was code-named ‘Burza’, or Tempest. It called for an uprising to be held when the Red Army entered pre-war Polish territory. It was to be a military uprising, in that Polish soldiers would help the Soviets push the Nazi occupiers out of their country, but it was also to have a political element. By participating in the fight to liberate their own country, the insurgents hoped to establish the right to the restoration of a free independent state when the hostilities were over. The Poles watched and waited in the spring of 1944, ready to act as soon as the Red Army moved in.

      Despite the impending downfall of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler was in a surprisingly buoyant mood that spring, not least because of the injections of glucose and, soon, cocaine administered by his trusted but utterly incompetent doctor, Theodor Morell. The Führer was increasingly losing touch with reality. When the Luftwaffe ace Günter Rall saw him in early 1944 he said, ‘This was a very different Hitler. He was no longer talking about tangible facts. He was talking about: “I see the deep valley. I see the strip on the horizon,” and it was all nonsense … It was clear to me that this man was a little out of his mind. He did not have a truly clear, serious concept of the situation.’¹

      Hitler was enjoying cosy domestic life ‘at home’ in the Berghof in the Bavarian mountains, far from the desperate privations of the Eastern Front, and his gloomy Prussian headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) at Rastenburg, where the forced labourers of Organization Todt were pouring seven metres of concrete as a protective layer against Soviet bombs. Bunkers had been dug on ‘The Mountain’ too, and camouflage netting shrouded the buildings, but Hitler lived as if the war was no more than a distant, irrelevant skirmish. He spent mornings in bed, rising late for his vegetarian Bircher-Benner breakfast prepared in the cavernous kitchen by his dietician Constanze Manziarly. Then he would relax in the company of the Berghof ‘regulars’ – SS General Sepp Dietrich, Armaments Minister Albert Speer, the grossly obese Dr Morell, his close friend Walther Hewel, and his personal secretary, Martin Bormann. Other guests came and went, joining in the customary afternoon stroll to the ‘little tea house’ on the Mooslahner Kopf, where Hitler had his customary cocoa and apple pie. Eva Braun and the other ‘girls’, Margaret Speer, Anni Brandt and Eva’s sisters Ilse and Gretl, would lounge on the terrace, play in the bowling alley or watch the latest films in the projection room, commenting on fashion trends and the hairstyles of the stars.

      As the clouds of the Allied invasion of Europe loomed, Hitler, perversely, seemed to grow more confident. On 3 June he threw a lavish party to celebrate the wedding of Eva Braun’s sister Gretl. The groom was Hermann Fegelein, who would play a key role in the Warsaw Uprising.

      Fegelein was a suave playboy, a charmer and a mass murderer rolled into one. He had risen to power thanks to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who treated the witty and sleek young man almost like a son. It was Himmler who had plucked the young Hermann out of obscurity to make him Commander of the new SS Main Riding School in Munich, before promoting him through the ranks to become SS Gruppenführer with the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer, a unit which was particularly ruthless in the fight against partisans in the east under Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. When Fegelein was wounded on the Russian Front for the third time, Himmler brought his favourite home and appointed him Waffen SS Liaison Officer at Führer headquarters. This not only got Fegelein away from the front, but also gave Himmler even more access to and power over Hitler. It was an inspired choice.

      Fegelein’s influence on the uprising came about in part because of his skill as a horseman. Before the war he had competed in a number of events on the international circuit, and had even created the equestrian facilities for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. One of his long-time competitors, and a man he admired, was a Polish cavalry officer named Count Tadeusz Komorowski, who trained the Polish eventing team which won a silver medal at the Olympics. What Fegelein did not know was that Brigadier-General Bór-Komorowski, as he was now known (‘Bór’ being his wartime code-name), had, a few months before the lavish wedding party, been appointed commander of the Polish Home Army based in Warsaw. Even as the SS cavalry officer was quaffing champagne and flirting with Eva Braun, General Bór was planning the uprising that would link the two men once again.

      The day after the wedding, on 4 June 1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, on his way to his holiday home, talked to Hitler about the expected Allied invasion of France. Rommel agreed with Hitler that the Allies were most likely to strike at the Pas de Calais, and reminded him that the most important thing was that they must not be allowed to establish a bridgehead on the coast. Hitler was confident that any invasion in the heavily fortified and well-defended area could be easily repulsed. Which is why, when German sentries looked out over the grey waters of the English Channel two days later, they could hardly believe their eyes. The first of 1,200 warships were slowly coming towards them, but they were not heading to the Pas de Calais. They were on their way to Normandy.

      Hitler, as was his custom, had taken a cocktail of sleeping pills the previous night, and did not wake up until midday. ‘The Führer always gets the latest news after he has had his breakfast,’ the duty adjutant snapped at an impatient Albert Speer. When he finally emerged, Hitler, still in his dressing gown, listened calmly as Rear Admiral Karl-Jesco von Puttkamer told him that a number of major landings had taken place between Cherbourg and Le Havre; more were expected. Hitler sent for the head of the armed forces, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and his deputy Colonel General Alfred Jodl, but all three agreed that this was a diversion, and nothing more than an Allied trick. Hitler opted to do nothing.

      Colonel Hans von Luck, head of Kampfgruppe von Luck, was in the thick of the fighting on the coast, and desperately trying to inform his superiors that he was witnessing an invasion on an unimaginable scale. ‘We were dismayed and angry that we had not been believed by the highest authority. And even by evening the Panzer divisions and reserve units stationed in the Pas de Calais were not to be withdrawn, on express orders from Hitler.’ At 4.55 p.m. Hitler revealed his complete lack of understanding of the situation by giving the extraordinary order that the Allies’ bridgehead was ‘to be annihilated by the evening’. Perversely, he seemed almost relieved by the invasion: ‘When they were in Britain we could not get at them. Now we have them where we can destroy them.’ Later, Keitel admitted his mistake: ‘If we had fully believed our radio intelligence interception we would not only have had the date of the invasion, we would even have had the exact time.’ When Hitler and his generals finally realized their error it was, as von Luck put it, ‘too late, much too late!’²

      A furious Rommel met Hitler on 17 June in the gigantic concrete bunker near Soissons, in northern France, that had been designated the Führer’s western HQ. By now over 600,000 Allied troops had landed in Normandy. Rommel was critical of Hitler’s tactics, complaining, ‘The battle is hopeless!’ ‘Just take care of your invasion front,’ Hitler snarled in reply. ‘I shall take care of the future of the war.’ Thereafter, Rommel began to criticize Hitler openly, and lent his support to the 20 July plotters who were planning to assassinate the Führer. When Hitler discovered his treachery,