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

opera or to one of the dozens of cinemas or theatres, while others headed to the neon-lit nightclubs to dance the night away.

      The last pre-war President of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński, had set out to make his capital a world-class city, and he succeeded. After many years of occupation the reborn capital city blossomed as the centre of Polish life. Warsaw had new roads, trains, housing, factories and institutions; its museums and archives, libraries and laboratories were rebuilt or improved, and science, the arts and culture flourished. It was the centre of Polish and Jewish writing, publishing, painting, film-making and photography, and new ideas were quickly embraced. The changes brought not only cultural renewal but also investment, with companies like Opel, Philips and Prudential moving into landmark headquarters which were often the envy of their counterparts in other European cities. Warsaw was a ‘city of the future’, and its trajectory was ‘always up’. A 1938 exhibition at the National Museum, ‘Warsaw – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, which celebrated this new identity attracted half a million visitors.¹ The generation that grew up in this climate could not imagine that it would end so suddenly. When it did, they were indignant. They knew that something wonderful had been cut short, and their anger prompted many who had come of age in the 1920s and 1930s to fight against impossible odds to regain their freedom. That generation was unique. It was also doomed.

      On the morning of 1 September 1939 confused Warsawians awoke to the sound of aeroplanes flying overhead, followed by the crashing of bombs. Hitler had started his Blitzkrieg.

      The German surprise attack on Warsaw was as quick and merciless as it was unexpected, and from the very beginning of the war the city was subjected to a campaign of terror bombing of a kind that had never previously been experienced anywhere in the world. It had been personally ordered by Hitler, who detested the Polish capital and all it stood for; indeed, his hatred was so great that when Generaloberst Franz Halder suggested to the Führer that Warsaw could easily be bypassed on military grounds he was shouted down. ‘No!’ Hitler yelled. ‘Warsaw must be attacked!’ The war against Poland ‘will only be over when Warsaw has fallen’. Hitler set out his vision: ‘how the skies would be darkened, how millions of tons of shells would rain down on Warsaw, how people would drown in blood. Then his eyes nearly popped out of his head and he became a different person. He was suddenly seized by a lust for blood.’²

      The city was pounded for twenty-five terrible days. Then, on 26 September, nine German divisions attacked simultaneously, blasting their way into the city centre. The Warsawians had no choice but to surrender the next day. When he toured the fallen city in October, General Erwin Rommel was shocked by the devastation, and wrote to his wife that there was no water, no power, no gas and no food; 25,000 people lay dead in the rubble. But for Warsaw this was only the beginning.

       The Terror

      What followed was to become one of the most brutal occupations in all of Europe. In the next five years the Germans systematically rounded up and murdered millions of Poles, and Warsaw suffered terrible losses. The litany of crimes against the people of the city is overwhelming. By far the single greatest atrocity was the extermination of almost all of the capital’s Jews, a crime so complete that by the time of the Warsaw Uprising there were only 28,000 left alive in the city, all of them, with the ghetto an utter ruin, in hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side.³ Over 11,000 were able to leave Warsaw with the Gentile population after the uprising, most of them using false papers. Of the five hundred who remained behind, only two hundred would survive until January 1945, when Russians liberated the frightened and starving people struggling in the embers and rubble of the once great city.

      The Jews of Warsaw had made the city their home for five hundred years, creating a rich cultural heritage which had become part of the very fabric of urban life. The old tombstones of the Jewish cemetery, which as in Berlin Hitler decided to spare, bear the names of thousands of people who, through literature or science or music, contributed in some way to the richness of one of the great European capitals. This old and dynamic community was targeted by the Nazis for complete annihilation.

      The process began gradually. In October 1939 spiteful and humiliating attacks began against the Jews of Warsaw. The Germans themselves documented these attacks, which at first took place primarily against Orthodox Jewish men – thousands of ‘tourist’ photographs show innocent people being forced to dance by Nazi soldiers, or having their beards roughly cut off. The oppression increased. Jews were forced to move the rubble from bomb sites. There followed widespread organized theft of Jewish property, often by the Wehrmacht. By the end of November 1939 Jews were being forced to wear Star of David armbands, which in Warsaw were blue and white. In April 1940 a high red-brick wall began to rise around the newly created ghetto, and between mid-October and mid-November of that year the city was turned on its head as 113,000 Catholic Poles and 130,000 Jewish Poles were forced to leave their homes and move to either the new ‘Aryan’ or ‘Jewish’ districts of Warsaw. None of them had a choice, although many thousands of Jews chose to hide on the ‘Aryan’ side. On 16 November the Germans closed all the gates in the ten-foot-high brick wall and topped it with barbed wire, penning Warsaw’s Jews in a thousand-acre prison in the centre of their own city. The Nazis had effectively created the largest ghetto in Europe. For the Jewish prisoners, communication with the outside world virtually ceased. As weeks turned to months, most of those trapped inside were reduced from the prosperity of their former lives as doctors and actors, tradesmen and journalists, to a basic struggle for survival, selling whatever they could to make a little money to get through another few hours. By 1942 the majority of Jews in the ghetto were existing on less than two hundred calories a day. Eighty thousand people – 10,000 of them children – died of starvation, disease or brutal treatment on the streets. Films and photographs, some taken by German ‘tourist’ soldiers, show the lonely deaths of emaciated children too weak even to move from the middle of the street. Their bodies were collected daily by handcart and thrown into mass graves along with the rest of the victims. It was pitiless cruelty.

      For those strong enough to carry on, life was a ritual of humiliation, degradation and fear; people were pushed off high balconies, or beaten with rifle butts, or herded and whipped like animals for no reason. The Nazis and their henchmen, the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst ghetto police, had absolute power over life and death, and a person could be stopped, interrogated, beaten or killed on a whim. Piotr Dembowski, who grew up in the ghetto, remembered guards forcing Jewish workers to ‘fight each other or to sing (in Polish) the song praising the “golden Hitler, who taught us how to work”. I remember the German Polish-language propaganda posters: “Jew=Louse=Typhus”.’⁴

      In ‘Grossaktion Warschau’, which lasted only from 22 July until 21 September 1942 – a period of less than two months – a staggering 310,322 men, women and children were gathered at the Umschlagplatz and herded onto trains destined for Treblinka. This terrifying place was perhaps the most chilling and efficient of all the extermination camps.

      In order to encourage people to go to the trains, the Germans cynically promised loaves of bread and free marmalade to the starving, and spread rumours of ‘resettlement’ to allay their fears. Many desperately hoped that their lives would be spared; others suspected the truth. Władysław Szpilman remembered the terrible conditions at the Umschlagplatz, where those awaiting transportation were forced to wait sometimes for days for space on a train. It was hot, and there was no shade, food or water: ‘People got lost in the crush and called to one another in vain. We heard the shots and shouting which meant raids were going on in the nearby streets. Agitation grew as the hour approached at which the train was supposed to come.’⁵ Szpilman was pulled out of the crowd at the last possible moment and his life was spared, but he watched as his mother, father and siblings were crammed into the wagon that would take them to their deaths. As it rolled away he heard a Jewish policeman say to an SS man, ‘Well, off they go for meltdown!’ Szpilman remembered, ‘I looked the way he was pointing. The doors of the trucks had been closed, and the train was starting off, slowly and laboriously. I turned away and staggered down the empty street, weeping out loud, pursued by the fading cries of the people shut up in those trucks.’⁶

      Stanisław Aronson, the scion of a sophisticated