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

proper help, necessary help. In places that needed divisions we could only send groups or give some weapons. The Warsaw Uprising showed us later how weakly equipped we were.’

      The treatment of the Jews and Roma in Nazi-occupied Europe was unique. No other peoples suffered the systematic hunting down, the remorseless quest for every last individual, the utterly pitiless extermination of each human being, and the knowledge that once they had been identified and caught there would be no mercy and no escape. Non-Jewish Poles did not suffer the extreme, unrelenting terror that led to the murder of so many Polish Jews. Piotr Dembowski, who was arrested in Warsaw on 7 April 1944 in a round-up in the district of Żoliborz, witnessed the different treatment meted out to Jews and Catholics at such a moment. Around sixty people were arrested, among whom were eight Jewish men and women who had been in hiding and who did not have the correct papers. ‘We stayed together for a few hours in a transit cell in the Pawiak prison,’ he recalled. ‘We whispered. Later, “we” [the Poles] were turned into the Registrar’s office and entered the regular prison, while “they” [the Jews] were led outside to the already destroyed ghetto. They knew and we knew that they would be shot that very day. That particular memory, the memory of my “automatic” reaction – “Thank God that I am not …” – has prevented me from ever forgetting the absolute distinction that existed in those terrible days between Jews and non-Jews.’¹⁰

      Ethnic Poles also endured great discrimination and violence at the hands of the Nazis, albeit on a vastly different scale from the Jews and Roma. From the moment the Germans invaded the country, ethnic Poles were treated as Untermenschen – sub-humans – who were to be killed, deported or turned into slaves of the German master race. Hitler had made it very clear from the beginning that his troops were to send to death ‘mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish race and language’. The Poles, and Warsawians in particular, were despised by both Hitler and Himmler, and from 1939 SS and police Einsatzgruppen arrested and killed anyone who stood in the way of Generalplan Ost – the Nazi plan to Germanize the east.

      In June 1939 Hitler was invited to visit an architectural office in the Bavarian city of Würzburg. By chance his attention was caught by the designs for a new town planned to replace the current city of Warsaw. He gave his permission for the project to be pursued. The design, which became known as the Pabst Plan after one of its authors, envisaged the callous reduction of the city from 1.5 million inhabitants to a small German population of 130,000 people, with room for 80,000 Poles to be kept as slave labour on the left bank of the river. The Jews were to disappear altogether. Warsaw, with the exception of a few areas such as the Old Town, was to be flattened and replaced by a ‘New German City’ which had been designed to resemble a medieval German settlement, complete with picturesque narrow streets and pretty timber-framed houses. The population was dispensable. The city was to become a symbol of the new Germany of the east.

      Generalplan Ost was not reserved for Warsaw alone; indeed, the entire pre-war Polish population of thirty-five million was to be reduced to a mere three to four million uneducated ‘peasants’ who would be put to work in industry or agriculture. To this end the Germans swept through Poland in 1939, arresting the country’s elite – tens of thousands of doctors and teachers, bureaucrats and landowners, clergymen and professors, journalists and businessmen, actors and priests. Many were murdered at killing grounds such as the Palmiry forest near Warsaw, or in the Pawiak prison in the city itself. The earliest such massacres were small – the first in Warsaw was in the suburb of Zielonka in September 1939, when nine people were executed because someone had put up a poster quoting an anti-Prussian song, but the numbers increased rapidly. In Wawer, another suburb of Warsaw, 107 civilians were shot in reprisal for the killing of two German NCOs. As it happened, Zielonka and Wawer would be the first two suburbs of Warsaw to be taken by the Red Army in July 1944. The sounds of battle from those districts would prompt the AK to start the uprising.

      One of the Germans to take to the killing of the Poles with gusto was none other than Hermann Fegelein, whose 1st SS Cavalry Division carried out a number of mass shootings in the autumn of 1944. Fegelein had shown his disdain for the Poles early on, personally taking part in the execution of nearly 2,000 people in the Kampinos forest near Palmiry. The first of these, on 7 and 8 December 1939, saw eighty people killed. Later victims included the speaker of the Polish Parliament, the Olympic gold medal-winning athlete Janusz Kusociński, and the Vice-President of Warsaw Jan Pohoski. Pictures taken on the first day show the victims being led to their deaths in dressing gowns and pyjamas, as they had not been given time to get dressed.¹¹ Fegelein also shot a number of eminent Poles in the gardens of the Parliament Buildings in Warsaw.

      This brutality only increased with time, and by the end of the war ethnic Poles were to be found in nearly every camp in the Reich. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski called for the creation of Auschwitz in order to hold ethnic Polish prisoners; only later would it evolve into the factory of death for Jewish victims. The numbers of ethnic Poles killed are dwarfed by the sheer scale of the murder of Jews in the camps; even so, of the estimated 140,000 non-Jewish Poles imprisoned at Auschwitz, around 70,000 died, some as the result of barbaric medical experiments but most through disease, starvation and ill-treatment. Around 20,000 Poles were killed in Sachsenhausen and 20,000 in Gross-Rosen, 17,000 in both Ravensbrück and Neuengamme, and 10,000 in Dachau. Tens of thousands of the 100,000 Poles sent to Majdanek were killed there, and 30,000 died at Mauthausen. Few people today have heard of the sub-camp at Gusen, a place designed specifically to erase the intelligentsia of Poland through hard labour in the granite mines. Many died after being thrown into the Mauthausen quarry, the SS and kapos laughing as the ‘parachutists without parachutes’ writhed and twisted before hitting the ground.

      As with any list of numbers, it is sometimes easy to forget that each figure represents an individual, a single person who was wrongfully imprisoned, brutally abused, and killed. Stanisław Nogaj, Gusen prisoner no. 43322, wrote that there were about eighty kinds of violent death in the sub-camp, where the guards were particularly cruel and sadistic, as if to heap humiliation on the ‘effete’ intellectuals and professionals who ended up as prisoners there. They included ‘bullets, clubs, ropes, gas, poison, electrical current, hunger, being buried alive, burned alive, stoned to death, falling under trains, thrown from cliffs …’ Sketches that survive from the camp show prisoners being crushed by stones, hung up by their hands and whipped, or chained by the neck like animals. Ludwik Bielerzewski, Gusen prisoner no. 48705, recalled the death of Father Laskowski, Director of Economy at the Seminary in Poznań. When the hated Oberkapo Kastenhofen Gustav Krutzky, known as ‘Tygrys’ by the inmates, asked Father Laskowski who he was, he answered that he was a priest. ‘This answer was sufficient. They ordered him to lift a huge, hundred-kilo stone. When he was not able to lift it, “Tygrys” – one of the kapos who should be avoided at all costs, since a mere encounter with him heralded an inevitable death – together with his colleague, placed this stone on the back of the unfortunate prisoner. The stone fell, Father Laskowski was knocked down. The torturers beat and kicked the prostrated victim. When he got up with difficulty they weighed him down again. Another fall.’ The kapos eventually killed him.¹² In another form of murder people were forced to strip naked and, in freezing winter weather, stand in the ‘baths’, where they were doused with cold water. Zbigniew Wlazłowski, Gusen prisoner no. 49943, risked his life to witness such an execution from Block 29: ‘Unterscharführer Jentsch ran around with a riding crop in his hand, urged on the block leaders and encouraged the kapos to beat the resisters. Even he cut the naked bodies with a whip or shoved the prisoners with his leg under the ice-cold showers. The people froze, and the water unable to drain to the blocked sewers kept on rising … Most of them became weak, fell down, and drowned in the water then above their knees.’¹³

      The Germans had other punishments for the Poles. Between 1939 and 1945 over 1.5 million were sent as forced labourers to the Reich. In another agonizing chapter, children deemed ‘racially acceptable’ were taken from their parents and given to childless couples in Germany. As Himmler wrote in his official report on the subject, ‘racially valuable children [are to be raised] in the old Reich in proper educational facilities or in German family care. The children must not be older than eight or ten years, because only till this age can we truly change their national identification,