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

until he returned. A meeting was organized so that he could meet Rowecki: ‘I entered a dimly-lit room, to be welcomed by a thick-set man in his forties … Our talk lasted for several hours, during which I was mostly a listener,’ he recalled. ‘At that time I was not aware that I was sitting in front of a man who was to be one of the most heroic figures of the coming struggle.’⁴ Rowecki would play the decisive role in the creation of the AK; ‘Bór’ Komorowski replaced him after he was arrested by the Gestapo on 30 June 1943.

      Jan Karski was recruited in a similar way. He too had escaped from a PoW convoy, and went to see an old friend in Warsaw, Dziepatowski, in the hope that he would help him find a place to live. Karski did not know that Dziepatowski was already working for the resistance. ‘Conditions here are very bad,’ he said. ‘A man like yourself – young, healthy – is in constant danger. You can be picked up at any moment and sent to a forced-labour camp. You must be very careful. Avoid visiting your family. If the Gestapo learned about your escape it would mean the concentration camp. They may be searching for you already.’ Dziepatowski handed him false identity papers. ‘You are going to have a new name,’ he said. ‘Call yourself “Kucharski”. The apartment I am sending you to is owned by the wife of a former bank employee.’ Karski was still reeling from this information when he left to embark on his new life. ‘Although I did not know it at the time, this was my initiation into the Polish underground organization. There was nothing extraordinary about it; nothing at all romantic. It required no decision on my part; no spurt of courage or adventure. It came about as the result of a simple visit to a good friend, dictated largely by my despair, gloom, and the feeling of being utterly at a loose end.’⁵

      Thousands of young people were recruited like this. Stanisław Likiernik joined after attending secret university courses. ‘I am not sure exactly how and when it happened, but eventually I became a full-time member of the underground. I received a small amount of money, enough to live on … I spent a lot of time cycling around Warsaw, meeting people, passing on and receiving intelligence in friendly shops, secret haunts and safe houses.’⁶ Stanisław Aronson, having escaped from the train that was taking him to Treblinka, was recruited into the ‘Kedyw’ unit by its head Józef Rybicki after an interview in a friend’s apartment; he became one of approximately a thousand Jews who fought in the AK during the uprising.⁷

      The AK also had a large number of women in its ranks, many of whom had participated in the First World War and the 1920 war against the Bolsheviks as couriers, runners, nurses or drivers. When these conflicts were over they had refused just to ‘return to the kitchen’, and threw themselves into various paramilitary organizations like the Ochotniczy Legion Kobiet (Voluntary Legion of Women).

      The most important source of female AK recruits was the Przysposobienie Wojskowe Kobiet (Female Military Training), or PWK, a paramilitary organization set up between the wars. By 1939 it had 40,000 active members and 1,500 instructors. An estimated million women had been through its rigorous courses, learning everything from first aid to how to shoot. Antonina Mijal was typical of its leaders. A crack shot, she had spent years directing training camps for the PWK. She was approached by Major Zofia Franio, and joined her new female sappers’ unit in October 1940; in February that year she had become the liaison officer for Jan Kiwerski, the deputy commander of the sabotage unit of the AK, who had overseen the abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler during his visit to Warsaw in October 1939.

      By the outbreak of the uprising the AK had over 300,000 volunteers, the vast majority of whom were young men and women who had for years dodged German round-ups and restrictions, waiting for the day they could fight back. They were from every imaginable background – politicians and peasants, professionals and students, workers and writers, musicians and army officers – all joining together in an outpouring of patriotism and indignation that the nation which had been recreated after the First World War had been taken from them. Twenty thousand Polish nurses, runners and snipers, sappers and soldiers would lay down their lives in the summer of 1944 in the fight for their capital city.

       The Troublesome Poles

      Partly because of the overwhelming brutality of the invading forces, there was no serious Polish political collaboration with Nazi Germany – no quislings or Polish SS divisions – during the Second World War. There were, of course, individual collaborators and ‘Volksdeutsche’ who worked for the Germans; there were also the despised ‘Schmalcowniks’,^fn1 who specialized in blackmailing and betraying Jews and their protectors. On the whole, however, the Poles supported the Western Allies, and unwaveringly shared their vision of freedom, democracy and self-determination. When Jan Karski joined the underground in 1939 he was told by his mentor ‘Mr Borecki’, a well-known lawyer in the interwar years, that the organization was nothing less than ‘the official continuation of the Polish state’.⁸ General Władysław Sikorski, the leader of the wartime Polish government-in-exile in London, said that ‘we are fighting not only for an independent Poland but for a new democratic state assuring to all her citizens political and social freedom and progress’.⁹ The Poles resisted German rule from the beginning of the war, and plans for an uprising evolved early. The most critical question was not if they should act, but how and when.

      The Germans were well aware of the Polish history of rebellion, and dealt with all threats by increasing the terror. In February 1940 SS General Petri sent a study of the 1863 Polish Uprising against the Russians to Himmler, who found it so instructive that he ordered copies to be distributed to the Gestapo and to all SS and police battalion commanders at once. ‘The only means of dealing with a Polish Uprising,’ the report stated, ‘is unmerciful severity applied at the first show of resistance. Any indecisive behaviour of the authorities [must] end in disaster.’¹⁰

      Despite this, the Germans completely misunderstood the mentality of a people well acquainted with persecution and oppression, and did not realize that the more they pushed, the more the Poles would resist. Every Pole understood the wartime rules of behaviour which were formalized by the Directorate of Civil Resistance in 1942. Citizens were to hinder the Germans wherever and whenever possible. Quotas were to be fudged, armaments were to be sabotaged, equipment was to be improperly repaired. People learned not to pry into the affairs of those who might be working for the underground. Small acts of resistance, like daubing graffiti on prominent walls or placing flowers on the sites of destroyed memorials, did little more than raise morale, but they were important in maintaining the spirit of solidarity in the grim war years. After the defeat in 1939 a mass grave for unknown soldiers was dug on the corner of Marszałkowska and Jerusalem Avenue in the very centre of Warsaw, and hundreds of people lit candles for the fallen every day. SS Gruppenführer and Commander of the SS and Warsaw District Police Paul Moder realized the potential danger of such gatherings, and had the bodies moved and access to the site restricted. Warsawians nevertheless managed to surreptitiously light candles there every day until the uprising made it impossible. The 1942 Directorate even included the creation of underground courts of justice which heard cases against collaborators. They imposed – and carried out – the death penalty on a regular basis.

      The Nazis tried and utterly failed to crush Polish culture. Many Germans held the strange notion that the further east one went, the less sophisticated people became; propaganda bore this out with carefully chosen photographs of filthy villages and houses in ‘the east’, with no electricity or running water, and with outhouses dotted around muddy back fields. In reality, Warsaw, with its embassies and theatres and museums, was a highly sophisticated and elegant city, and its inhabitants were often far more worldly than the young German soldiers sent there who had been brought up on a provincial diet of narrow-minded Nazi propaganda. Warsaw inhabitants lived in close-knit working-class communities, handsome villas or suburban flats; they loved their families and their neighbourhoods and their churches, and they followed the latest fashions, theatre and films as keenly as their counterparts in any other European capital. The young German soldiers sent to arrest eighteen-year-old Władysław Bartoszewski in April 1940, and send him on the second ever transport bound for Auschwitz, were astounded to find complete German editions of Goethe and Heinrich Heine on his bookshelves; it had not occurred to them that knowledge of German or French literature was commonplace