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

intentions. ‘In my view,’ he wrote to Bór on 11 January 1944, ‘the final aim of the Soviet Union is to transform Poland into a vassal Communist republic or simply into the 17th Soviet republic.’ He was right. Stalin had already mentally claimed Eastern Europe for himself. Furthermore, the Poles could not count on any real help from the Western Allies. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943 Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had determined the future eastern border of Poland at the so-called Curzon Line, which gave large chunks of Polish territory to the Soviet Union. Churchill suggested that Poland be given swathes of Germany as compensation. It was an ominous precedent. Not only had the Western Allies left the Poles out of the decision-making process, they had made it clear that however just their cause, they cared more about maintaining friendly relations with Stalin than they did about Polish concerns for the future of their country. Roosevelt in particular saw Poland as part of Stalin’s sphere of influence, and his only real concern was to keep the issue of the future border secret from the millions of Polish-American voters until after the November 1944 presidential election. Documents released by the National Archives in September 2012 show that Roosevelt knew that the Soviets had in fact committed the massacre at Katyń, but was so determined to remain on good terms with Stalin that he lied to his own people, and in particular to the Poles. It was harsh treatment of a nation in such peril.

      Churchill was sympathetic to Poland, but he was in a difficult situation. British power was waning in the shadow of the two emerging superpowers, and he was desperate to preserve what he could of his nation’s influence. He understood that the West could not defeat Nazi Germany alone, and that one price for Soviet cooperation would be a change to Poland’s eastern border. The sheer scale of the Soviets’ military success led to irritation with the Poles amongst the Western Allies for not accepting the new international reality. The prevailing view was that the Soviets were paying for victory with the blood of millions of men, and that the ‘Polish question’, however embarrassing, could not be allowed to threaten Stalin’s decision to carry on the fight. As Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa, put it to Churchill in March 1944, ‘It would be calamitous if the Polish question were to sour Russian relations with Britain.’³² Most senior officials in the Foreign Office agreed. Sir William Strang, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Europe until 1943, felt that it would be in Britain’s interest to accept Soviet supremacy in Eastern Europe: ‘It is better that Russia should dominate Eastern Europe,’ he wrote, ‘than that Germany should dominate Western Europe.’³³ Stalin was in effect given carte blanche to do as he wished.

      Despite their fears of Soviet intentions, the Poles did their best to help the Red Army in its sweep towards Warsaw. The AK attacked the Germans in Wilno, Lwów and Lublin as part of Operation ‘Tempest’, and assisted the Russians where they could. Stalin did not care, as he was determined not to allow the AK any kind of military or political victory. Early contacts between Red Army soldiers and the AK were usually friendly, but once the NKVD arrived – usually within a few hours – AK soldiers who revealed themselves were arrested, murdered, sent to the gulag or press-ganged into the Soviet-run army commanded by General Zygmunt Berling.^fn3 The Soviets used the recently liberated camp at Majdanek to intern ‘dangerous’ Polish nationalists. When the ‘Committee for National Liberation’ was set up in Lublin as the ‘legitimate government’ of Poland on 22 July, the announcement had been followed by a half-hour broadcast of the Polish national anthem. Stalin had laid his cards on the table. The Polish government-in-exile in London was to be undermined in every way possible, and its representatives in Poland eliminated.

      As the Soviets’ true intentions became clear, the pressure on the AK in Warsaw grew ever more intense. With the Red Army advancing rapidly towards the city, the fear was that if the AK did nothing the Soviets would liberate Warsaw, and Stalin would broadcast to the world that the Polish Home Army had been ineffectual – or worse, had even collaborated with the Germans. General Bór and a handful of colleagues began to convince themselves that the very proximity of the Red Army might give them the chance to include Warsaw in Operation ‘Tempest’. With the Germans apparently falling to pieces and the Red Army approaching the eastern bank of the Vistula, the calls to ‘do something’ increased. That ‘something’ was to be an uprising in the capital.

      There was one big problem. In March 1944 Warsaw had been deliberately excluded from the plans of Operation ‘Tempest’ because, as Bór had put it, ‘we wanted to avoid destruction and suffering of the civilian population and safeguard historical buildings’.³⁴ Some AK units remained in the city, but most of the arsenal had been moved to the main forces waiting in the forests. General Tadeusz Pełczyński, the AK Chief of Staff, said that ‘we wanted not to fight in the towns to save them. A fight in Warsaw was not planned. But the nature of the war changed all that … the decision to fight in Warsaw was taken in mid-July when the front was approaching the capital very quickly. The authorities decided it was essential for Polish soldiers to free Warsaw from the Germans.’³⁵

      Pełczyński and his friend General Leopold Okulicki were the main architects of the revised plan. Born in 1892, the son of a sugar-mill technician, Pełczyński had been deeply involved in the AK from the beginning: it was he who handed over the Enigma machines to the British in 1939, and he had commanded numerous ‘Kedyw’ sabotage operations throughout the war. For him the choice was simple: either the AK could depart from Warsaw, leaving a no man’s land in which the Germans and Soviets would fight one another, or it could help free the city and, as its rightful proprietors, extend a formal welcome to the Soviets.

      For his part, Okulicki had few doubts about Soviet intentions. Arrested and sent to the gulag while serving in the Polish resistance, he had only managed to escape thanks to General Władysław Anders, who was released by the Russians to form an army made up of Poles captured by the Soviets in 1939 and 1940. Okulicki was parachuted back into occupied Poland in May 1944, and the fact that he had been sent on a special mission from General Sosnkowski in London lent his voice great weight in AK headquarters. But his view bordered on the messianic. Even if the Russians did not come to help liberate Warsaw, he argued, the price of defeat would be worth it, as it would ‘show the world’ that the Soviets were the bearers of an ‘inhuman policy which condemns half of Europe to future slavery’.³⁶ Both Pełczyński and Okulicki believed that waiting for the Germans to retreat would make the AK appear too weak and passive. The Poles had to show the world that they could fight in open combat, and that they had the right to a free and independent country after the war. All they had to do was to storm the German garrison and hang onto the city until the Red Army arrived. It seemed so simple.

      On 21 July, General Bór bowed to pressure from Pełczyński and Okulicki and asked Jan Jankowski, the Government Delegate for the Polish government-in-exile, who was based in Poland but was in constant contact with London, to approve the decision to include the capital in the fight. The timing seemed perfect. That very night the German commander of Warsaw had announced that all German women, including those working for auxiliary organizations, should leave the city. The German community was in chaos as panicked civilians tried desperately to get out before the Russians arrived. Even SD units were leaving.

      That same day, Bór sent what turned out to be a wildly optimistic telegram to London describing the situation on the front: ‘The Soviet advance on this sector will be rapid and will reach and cross the Vistula in a further advance to the west without any effective or serious German counter-offensive … It appears certain that on the Eastern Front the Germans are incapable of taking the initiative from Soviet hands or of successful opposition. Recently we have observed more frequent signs of the disintegration of the German forces who are tired and show no will to fight. The recent attempt on Hitler’s life, together with the military position of Germany, may lead at any moment to their collapse.’³⁷

      The AK High Command were by this time meeting daily at their central headquarters on Pańska Street. Colonel Rzepecki, the head of the Information and Propaganda Bureau, was in favour of an early start to the uprising, not least because he felt it would help Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s negotiating position with Stalin in Moscow. But he also believed that the Nazis were finished. During the meeting on 21 July he gestured to the window and asked his colleagues to look at the empty streets. The Nazis had gone; there were no armed patrols. ‘The