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

It was as if they could picture themselves standing in a Warsaw emptied of Germans, waiting on the proverbial red carpet to welcome the Soviets with a gentlemanly salute as a mark of mutual respect, power and goodwill. They had spent the war creating an underground army with the intention of rising up against the Germans, but now the chance had come to win a great political victory over Stalin as well. They did not stop to think that with only a few thousand poorly armed men they had nothing remotely like the military strength to defeat one, let alone two, of the greatest armies ever created should something go wrong; but there was no ‘Plan B’. In those heady July days the AK leaders allowed themselves to believe that the Germans were now all but irrelevant, and that their primary task was to deal with the Soviets, as well as international opinion and the post-war world. The underestimation of German strength would prove to be a terrible and costly error. Worse still, none of the AK High Command could later claim that they had not been told the truth.

      There was, in fact, one important dissenting voice at the AK meeting of 21 July. Colonel Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki, the Chief of Intelligence, was one of the most thoughtful and well-informed of the group that gathered daily to discuss and decide on Warsaw’s fate. He was appalled to hear Rzepecki say that the German army was finished, and quickly gave a summary of the military situation gleaned from intelligence personnel around Warsaw. He said that the German units which had crossed the Bug River in the past few days were remnants of four divisions; two others had been surrounded at Brest, which meant that the German 2nd Army had been destroyed, and that the Germans could not defend Warsaw from an attack from the east. Furthermore, in the south the 4th Panzer Army seemed to have been demolished: ‘The command headquarters of the army has sent unciphered dispatches to all units which means that they have either lost touch with them or the divisions have ceased to exist.’ But then Osmecki made one of the most important revelations of the days leading up to the uprising. ‘There is new unverified information that fresh Panzer units, as yet unidentified, have appeared on the right side of the Vistula in the forests between Wyszków and Jabłonna. Also, parts of the Hermann Göring Division, one of the best units of the German army, have arrived in Żyrardów. According to our intelligence the Hermann Göring Division was withdrawn from the Italian Front and moved by train to Warsaw. The first units have been moved in secret into the forests by Wyszków and Jabłonna.’³⁹

      Osmecki was asked about the significance of the troop movements, but replied that it was too early to tell. Then General Okulicki, who had no way of knowing any more than Osmecki about the German plans, confidently declared that the new forces were of no importance, because the tanks ‘are simply there to protect the retreat of the 2nd Army’. Osmecki countered with a new piece of information. Intelligence had informed him that the ‘German headquarters in Warsaw had demanded from the railway office the immediate dispatch of 2,000 empty wagons to remove factories from the city’. However, rather than simply send the empty trains from Berlin to Warsaw, as might have been expected, the headquarters announced that ‘a few thousand wagons of ammunition and equipment will be sent in the nearest future to Warsaw’ in those same trains. The wagons were to be unloaded, and only then sent back to Germany with the dismantled factories. ‘A few thousand wagons of supplies and ammunition,’ Osmecki said, ‘suggests that the Germans are going to defend themselves.’⁴⁰ Again Rzepecki and Okulicki downplayed the idea, and referred to the attempt on Hitler’s life the previous day, concluding: ‘The German army could fall apart at any time.’

      What they could not yet know was that far from removing Hitler, the attempt on his life had only fuelled his fanaticism and his desire to fight on. In his mind he had been spared for Germany by ‘divine providence’, and in the Wolfsschanze he railed against his generals and wrested even greater control for himself. But General Bór was swayed by Rzepecki and Okulicki, and called a state of alert for Tuesday, 25 July at the very moment Hitler’s luck on the Eastern Front was turning in his favour. Warsaw’s day of reckoning was drawing near.

      During the next meeting, on Sunday, 23 July, Osmecki again tried to warn the AK leadership of the threat posed by the Nazis. He now had more information: ‘There is a concentration of German forces to the north and east of Warsaw which is increasing all the time,’ he said. ‘Now we know that the elite Viking SS and Totenkopf Divisions have come.’ Although the Soviets ‘will ultimately defeat the Germans’, he said, decisions about the uprising ‘should be postponed’ until the Germans had launched their counter-attack in the north.

      This time, Osmecki’s view was supported by the AK’s brilliant Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel Janusz Bokszczanin, who was in Warsaw for a few days. But Okulicki and Rzepecki again declared that the Germans were in ‘disarray’ and were ‘about to leave Warsaw’. Rzepecki even said that although it would be very bad to start the uprising too early, it would be ‘considerably worse’ to start it too late. ‘In the first case we could hope to improve the situation, but in the second we would be condemned for good, and so would Poland.’

      25 July brought a full meeting between Bór and his staff, Jan Jankowski, and General Antoni Chruściel, known as ‘Monter’, Commander of the Home Army units in Warsaw. Born in 1895 of peasant stock, Monter had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and then, after the First World War, in the newly formed Polish army. Józef Rybicki, head of ‘Kedyw’ in Warsaw, found him unsuited to the secret world of the AK. ‘Meetings with Monter were particularly unpleasant,’ he said. ‘He was a typical Zupak – a boorish old soldier – with no understanding of conspiracy and its style of operations.’⁴¹ Monter was ‘always suspicious in an unpleasant way, distrustful and crude … We often exchanged strong words, which I could get away with as a civilian but which would not have been tolerated in the army officers.’ Monter was overly concerned with superficial matters. He cared too much about military protocol and about his personal appearance, having new uniforms made and striking poses in front of onlookers. He was also obsessed by his place in history, and had a highly exaggerated view of his own importance. After the war he wrote to Stanisław Jankowski, who had by then become an architect in Warsaw, to try to get a memorial that he had designed built on one of the most important squares in Warsaw. In the crucial days leading up to 1 August Monter continued to underestimate German strength. His main concern was the weakness of the AK in Warsaw and the location of the Soviets, and he was against starting the uprising until the Red Army was in Praga.

      Osmecki tried to emphasize the importance of German strength and the growing evidence that they intended to counter-attack against the Russians from Wyszków, to the north-west of Warsaw. ‘This would have a huge effect on the capital,’ he said, and again urged that the timing of the uprising be made dependent on the outcome of the Russo–German battle. He left the meeting quite dejected, with the feeling that he had not been heard. It was true. Far from heeding his warnings, Jankowski sent a message to London that the uprising was now imminent: ‘We are ready at any time to launch the battle for Warsaw,’ it said. He even requested that the Polish Parachute Brigade stationed in the UK be sent to Warsaw, and that the airfields near the city be bombed by the RAF. ‘I will report the commencement of the battle,’ he wrote. And that was all. There was no real discussion between Warsaw and London about what was about to happen; Bór and Jan Jankowski were effectively dictating policy to their superiors in the UK.

      As he walked home after the meeting, Osmecki had a vision of the fate that he was sure awaited Warsaw. ‘The sun was going down over Wola and lighting up the windows of the city. I stood on Sienna Street blinded by the reflection. Suddenly I remembered Bokszczanin’s warning: “Believe me, the Russians will not come, they will leave us alone to the Germans.” I was sure he was right, and that the city would once again be destroyed. As I looked at the sun reflected in the windows I saw a vision of fire consuming the city and heard the crackling of flames. This was very brief, but the feeling stayed with me and I had nightmares that night. I woke up in the morning feeling as if I was in a Greek tragedy. We were watching a horrifying drama unfold around us, but we could not avoid it; it was our tragic fate against which we could do nothing.’⁴²

      The point is that the AK could have done something, but they chose not to. Osmecki, Bokszczanin and Colonel Pluta-Czachowski, the AK’s Chief Signals Officer, had warned Bór and the others about the German threat, but they were ignored. ‘Destiny’ had spoken.

      Bokszczanin