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

the self-serving memoirs that appeared in East and West Germany after the war, one would be forgiven for thinking that the uprising had not happened at all. Even serious histories of the Second World War seem to gloss over the summer and autumn of 1944 on the Eastern Front as if nothing in particular was happening in Poland, and none of the main criminals of the uprising was ever brought to justice. The Germans, of course, had every reason not to want to discuss one of the most terrible crimes of the Second World War, and whereas there are thousands of memoirs of Stalingrad or Kursk, the library shelves are sparse when it comes to Warsaw. At Nuremberg the Nazi defendants fell over themselves to deny and cover up their involvement in the crushing of the uprising. Guderian was one of the most creative. When asked about the order to destroy the city, he said that at times it was ‘very difficult to recognize if an order which we got was against international law … it is also difficult for generals because they didn’t study international law’. Von dem Bach claimed that he had arrived in Warsaw in ‘mid-August’; even in his diary (which was not available during the trial) he admitted that he was already there on 6 August. Reinefarth, too, lied about the date of his arrival so as not to be linked to the massacres he had ordered on 5 August. On 23 September 1946 he testified at Nuremberg: ‘Around 6 August 1944 I met Himmler in Posen … Around 8 August I reported to von Vormann in Warsaw.’ He claimed that not until the 9th did he first set foot on Wolska Street – over a week after his actual arrival.⁵

      The Soviets, too, glossed over their involvement – or lack thereof. Red Army commanders Zhukov and Rokossovsky briefly mention Warsaw in their memoirs, but Zhukov is careful to chide Bór for not having contacted the Soviets before calling for the uprising, and Rokossovsky claims that the Soviet forces were too exhausted to carry on the fight in the summer of 1944. Both almost ignore the uprising itself, hastening on to the conquest of Berlin. Official Soviet histories of the war are no better, maintaining the line that the Red Army had to stop at the Vistula to be re-supplied; even today official histories claim that the uprising was a ‘reckless adventure’ inspired by the British and the irresponsible AK. After the war Stalin imposed a ban on any but approved accounts of the uprising; even the famous author and journalist Vasily Grossman was discouraged from writing about it.

      The uprising was not particularly well known in the West during the war, and any memory of it quickly faded after 1945. Things were hard enough, and people set about rebuilding their lives with little thought to the fate of those now trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Émigré Poles tried to keep the memories of the uprising alive, but their accounts were read largely within Polish circles. The Poles did not participate in the official celebrations of VE-Day in London, despite their valiant contribution to the war. It was easier to forget.

      In Poland the artificial vow of silence imposed on the uprising changed dramatically with the collapse of Communism in 1990. It was as if, having been forced to be silent for so long, a great geyser of memory was unleashed, and the history of the uprising became a focal point of Warsaw life. Statues, monuments and street names commemorating every battalion and leader of the AK sprang up like mushrooms; histories and memoirs abounded; the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising was opened on the sixtieth anniversary of the conflict; re-enactments of famous battles became commonplace on the streets; and there was even a board game to teach children as they played. It was right that the people of the battered city should finally be able to commemorate the history of this terrible period; the annual wreath-laying to the dead of Warsaw on 1 August, and the ensuing minute of silence, during which the whole city stops, is very moving. But the pendulum swung so far that many accounts of the uprising read like hagiographies, in which the AK and its soldiers could do no wrong, and the only things that failed in the uprising were the Western Allies and Stalin. Strangely, in all these accounts there is very little information about the suffering of Warsaw’s civilians, and even less about the activities of the occupying Germans. This book is an attempt to redress the balance.

      It is not intended to be a complete history of the Warsaw Uprising. The fundamental questions which inform the whole are why, at the end of July 1944, when the Germans had virtually abandoned the city, did they suddenly decide to return to it; and why, when the uprising began, did they crush it with such viciousness? This is not a book about what ‘should’ have happened, or what ‘might’ have happened, or what Stalin or the Western Allies ‘could’ have done – it is a story of what actually did happen in the summer of 1944, in particular between the Germans and the Poles. My aim has been to synthesize many different elements of the uprising into a single narrative. I begin with a framework of military and political history in order to put the uprising in context, not only of the relationships between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, but also in relation to the war on the Eastern Front, including the Soviet summer offensive Operation ‘Bagration’, to Hitler’s racial war of extermination, and to the coming Cold War. It is impossible to avoid ‘top-down’ history when writing about an event so dom-inated by Hitler and Himmler. These men wielded such enormous power that any order they issued was followed unquestioningly by every level of the Nazi hierarchy; when the order went out in early August to destroy Warsaw and kill all its inhabitants, everyone from Guderian to von Vormann, Reinefarth and von dem Bach fell into line, despite the fact that the policy made no military sense. The behaviour, likewise, of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt is also crucial to understanding the uprising in a broader context.

      But such conventional political and military history alone contains almost no information on the ordinary people whose lives were so affected by these men and their policies. The solution was to weave ‘grassroots’ history into the narrative, adding dozens of personal testimonies and accounts by combatants and civilians alike to show what it was actually like to live through this ordeal. The Nazis practised the deliberate dehumanization of their victims, referring to them as ‘pieces’ and burning their bodies on pyres on the streets of Warsaw to remove the evidence of their violent deaths. I have tried to pay homage to at least some of these people by attempting to bring their stories to life. Because I ask why Hitler and Himmler decided to crush the Polish capital with such irrational brutality, I have also concentrated on the ‘interface’ between Germans and Poles in Warsaw; as a result I looked for testimonies not just from the Poles themselves, but also from others who found themselves in Warsaw that summer, from foreign journalists to SS men guarding the prisoners of the ‘Cremation Commando’, and from Wehrmacht soldiers who longed to get out of the ‘second Stalingrad’ to the troops of the Soviet-led Berling’s Army, who crossed the Vistula only to die in their hundreds under German fire.

      Traditionally, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and the Warsaw Uprising have been treated as two entirely separate events. This is understandable, as the liquidation of the ghetto and the murder of its inhabitants is a unique and terrible crime in history. Even so, the story of Warsaw’s Jewish population did not begin or entirely end with the destruction of the ghetto. It is often forgotten that many Jews were also killed in the bombing of 1939, and that many of those who survived the horrors of the ghetto would die in the 1944 uprising or its aftermath. Throughout, I have tried to trace the fate of some who did manage to survive – Władysław Szpilman and Stanisław Aronson amongst others – in an attempt to show the uniquely perilous existence they led in the wartorn city. I have also tried to show that the Jewish tragedy was also a tragedy for the city of Warsaw in its entirety, and also affected the uprising of 1944. As Gunnar Paulsson put it, ‘Ninety-eight per cent of the Jewish population of Warsaw perished in the Second World War, together with one-quarter of the Polish population: in all, some 720,000 souls … undoubtedly the greatest slaughter perpetrated within a single city in human history’.⁶ My references to Carthage are a deliberate attempt to emphasize the epic scale of the tragedy of this city.

       1

       BYELORUSSIAN PRELUDE

      Scipio finding no sort of discipline or order in the army, which Piso had habituated to idleness, avarice, and rapine, and a multitude of hucksters mingled with them, who followed