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

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СКАЧАТЬ including 3,300 Jews murdered in the Słuck ghetto. Only sixty-five prisoners were taken in the entire operation. Later, when the Soviets exhumed the bodies they found no bullets or spent cartridges lying around. The victims had been burned alive in the barns.

      In this terrible phase of the ‘Bandit War’ few prisoners were taken; indeed, only 3,589 people were taken for slave labour by the Sauckel Commission (in charge of processing forced and slave labourers) in the course of eleven major operations, in which at least 33,378 people were murdered.³⁸ It was straightforward slaughter. Gana Michalowna Gricewicz, who survived the destruction of her village, remembered feeling as if ‘there was no one left in the world, that all had been killed’. The country around Slutsk was turned into a ‘dead zone’: all the people, animals and supplies were removed, and the area torched. Any person found there was to be treated like ‘game’, and shot on sight.

      One of the most deadly ‘actions’ in which Dirlewanger participated was Operation ‘Cottbus’, which started on the morning of 30 May 1943. The attack at Lake Palik saw 16,662 soldiers sent in to push a terrified civilian population in front of them, forcing them to fight with their backs to the water; the death toll was at least 15,000 people.³⁹ Bach’s deputy von Gottberg praised Dirlewanger’s innovation of forcing civilians to walk over minefields: ‘The mine detector developed by the Dirlewanger Battalion has successfully passed the test,’ he crowed.⁴⁰ Von dem Bach was delighted by this new technique, which had ‘sent two to three thousand villagers flying’, he said.⁴¹ It soon became standard practice. Dirlewanger also continued in his sexual abuse of, and by now profitable trade in, women, noting that one group had ‘enjoyed’ catching many girls who had been trapped on the edge of Lake Palik. The victims were gang raped, and then sold to Dirlewanger’s friends. Some were kept in makeshift prisons, to be abused later.⁴²

      Despite his successes in Byelorussia, Dirlewanger’s brutality brought him negative attention once again. Wilhelm Kube reported a massacre in the village of Vitonitsch, complaining that bullet-wounded escapees were climbing out of their pits and seeking help in hospitals and clinics. Kube wrote in a report to Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for Occupied Territories, that in terms of turning the local population against the Germans, ‘the name Dirlewanger plays a particularly significant role, for this man, in the war of annihilation he wages pitilessly against an unarmed population, deliberately refuses to consider political necessities. His methods, worthy of the Thirty Years War, make a lie of the civil administration’s assurances of their wish to work together with the Byelorussian people. When women and children are shot en masse or burned alive, there is no longer a semblance of humane conduct of war. The number of villages burned during sweep operations exceeds that of those burned by the Bolsheviks.’⁴³ Kube’s report was ignored. Dirlewanger was given even more men, this time hardened criminals from Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. In order to impose discipline he had three of them shot in the back of the head in front of their new comrades upon their arrival. All the men knew that they would quickly share the same fate if they did not fall into line; at best they could expect to be sent back to the camps at the first sign of weakness.

      Far from attempting to rein him in, von dem Bach and Himmler rewarded Dirlewanger. His grand residence in the ancient town of Lagoisk was perfect for entertaining. Unlike von dem Bach he was not one for ballet or theatre, preferring a ‘Kameradenschaftliche Abend’ (comradeship evening), for which colleagues would be invited from the area, or flown in on his own Fieseler Storch aircraft. After drinks, the guests would be seated at the large table, the lights glinting off stolen glass and silver. The best pieces were sent to his storage facility near his home at Esslingen, in Württemberg, but there was enough left over to make life at headquarters bearable. To the sound of a gramophone playing songs like Dirlewanger’s favourite ‘Alle Tage ist kein Sonntag’, particularly pretty young women prisoners, specially chosen during round-ups, would be forced to serve the food and wine, and to endure the lurid attentions of the host and his guests. Dirlewanger would invariably get very drunk, and invite his guests to join in the rape, and often the murder, of these women. His officers were permitted to capture women during the partisan sweeps: a unit veteran, Waldemar B, certified that in one case ‘the officers shut up eight women, confiscated their clothing, and in the evening took them to the castle, where they whipped them’.⁴⁴ A company of policemen operating with the unit was in the habit of taking women prisoners and selling them. A radio message sent by Dirlewanger on 11 March 1944 confirmed this trade: ‘The Russian [women] requested by Stubaf. Otto will be captured on Monday and delivered with the next men to go on leave. The price is the same as that fixed by Ostuf. Ingruber in the Lake Palik woods. Price per Russian woman: two bottles of schnaps.’⁴⁵

      Dirlewanger’s last ‘sweep’ in Byelorussia, Operation ‘Kormoran’, took place in May and June 1944. It was never completed. On the night of 19 June the partisans who for so long had been hunted by the Germans set off a massive series of bombs and explosions, which heralded the beginning of the great Soviet summer offensive into Byelorussia. Hundreds of thousands of Germans, Dirlewanger included, would soon be scrambling to get out as fast as they could, as the house of cards collapsed around them. Dirlewanger had spent twenty-eight months in Byelorussia. His next stop was to be Warsaw.

       2

       TO THE VERY GATES OF WARSAW

      Those on the walls joined in the lamentations, knowing nothing, but sensing unmistakably the feeling of a great calamity. (Chapter XIII)

       Bagration

      As von dem Bach and Dirlewanger were slaughtering their way through villages on what would prove to be the final day of Operation ‘Kormoran’, the regular soldiers of Army Group Centre were waiting nervously at the front. It was common knowledge that the Soviets were about to attack, but the troops were convinced that the main thrust would be directed to the south, against Army Group North Ukraine, and that they would be spared. When the young German infantryman Armin Scheiderbauer arrived in Vitebsk on 11 June 1944 he found the Byelorussian front surprisingly quiet. He was sent off to dig trenches, but felt an ominous and overwhelming ‘sense of discomfort’ out amongst the isolated platoons.

      For others the waiting was torture. Willy Peter Reese, a twenty-three-year-old Wehrmacht soldier who would die in the fighting around Vitebsk, described the reality of filling these endless hours: ‘Things and values changed. Money had become meaningless. We used paper money for rolling cigarettes or gambled it away indifferently.’ There was a feeling of impending gloom. ‘Only a few sought intimacy, most drugged themselves with superficialities, with gambling, with cruelty, hatred, or they masturbated … Our comradeship was made from mutual dependence, from living together in next to no space. Our humour was born out of sadism, gallows humour, satire, obscenity, spite, rage, and pranks with corpses, squirted brains, lice, pus and shit, the spiritual zero.’¹

      At times Red Army reconnaissance soldiers dressed in German uniform would penetrate the line. When one soldier shot at and killed some members of such a party he found ‘still clenched in their cold fists the opened razors with which they had planned to silently cut the throats of our sentries’.² At other times loudspeakers would blare at the German ranks from across no man’s land: ‘You are spilling your blood for Hitler. Nothing can save you from the carnage. Break from this army of Hitlerite oppressors, otherwise you will face destruction!’³ These messages were met by bursts of machine-gun fire. In truth, although many Germans feared that the war was lost, ‘it was widely СКАЧАТЬ