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

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СКАЧАТЬ a Soviet prisoner of war camp’.⁴ Morale was low; sometimes new recruits would be caught ‘surreptitiously creeping along the earthworks, their hands held high in the air above the protection of the berm in hopes of receiving a Heimatschuss’ – a wound that would get them home.⁵

      The Russians were now equipped with new automatic weapons, including a short-barrelled submachine gun fitted with a high-capacity drum magazine.⁶ The ordinary ‘Ivan’ was both feared and, in a strange way, admired. The image of the Russian soldier in his loose-fitting brown tunic, with his greatcoat carried even in the hottest weather to be used as a blanket or uniform, and his boots stuffed with straw, had an almost iconic status. The Soviets were admired for other things, too. They could forage and survive on what seemed like almost nothing. General Guderian’s adjutant, Lieutenant Horbach, wrote a letter which was found by the Soviets on his corpse: ‘You ask my opinion of the Russians. I can only say that their behaviour in action is incomprehensible. The most remarkable thing about them, to say nothing of their persistence and cunning, is their incredible stubbornness … The life of the individual means nothing to them.’ Gottlob Biderman, a young Wehrmacht soldier, remembered coming across some Russians while he was searching for fuel: ‘Inside the tanks we discovered three shivering Russian soldiers who had been standing up to their shoulders in oil for several days. Having been convinced that they would be shot immediately upon capture, they had chosen to die in the freezing temperatures or face the prospect of drowning in horrible conditions rather than surrender.’⁷ Another, Harry Mielert, found two Russians hiding in a cellar in a burned-out village: ‘[They] had fed themselves on potatoes … they held out for four weeks, together with two dead bodies, their own excretions, their feet … frozen, and yet they still wouldn’t venture out.’ Erich Dwinger was amazed at the stoicism of the wounded Russians: ‘Several of them burnt by flamethrowers had no longer the semblance of a human face … Not a cry, not a moan escaped the lips of the wounded … The shapeless burnt bundles advanced as quickly as possible [for supplies]. Some half a dozen of them who were lying down also rose, holding their entrails in one hand and stretching out the other with a gesture of supplication.’⁸ But years of anti-Soviet propaganda had done their work, and not all German soldiers felt respect for their adversaries. One, Wilhelm Prüller, wrote that ‘It’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals.’⁹ Another spat that the Russians ‘are no longer people, but wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by Bolshevism in the last twenty years’.¹⁰ Erich Stahl felt that the Soviets’ ‘utter disregard for their own lives, that ruthlessness towards their enemy and themselves alike, was a riddle we had never answered’.¹¹

      The soldiers were frightened of the Russians for other reasons, too. The infantry commanders may not have reached the depths of depravity of a Nebe or a Dirlewanger, but their men were part of the same army, and had participated both directly and indirectly in the murderous policies in the east. ‘On the way we torched all the villages we passed through and blew up the stoves,’ wrote one retreating soldier. ‘We had been ordered to spread devastation, so that our pursuers could find no shelter … When we were issued a supply of cigarettes we lit them on burning houses.’¹² The Wehrmacht soldiers knew they could expect no quarter from the Red Army. Reese, who had left Germany two years before as a perfectly ordinary young man, saw how Russia ‘was turning into a depopulated, smoking, burning, wreckage-strewn desert, and the war behind the front bothered me still more, because those it affected were non-combatants’. Yet he and his colleagues made ‘a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish, got her as drunk as we were’.¹³ In Russia the normal rules of warfare no longer applied: everything was permissible, as long as any criminal behaviour was directed against the racial enemies of Germany. White flags were used to draw Soviet soldiers to their deaths; red crosses on field hospitals were used for target practice. Soviet soldiers retaliated in kind, so that the brutality and depravity spiralled out of control. Atrocities were committed by both sides in a struggle that had sunk into a moral abyss so deep that little came close to it on any other front in the Second World War.

      Despite von dem Bach’s best efforts, partisans were harassing the Germans at every turn. The ‘Banditen’ were hated and feared in equal measure, and the savagery meted out to and by them was terrible. This ‘was not fighting any more, it was butchery. In the course of brief counterthrusts, we found our missing in little pieces. And we didn’t take any prisoners either,’ remembered one soldier. Men found their comrades stripped naked, having been beaten to death or dismembered. One came across a group of dead soldiers whose tongues had been nailed to a table. Generaloberst Georg-Hans Reinhardt, who would replace Model as commander of Army Group Centre on 16 August, in the midst of the Warsaw Uprising, fought the ‘bandits’ ruthlessly in the forests of Byelorussia, killing anyone he caught. ‘There had been no time to bury the bodies. That was why long stretches were overwhelmed by a ghastly stench. It was said that hundreds of dead were lying in the woods. The July heat strengthened the smell of putrefaction. You had to pinch your nose and breathe through your mouth. Some men even put on their gas masks.’ At crossroads it was common to find bodies hanging from posts or branches, their faces swollen and blue, their hands tied behind their backs. Reese remembered coming across such a scene: ‘One soldier took their picture; another gave them a swing with his stick. Partisans. We laughed and moved off.’ But later that night, two scouts disappeared into the woods and never came back, probably killed by ‘bandits’.¹⁴

      ‘Bagration’, the great Soviet summer offensive, has not received the attention given to other battles on the Eastern Front, which is all the more strange as it was without a doubt the single most successful Soviet military operation of the entire Second World War. It also came as a complete surprise to the Germans. Stalin had decided that his attack should not be against Romania, northern Ukraine or the Baltic, but rather should go straight into Byelorussia. His aim was nothing less than the complete encirclement and destruction of Army Group Centre, which was situated in a bulge of occupied territory that jutted into the Soviet Union like an enormous balcony. This was, apart from anything else, the shortest route to Warsaw, and to Berlin.

      On 14 May 1944, Stalin summoned his commanders to formulate a plan of attack. It was the most ambitious task he had yet set for the Red Army, and he assembled an extraordinary team with which to achieve it. One of his greatest strategists was the complex and controversial General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had recently proven himself both at Stalingrad and at Kursk. In his surprisingly high voice for such a bearlike figure, he told Stalin that his 1st Byelorussian Front should attack Bobruisk along both sides of the Berezina River, creating a giant pincer to hit the flanks of 3rd Panzer Army and the 9th Army, and then encircle the 4th Army and destroy it. Stalin, who believed that there should be a single thrust against the German lines, disagreed, and twice sent Rokossovsky out of the room to ‘think it over’. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov tried to convince him to toe the line, but Rokossovsky stood firm, declaring that he would rather be relieved of his command than attack as Stalin wanted him to. After the third discussion Stalin walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. The room froze, with those present convinced that Stalin was about to tear the epaulettes from his shoulders. Instead he smiled. Rokossovsky’s confidence, he said, ‘reflected his sound judgement’, and he was to attack as he wished.¹⁵ Stalin also made it very clear, however, that Rokossovsky would be blamed for any failure.

      Rokossovsky’s defiance revealed great personal courage. This was, after all, a man who had experienced the Terror first hand. The fact that he had been born in Warsaw, to a Polish father and a Russian mother, had made it easy for Lavrentii Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD, to accuse him of being a Polish spy, although in reality Rokossovsky had been targeted because he had openly favoured the innovative military methods of Marshal Tukhachevsky over traditionalists like Semyon Budenny. Arrested in 1937 for allegedly having conspired with another officer to betray the Soviet Union, he was dragged through a ridiculous show trial, during which it emerged that his alleged co-conspirator had been killed in the Civil War twenty years before. ‘Can dead men testify?’ Rokossovsky had asked incredulously. Imprisoned until March 1940, he was repeatedly tortured: his teeth СКАЧАТЬ