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

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СКАЧАТЬ so that our pursuers could find no shelter’.⁴⁰ The Soviet condemnation of Model as a war criminal, which led directly to his suicide in 1945, included the ruthless scorched-earth policies he sanctioned during this retreat.

      The Soviet offensive had been so successful that some in the West doubted the reports of Stalin’s triumph. Could it possibly be true that the Germans had suffered nearly half a million casualties, that 150,000 men, including twelve generals, had been captured, and that an astounding seventeen divisions of Army Group Centre had been wiped out in a mere two weeks? Stalin decided to prove to the world what he had done. In Operation ‘The Great Waltz’, named after a 1938 American film based on the life of Johann Strauss, he marched over 50,000 of the Germans captured at Minsk through Moscow. The vanquished had been loaded onto cattle trucks, and many had died from thirst or exhaustion on the way to the massive PoW camps that had been set up outside Moscow. Those who collapsed due to illness or wounds were shot. On 17 July the surviving prisoners were collected in the Central Moscow Hippodrome and the Dynamo Stadium. From there they were marched, led by their generals, through the streets of the city and into Red Square itself. It was a sobering sight. Muscovites watched quietly as the haggard men filed past, their fearful, downcast faces revealing the scale of their defeat. When a handful of young people jeered and threw stones at the prisoners, the Russian-born British war correspondent Alexander Werth noted that they were quickly restrained by their elders. The scene was too grave for that.

      The Germans had been provided with a ration of greasy soup to give them energy, but their now starved digestive systems could not handle the fat, and many were stricken with acute diarrhoea. ‘Thousands of the “Vohna-Plennys”^fn1 were unable to control their tortured bowels,’ and soiled themselves as they trudged through the streets. In an act heavy with symbolism, Stalin had street cleaners follow the columns to sweep up the ‘Nazi filth’.

      As the German prisoners were being marched through Moscow, the Red Army was racing westward at a remarkable twenty-five kilometres a day. Stavka now realized that nothing stood between them and Poland and Lithuania. Despite technical problems, stretched supply lines and exhausted troops, Stalin decided to exploit this momentum, and ordered on 28 June that Kaunas, Grodno, Białystok and Brest-Litovsk be included in Bagration.

      Stavka now issued order no. 220126, directing the 3rd Byelorussian Front to take Wilno, a move which would bring the Soviets deep into Polish Home Army (AK) territory. This presented particular problems for both forces. General Bór-Komorowski, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army, had long planned for uprisings to break out all over Poland in order to aid the Red Army to rid the country of the Nazis. The Poles hoped that by aiding the liberation of their country they would boost their claims to create an independent state after the war, and prove to the world that they were a force to be reckoned with. On 26 June the commander of the Home Army District in Wilno, General Aleksander Krzyżanowski, code-named ‘Wilk’, set out the plans for an uprising for that city. Called Operation ‘Ostra Brama’ – ‘Gate of Dawn’ – it involved the Poles of the AK attacking the German forces just as they were evacuating their last positions.

      Like the Western Allies, the Poles had been amazed at the speed and success of the Red Army’s advance, but they were well-organized and eager to fight to help liberate their country. The area around Wilno was ideal partisan territory. Vast forests and few roads had meant that they had been able to operate there even in the worst years of the occupation, with relatively little interference from the Germans; indeed, their main problems had come from rival Soviet-backed partisans, with whom they competed for matériel and influence. Over 12,000 Home Army men now gathered from Wilno and the surrounding area, but the roads were in chaos, as the city was being evacuated. The AK troops ran into retreating Germans and panicked civilians, or got caught up in local skirmishes; in the end, only about 5,000 of them actually made it to Wilno.

      The German city commander, Luftwaffe Major-General Rainer Stahel, formerly city commander of Rome and a man Hitler trusted, had been ordered to hold Wilno with his 17,000 men. Stahel was not surprised when the Poles attacked on 7 July, just as the first Soviet tanks of the 3rd Byelorussian Front rolled into view. The AK were able to take part of the city centre, but were too weak to dislodge the Germans. As the Red Army began to close in, Model tried to persuade Hitler to change the designation of Wilno as a ‘fortress city’, but even after a series of long and violent arguments Hitler would not back down. Finally Model tricked him into thinking that the besieged troops had run out of drinking water – something Hitler himself had encountered in the First World War. He resentfully allowed a breakout, and Colonel General Reinhardt personally led the 3rd Panzer Army to create a passage through to the trapped garrison. But Stahel got only 3,000 of the 17,000 troops out; the rest were captured or killed, often in bitter hand-to-hand combat that lasted five days. The Germans surrendered on 13 July; the next day a jubilant Krzyżanowski reported to the government-in-exile in London: ‘Wilno captured with great participation of the AK, which is in the city. Great losses and destruction. Relations with the Soviet Army correct at the moment.’⁴¹ The Soviets flooded into Wilno on 15 July; Red Army and AK soldiers linked arms, sang and drank and celebrated in high spirits. The mood did not last. Within hours the NKVD had moved in. Stalin had no intention of allowing the Polish Home Army either political or military power, and had decided that it should be eliminated immediately.

      On 14 July Stalin had issued Directive No. 220145, stating that all members of the Polish underground in Lithuania, western Byelorussia and western Ukraine were to be detained and disarmed. Ivan Serov, Lavrentii Beria’s deputy, who was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers at Katyń in 1940, and who would later crush the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was sent to Wilno to ‘guarantee’ that this was done. ‘Wilk’ and his officers were invited to discuss future ‘terms of cooperation with the Red Army’, but were taken prisoner instead; those who resisted were shot. Beria reported to Stalin that 15,000 AK soldiers had been disarmed, and requested his permission to hand those officers who had ‘operative value’ over to the NKVD, the NKGB and SMERSH; the rest were to go to NKVD camps ‘lest they undertake the organization of numerous Polish underground formations’.⁴² News of this treachery reached General Bór-Komorowski, who was now in the final stages of planning the uprising in the Polish capital. A few days later Beria moved Serov to Lublin to repeat the process there. Serov would then be sent to Warsaw, where he would have most of the AK soldiers or ‘hostile elements’ who fell into his hands either forced to join the Soviet-led Polish 1st Army, or sent to prison camps.⁴³ After the arrests in Wilno, Bór knew that Soviet treachery in Warsaw was a foregone conclusion. It was not a good omen.

      General Stahel, on the other hand, was lionized by Hitler for his defence of Wilno against the advancing Red Army. That most of his troops had been killed was irrelevant: Stahel had held on, and that was enough. Hitler awarded him Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross, and appointed him city commander of Warsaw.⁴⁴ But this was to prove irrelevant. Stahel would spend the beginning of the uprising under siege in the Brühl Palace, and Himmler would wrest control from him soon enough.

       To Kill Hitler

      The second extraordinary event to rock Germany in the summer of 1944, after the shock of Bagration, was the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July. The day after the collapse of Wilno, Hitler had moved back to the stifling atmosphere of Rastenburg in order to be close to the front, swapping the homely Berghof for the miserable Wolf’s Lair, which was situated in what even he called ‘the swampiest, most climatically unfavourable and midge-infested region possible’.⁴⁵ During the flight he had kept the blinds of the aircraft drawn to spare himself views of destroyed German towns. But he made the move believing that ‘As long as the soldiers know I am holding out here, they will be all the more determined in their struggle to stabilize the front.’⁴⁶

      Rastenburg was stifling. It was high summer, and the air was hot and sticky. The air-conditioning whined all day; even the guards wore mosquito-netting СКАЧАТЬ