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

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СКАЧАТЬ the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Soviets. The link between Soviet military conquest and political domination was becoming abundantly clear.

      Zhukov was intrinsically involved in this political element of the war. On 9 July he had met Stalin and Bolesław Bierut, Edward Osóbka-Morawski and Michał Rola-Żymierski, Stalin’s Polish puppets in the PKWN. ‘The Polish comrades spoke of the plight of their people who had been suffering German occupation for over four years,’ Zhukov recalled. He conveniently forgot the fact that the war had started in 1939 with the mutual Soviet–German dismemberment of Poland, and the mass deportation and murder of tens of thousands of Poles. ‘The members of the Polish National Liberation Committee … burned to see their homeland free as soon as possible.’ Stalin decided that the new government was to be based in Lublin.

      This political decision to set up a puppet government in Lublin, the largest city in the area, explains why on 21 July Stavka ordered General Bogdanovitj to move away from his original target of taking Siedlce and turn instead towards Lublin. Stavka issued an order to Rokossovsky to capture Lublin no later than 27 July. This ran counter to military logic, but Rokossovsky was told to put aside his doubts, as ‘the political situation and the democratic independent interests of Poland acutely required this’.⁵⁶

      On 22 July Rokossovsky’s 1st Byelorussian Front broke through against 4th Panzer Army’s weak defence. Hitler had designated Lublin another ‘fortress city’, but the term was virtually meaningless, as it was being held by a mere nine hundred men. Lublin fell on 23 July. On the same day the Soviets liberated the concentration camp at Majdanek. This horrifying place, with its huts and brick crematoria and barbed-wire enclosures, was now virtually empty. The ever-efficient SS, under the direction of camp commander SS Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel, had evacuated 15,000 prisoners in the previous weeks, the last thousand sent on a pitiless ‘death march’ just one day before the Soviets arrived. The Soviets found only a few hundred survivors trapped behind the barbed wire; most of them were severely crippled prisoners of war. They also found gas chambers, stained blue by Zyklon B, which the Germans had not had time to destroy completely. Eight hundred thousand shoes that had been earmarked for shipment to German civilians lay abandoned in a dusty pile.

      Also on 23 July, the Polish underground AK started another uprising, this time in Lwów. This most elegant of cities, with its splendid pastel-coloured neoclassical buildings, once stood at the very furthest reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It had always been a tolerant and welcoming place, with myriad religions and languages. Poles and Ukrainians, Jews and Germans, Russians and Armenians had all lived and traded and argued together there. Before the war its great university had contained one of Europe’s most celebrated faculties of mathematics, including world-renowned figures such as Stefan Banach and Stanisław Ulam.

      On 18 July the German civilian authorities and pro-Nazi Ukrainian troops fled, but Hitler ordered that the Wehrmacht troops hold the city. The Polish Home Army under Władysław Filipkowski was poised to rise up, but waited until the Soviet 29th Tank Brigade of the 4th Tank Army had actually reached the city limits. The Soviet attack on Lwów was part of the hugely successful Lwów–Sandomierz offensive, which in concert with Bagration forced the Germans from Ukraine and eastern Poland. That evening the AK began the uprising, capturing the main railway station and taking the large nineteenth-century fortress, which was still filled with German supplies. The Soviet approach to Lwów had been slowed by the weather and by fanatical German resistance around Brody, but unlike so many units trapped in Hitler’s ‘fortress cities’, the Lwów garrison decided not to stand and fight, and managed to escape on 26 July. The Soviet 10th Tank Corps entered the outskirts of Lwów on 23 July, and were joined by the 4th Guards Tank Army. The city fell to General Konev on 27 July, and the Soviet and AK troops cooperated in mopping up any Germans still left there. The Soviets congratulated their Polish comrades on their mutual victory. But the euphoria was not to last.

      Vyacheslav Yablonsky was a member of an NKVD squad sent into towns and cities to raid Gestapo and SS headquarters before the Germans could destroy evidence of their crimes. Tearing into Lwów in his American Studebaker truck, he and his team of twenty men dodged the retreating Germans and broke into the Gestapo building, where they found documents containing the names of Nazi collaborators and other ‘enemies of the Soviet Union’, as well as all the information the Nazis had gathered on the Polish Home Army. Interrogations began immediately. ‘Informers told us if somebody hated the Soviets and was a threat to us, and we would arrest him … they could be saying bad things about us or just thinking we were bad. Once arrested the normal sentence was about fifteen years of forced labour … we thought it was normal at the time.’⁵⁷ The Soviets arrested over 5,000 Home Army soldiers who had fought with them as brothers in arms only days before. Most were sent to the Miedniki gulag; those who remained were forcibly conscripted into the Red Army, usually into Stalin’s Polish 1st Army. This was treachery on a grand scale, and served as another grave warning to General Bór-Komorowski. The Warsaw Uprising was only days away. But after the arrest of so many Home Army soldiers in Lwów, Wilno and elsewhere, Bór had absolutely no reason to put his trust in Stalin.

      After the fall of Lwów the Germans tried desperately to stop the Soviet advance towards the capital. General von Vormann was told to defend the Vistula’s central portion and the city of Warsaw with the reorganized 9th Army, but this was impossible. There simply were not enough troops. Von Vormann reported to Army Group Centre on 25 July that ‘there is not a single German division between Puławy and Siedlce’ – the area just east of Warsaw – while the road to Warsaw was not manned ‘by a single German soldier’.

      On the same day the 8th Guards Army reached the eastern bank of the Vistula and easily established a bridgehead across the river at Magnuszew, fifty-four kilometres south of Warsaw. The 2nd Tank Army was ordered to turn north towards Brest and Warsaw, so as to cut off the retreating forces from Army Group Centre. Generaloberst Walter-Otto Weiss, leader of the 2nd Army, realized that Brest was lost, and gave the order to try to free the Germans trapped there; the plan worked, but the men, including General-Leutnant Scheller, commander of the 337th Infantry Division, were captured in a second encirclement east of Janów Podlaski. Brest fell on 28 July.

      With the Polish capital within its grasp, Stavka issued new orders to Rokossovsky. These prove without a doubt that despite all later denials, Stalin did originally intend to take Warsaw in August 1944: ‘After the seizure of Brest and Siedlce the attacks on the front’s right flank are to be expanded in the direction of Warsaw and the mission is to, no later than 5–8 August, seize Praga and occupy the bridge emplacement on the Narew’s western bank in the area around Pułtusk and Serock. On the front’s left flank, the bridge emplacement on the Vistula’s western bank is to be seized in the area around Dęblin–Zwoleń–Solec. The seized bridge emplacement shall be used for attacking in a north-westerly direction and thereby neutralize the enemy’s resistance along the Narew and Vistula and thus guarantee the successful crossing of the Narew by the 2nd Byelorussian Front’s left flank and likewise over the Vistula by those armies which are concentrated at the front’s central section. Thereafter, attacks shall be planned in the direction of Toruń and Łódź.’⁵⁸

      It is thus clear that, as of 28 July, the Soviets fully intended to seize the two operational bridges to the north and south of Warsaw, and to encircle the city. Like Buda and Pest, Warsaw is divided in two main parts, with the poorer eastern suburb of Praga separated by the Vistula from the main part of the city on the western side. The Stavka plan never saw the western city as a high-priority military target; rather it was intended to encircle it from the north and south, and to crush the trapped Germans as had been done at so many ‘fortresses’ in the previous weeks. Storming the city centre by pushing front-line troops across the bridges and into the Old Town, which was what the Polish Home Army believed the Soviets would do, was dismissed for tactical reasons from the very beginning. It would have been costly and senseless, not least because the Germans had already mined the bridges over the Vistula. The plan was always to encircle Warsaw in a giant pincer movement; indeed, that is precisely how the city was СКАЧАТЬ