Killing Hitler (19 page)

Poland’s sizeable Jewish community, consigned to the lowest category, was separated from the Aryan population and herded into ghettos. There, they were terrorized, starved, and worked to death. By the time the Warsaw ghetto finally closed its gates in November 1940, it contained around four hundred thousand inhabitants, living from hand to mouth and slowly wasting away. As an eyewitness recalled:

One well-known case involved a family from Łódᅼ, which at first numbered eight people. Their entire belongings consisted of two baby strollers: the father pushed three children in one, while the mother kept two others in the top of the second. They rolled the strollers along the curb and sang old Yiddish songs. They had beautiful voices. He sang and she sang, accompanied by six children’s descants. After a while there were only four voices; then there were three, then one stroller disappeared, along with the family’s shoes and what was left of their outer garments. Finally only two people remained. The father pushed while the mother lay in the stroller, singing to accompany her husband. She was thirty-nine years old but looked one hundred.
¹⁸

The Warsaw ghetto was, in effect, a highly efficient killing machine. Containing over 30 percent of the city’s population crammed into barely 2 percent of the city’s area, it soon descended into indescribable squalor. Within a year, it was claiming more than five thousand lives every month through starvation and disease. Yet the Nazis would soon devise even more efficient methods of killing.

In addition to the racial categorization, Polish society was effectively decapitated. Its natural leadership—priests, intellectuals, military officers, and politicians—was to be murdered regardless of racial status. The head of the General Government, Hans Frank, stipulated that Polish intellectuals were to be dealt with “on the spot and…in the simplest way possible.”
¹⁹
Those in any doubt as to the true meaning of his words would soon have had their worst fears confirmed. That November, the entire academic staff of the ancient Jagiellonian University in Kraków was sent en masse to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The following spring, the so-called extraordinary pacification campaign (or
AB Aktion)
accounted for a further six thousand people, including numerous professors, doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Countless more would be sent to Auschwitz or to the notorious Pawiak prison in Warsaw.

The attempt to destroy Polish society was complemented by
a destruction of the Polish economy. Most industrial concerns, shops, restaurants, and hotels were simply confiscated, and the looting of personal and public property became commonplace. To pay for the disruption, meanwhile, taxes were raised and the Polish currency was devalued, thereby setting all Poles at a profound economic disadvantage compared to their German occupiers. Polish manpower was also exploited. The majority was consigned to the labor camps that were quickly established to service the larger industrial centers. There, only the fit and determined could hope to survive any length of time; the sick and the old could hope for little but a swift death. Many thousands were also deported to forced-labor camps in Germany, where they were treated with outright contempt. As one notice admonished: “Germans! The Poles can never be your equals. Poles are beneath all Germans…. Be just, as all Germans must be, but never forget that you belong to the Master Race.”
²⁰

Alongside all of these official measures—the racial selection, the ghettoization of the Jews, the murder of the élites, and the laming of the economy—Poland was also exposed to an astonishing level of casual, everyday brutality. Death was ever-present. As one fifteen-year-old Pole would recall:

I was a veteran. I had seen sudden death at work many times. I had seen…SS Special Forces smash my mother’s skull with a pistol butt…. I had seen people shot like dolls, prisoners murdered with clubs and pitchforks, desperate men throw themselves on high-tension wires. Sudden death was the chequerboard on which we inhabited a few temporary squares. Stunned by it at first, you soon came to regard it as routine.
²¹

Poles could be shot on almost any pretext—black-marketeering, defying the curfew, making anti-German comments, or simply failing to make way for a German soldier on the pavement.
²²
In addition, the principle of collective responsibility was liberally applied. If German soldiers were killed, Polish civilians paid the price. In December 1939, for example, after two German NCOs
had been murdered in Warsaw, 170 innocent civilians were dragged from their homes and shot in reprisal.
²³
Officially, the German authorities stated that one hundred Poles were to be killed for each dead German; however, in some cases, as many as four hundred Poles paid for a single German life.
²⁴

Hostage taking was another German specialty. Roundups of civilians were commonplace, and church congregations and other similar gatherings were frequently targeted. No warning was given, and the victims were selected at random. They would then either be deported as forced laborers or held as hostages to ensure the good behavior of their fellow countrymen. In the event of further transgressions, the hostages would be stripped, handcuffed, and shot. Their bodies would then be loaded onto trucks and taken to the ghetto to be burned. The names of the deceased would then be broadcast in the streets.
²⁵
For many, it was the first news of a missing loved one.

The German governor, Hans Frank, gave a flavor of the sheer brutality endured in occupied Poland when he was asked by a German newspaper correspondent to outline the differences between the occupation regime in Poland and that in the neighboring Czech lands. In reply, he boasted:

I can tell you a graphic difference. In Prague, for example, big red posters were put up on which could be read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself: “If I put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper for such posters.”
²⁶

In private, Frank was more prosaic. He confided to a colleague that his mission was to “finish off the Poles at all costs.”
²⁷

But perhaps the best summary of life in occupied Poland was given by one of those who experienced it at first hand:

Under German occupation, a Pole had no right to own property, no right to participate in any sort of cultural activity, no right to study. He was only to sweat and labour under the supervision of German slave-drivers. Even so he could never feel safe or be sure to survive…. There is no family in Poland that did not suffer, not one that did not mourn somebody dear…. We in Poland never met the so-called “good Germans.” Towards us they were always ruthless tyrants and murderers.
²⁸

The Polish response to all this was to organize the largest and most effective underground network in occupied Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Polish defeat in the September Campaign, underground resistance groups mushroomed in every sphere. Every Polish political party—from the communists to the Peasant Party—sprouted a paramilitary wing, as did the Scouting movement. In addition, wildcat military units formed to continue the fight against the Germans by guerrilla means. One of the most spectacular such units was that established by Major Henryk Dobrzański. Dobrzański, a cavalry officer and former member of the Polish equestrian Olympic team, recruited a three-hundred-strong partisan force to harry supply lines and ambush troops. By the time he was finally killed in battle in the summer of 1940, he had succeeded in tying down eight police battalions and a regiment of SS cavalry.
²⁹
He had also provided a shining example to his fellow Poles and even earned the grudging admiration of his German opponents.
³⁰

In such circumstances, the priority for the Polish government, in exile in France and later Britain, was to bring this plethora of underground groupings under its exclusive command. The task was considerable. As the later commander of the underground recalled:

Every day officers, civilians—once even a monk from a remote monastery—turned up, reporting to me the numbers and other details of their local organisations. Often they had sworn in a few hundred people, mostly youths determined to fight to the last. They were all coming for instructions and orders.
³¹

The integration of the various underground bodies was achieved only slowly, but the groundwork had been laid prior to the defeat in 1939. Immediately upon the fall of Warsaw, the command and legitimacy of the regular Polish army was transferred to the newly formed Polish Victory Service (PVS), a clandestine organization that pledged to carry the fight “into whichever field of activity the enemy might engage.”
³²
After a series of further mergers, the PVS then became the core of the Polish Home Army, known in Polish as the
Armia Krajowa
or AK.
*

The AK was no partisan rabble. As the underground arm of the Polish military establishment, it was an integral part of the Polish armed forces. Its commander in chief was directly subordinate to the Polish commander in chief in exile, and its writ ran throughout occupied Poland. Its high command was organized like any other, with seven departments dealing with everything from logistics and supply to finance, propaganda, and counter-intelligence. Its forces numbered approximately two hundred thousand men, spread throughout the country, and its motto, “Poland fights,” was daubed on countless walls.

Despite the bellicosity of the original statute of the PVS, the later AK demonstrated a more circumspect approach to underground warfare. In the face of merciless and vastly superior opposition, it sensibly shrank from declaring outright war against the occupying forces. Rather, it set itself two goals. The first was the construction of a viable underground army with the long-term aim of fighting to regain independence once the Germans were weakened and in retreat.
³³
The second was the preservation of the “biological substance of the nation.” With the Polish people facing the very real threat of extermination, the underground sought to provide whatever vital civic amenities it could. In this regard, it became a “secret state.”
³⁴

Its most immediate priority, however, was secrecy. Pitted against the Gestapo and SS, the underground was under constant threat of infiltration and destruction. As a result, it soon became a maze of safe houses, passwords, and pseudonyms. Every member had a nom de guerre, ranging from the mundane (Daniel) to the fanciful (Tony Flamethrower).
³⁵
Family names were not used, and no one was supposed to know the precise identity of their superior. An absolute minimum of information was written down: orders were transmitted verbally, messages were memorized. The results could be disconcerting:

I approached a fair girl whose appearance corresponded with [the] description.

“I have come about a drawing…” I began.

“Do you want a water colour or a pastel?”

“No, I have come about drawing lessons.”

After this exchange of passwords, she led us to a room behind the shop, where a liaison girl turned up to fetch us. She took us to our lodging for the night….

Next morning, the same liaison girl came back and took me to a private flat. I had again to wait, all the time without the least idea whom I was actually waiting to see.
³⁶

Once established, the underground quickly found its feet. In the civilian sphere, it provided educational facilities, and through concerts, poetry readings, and drama circles it enabled an unlikely blooming of Polish culture. A thriving underground press was also formed. Every political party and every branch of the “state” soon produced a newspaper of some sort. The very first, titled
Poland Lives
, appeared just five days after the surrender.
³⁷
A precious few titles would even boast an unbroken publication run throughout the occupation.

The continued functioning of the underground depended on sound intelligence and effective communications. The first of these was supplied by a network of informants and by the professional intelligence officers of the underground’s Second Bureau—described by the British as “the best source of information among
the Allies.”
³⁸
It was Polish intelligence, for example, that in 1939 had presented the British with two working replicas of the German Enigma encryption machine, thereby rendering an incalculable service to the Allied war effort. They were also instrumental in locating the top-secret research facility for German V-weapons at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast.
³⁹
Their most famous intelligence coup, however, was the theft of an intact V-2 rocket from a crash site in eastern Poland in May 1944. Their booty was dismantled, photographed, and meticulously examined, long before the German investigators had pinpointed the location of the crash. It was then loaded into crates to be flown to Britain.
⁴⁰
Germany’s secret weapon was no longer a secret.