The Day We Went to War (37 page)

‘So it is now our job to free the Polish people from all this wretchedness and, under our leadership, to make it into one of the happiest nations on earth.’ An SS non-commissioned officer interrogates Polish civilians.

‘Cowards, cowards, they are! You can hardly get them to fight a decent fight. But they are very good at murdering!’ SS men interrogate Polish prisoners of war, Zelechov, mid-September 1939.

After the Poles were forced to surrender due to lack of ammunition, the Germans took a party of foreign correspondents to Westerplatte. Jack Raleigh of the
Chicago Tribune
saw that, ‘Bombs had fallen everywhere . . . the main buildings were total wrecks.’ One large pillbox which had received a direct hit still contained the charred remains of a Polish Army cook, who had been preparing a meal as the bomb fell. Raleigh saw ‘bits of his uniform had embedded themselves in the cement around him. Blackened flesh rotted in the half darkness . . .’ It was, the journalist noted, ‘one of the most gruesome sights I saw during the whole Polish campaign’.

In some places the Poles achieved local successes. But by Sunday, 17 September, the Corridor had been overrun, Polish forces in the River Vistula bend overcome, and the Germans had advanced to the River Bug. On that same day, the Red Army crossed Poland’s eastern frontier on its mission of ‘liberation’. Poland’s position was now absolutely hopeless. To avoid capture, the now-discredited government of Colonel Beck and Marshal Smigly-Rydz fled to Roumania, where they were interned.

On 1 October, Austrian Nazi Wilhelm Prueller wrote in his diary: ‘Smigly-Rydz has declared that the Polish Army is now defeated. He could have made this silly observation on 1
^st
September! For it was a joke to fight against us with horse-drawn wagons. I’ve seen only very few trucks or tanks in the Polish Army, and aeroplanes only at the beginning. And with their weapons they can’t compare with us at all. If their hand grenades were distributed to their whole army, it would mean two hand grenades for thirty-five men! Or take the company which took us prisoner: they had one MG! It was ridiculous!’

Polish civilians forced to flee the burning town of Govorovo, 9 September 1939. During the campaign fifty-five towns and 476 villages were deliberately burnt down by the Germans, and 714 mass executions took place, in which 16,336 Poles were murdered.

‘Here we can destroy all the Jews at one stroke.’ Elderly Jews forced to clear up the rubble in the destroyed village of Piatek. On 13 September, fifty Poles, including seven Jews, were murdered by the Wehrmacht.

Warsaw had held out until 27 September when, after severe bombing and shelling, the city was forced to capitulate. Teenagers Wlodzimierz and Zbigniew Leon hid in a cellar under the family shop at Szpitalna Street. Their apartment had received a direct hit from an artillery shell, which had blown it to pieces. In the streets of the capital, Wlodzimierz saw the corpses of soldiers, civilians and horses lying where they had fallen. The Leon brothers, like most Poles, had been confident that Britain and France, by declaring war, would come to Poland’s aid. Optimistic but false rumours abounded about the RAF bombing Hamburg into ruins, and the French piercing the Siegfried Line. But no aid from the Western Allies was forthcoming. Wlodzimierz Leon and his brother, like the majority of Poles, were over-confident in their own army. This was reflected in the boast that Polish cavalrymen would be tethering their horses in Berlin’s Tiergarten within a few weeks. They were also completely unaware of the strength of Hitler’s armed forces and unprepared for the tactics of
Blitzkrieg
.

After the city’s surrender,
Picture Post
wrote that ‘the defence of Warsaw is the first epic of this war’. The leading hero of that defence was City President, or Lord Mayor, Stefan Starzynski, who made many inspirational radio broadcasts during the siege. In them he both rallied his fellow citizens, and also called on world opinion. In his ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ on 19 September, Starzynski, or ‘Stefan the Stubborn’ as he was nicknamed, declared: ‘These Polish men, women and children are not dying in vain, but they are dying not only for the freedom of their own country, but for the freedom of Europe. We know that our friends want to help us and will help us. Our lives may be in danger now, but our souls are undisturbed. We shall fight to the last man if we have to go down fighting. We shall stand at our post imbued with holy faith in our ultimate victory even in this dark hour. The day will come.’

After Warsaw’s surrender, Starzynski remained in office for four
weeks, before being arrested by the Germans at the end of October 1939 and sent to Dachau concentration camp.

A few days after the city’s capitulation, Hitler held a victory parade in Warsaw. About to mount the saluting stand, the Fuehrer was greeted by General Walther von Reichenau with the words, ‘
Mein Fuehrer! Ich gebe Warschau!
’ (‘My Fuehrer! I give you Warsaw!’). One of the only two American reporters present, Jack Raleigh, noted how Hitler ‘unceasingly saluted file after file of grey clad men’, during the three-hour-long parade. ‘As they clumped past’, observed the newsman, Hitler would, ‘catch the eye of one or two men in each rank . . . I, being just beyond, saw the effect his glances had on the soldiers. The men’s faces fairly beamed . . . the power the man displayed even at a distance of twenty yards . . . was amazing. He seemed automatically to instil courage, loyalty, and an immense pride.’

Driving back to Warsaw airport after that display of German military might, Raleigh came face to face with the reality of the effects of
Blitzkrieg
on Poland’s capital. In the space of one block he saw three women who had been driven mad by the bombing and shelling. ‘No one paid any attention to them as they wandered aimlessly up and down the bread queues giggling hysterically and slavering.’ A little further on, Raleigh saw a ragged teenage boy, his cheeks ‘smudged by great gobs of encrusted dirt rivuleted by streams of tears’, standing by the kerb. Raleigh then saw how ‘suddenly he wrapped both arms about his chest and began sobbing pitiably. He did not cry as a child – rather as a lost soul, eyes wide open, flooded with tears, and great gasping sobs shaking his body. In a final paroxysm he sank to the gutter – where he lay, racking coughs and sighs shaking his small body. None of the passers-by gave him a second look.’

At the airport, Raleigh and his fellow correspondents were each in turn introduced to Hitler. He then told them: ‘Gentlemen, you have seen for yourself what criminal folly it was to try and defend this city. The defence collapsed after only two days of intensive effort. I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war!’

After the fall of Warsaw, the Germans opened soup kitchens to feed the capital’s hungry civilian population. The soup kitchens were filmed in order to demonstrate to the world the so-called generosity of the German occupiers. In fact, Warsaw’s municipal authorities were presented with a bill for the food distributed.

With that, the Fuehrer saluted and made for his plane to fly back to Berlin and deliver his ‘peace offer’ speech to the Reichstag. Raleigh found himself ‘burning with the injustice’ at Hitler’s words. But they obviously struck a chord with
Picture Post
reader J.E. Lake of Winchmore Hill, who wrote to the magazine, ‘You show pictures of suffering citizens of Warsaw and slang Hitlerism. But you do not point out that Hitler warned Warsaw, and that Warsaw could have surrendered when it liked. It was the Poles’ fault that they were bombed so mercilessly. The “heroic” resistance was futile. They could not possibly win. They were throwing away their own lives.’

To which the magazine gave the tart response, ‘So if
we
fight on for justice and freedom in face of a pirate’s threat, it will be
our
fault if we suffer? And are there not times when a man
must
“throw away” his life?’

Organised Polish resistance continued at some places until 5/6 October, and even after that, guerrilla warfare under Major Henryk ‘Hubal’ Dobrzanski went on sporadically until the spring of 1940. Many thousands of Polish servicemen managed to escape to France, where a government-in-exile under General Wladyslaw Sikorski was established at Angers.

Poland itself was divided up between Germany and Russia in a treaty signed in Moscow by von Ribbentrop and Molotov on 29 September. Poland’s western provinces were annexed to the Greater German Reich, while a General Government of Occupied Polish Territories was set up with Nazi lawyer Hans Frank at its head. Russia received nearly 200,000 square kilometres of Polish territory, including the oilfields of Galicia. In both parts of occupied Poland, her conquerors brutally set about trying to wipe out any traces of Polish national identity. ‘East and west the prisoners rolled away into slavery’, many never to return.

A Red Army soldier guarding a Polish Air Force PWS 26 biplane trainer at Porubanek Airfield, Wilno. At the time of the German invasion, the Polish Air Force had 392 serviceable warplanes to the Luftwaffe’s 1941.