World War II Behind Closed Doors (46 page)

Meantime, Prime Minister Mikołajczyk had left Moscow and returned to London. His last meeting with Stalin, in the Kremlin on the evening of 9 August,
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had been bizarre. After Mikołajczyk had told the Soviet leader that his talks over the last couple of days with the Lublin Poles had convinced him that ‘we shall eventually reach an agreement’ he asked Stalin once again for ‘immediate assistance’ for Warsaw. ‘All these struggles in Warsaw seem to me unreal’, replied the Soviet leader. ‘It would be different if our armies were approaching Warsaw, but unfortunately this is not the case’. He went on to explain that ‘a vigorous counter-attack’ by the Germans had prevented the Red Army moving towards the Polish capital. ‘I am sorry for your men who started the battle in
Warsaw prematurely and have to fight tanks, artillery and aircraft with rifles…. What can an airlift do? We can supply a certain quantity of rifles and machine guns but we cannot parachute cannons…. Are you quite sure that arms parachuted from the air will reach the Poles?’ None the less, added Stalin, ‘We must try. How much assistance are you asking for and where would you like us to drop the arms?’ The discussion then moved on to examine the practicalities of the air drop – there was even a suggestion from Stalin that a Soviet officer with a codebook be dropped into Warsaw in order to allow secure communication between the Home Army and the Soviet troops outside.

All of which raises the important question: how is it possible to reconcile Stalin's sudden promise on 9 August to help the Home Army in Warsaw with what actually happened? After all, just four days later the Soviet TASS news agency announced that, since the London Poles had not notified the Soviets in advance of the uprising, all responsibility for what was now happening in Warsaw lay with them. And then, on the night of 15 August, the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, had a meeting at the Kremlin with Soviet Foreign Ministry officials, which led him to send a telegram to the USA saying: ‘The Soviet Government's refusal [to help the uprising] is not based on operational difficulties, nor on a denial of the conflict, but on ruthless political calculations’.
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Finally, on the 22nd, Stalin made his position clear personally in the most strident and insulting terms possible. He described the Home Army as a ‘bunch of criminals’, and stated that the Soviets would refuse to help the Western Allies with the airlift.

So was this change in position just another straightforward example of Stalin's mendacity? Significantly, towards the end of the last meeting with Mikołajczyk, when the Polish Prime Minister asked: ‘Would you tell us something to comfort the Polish hearts at this difficult time?’ (the kind of emotional request that Churchill could always fulfil with immediate and often lachrymose power), Stalin replied: ‘Surely you attach too much importance to words? One should distrust words. Deeds are more important than words’.

And, clearly, as far as ‘deeds’ were concerned, Stalin failed the Poles in Warsaw. But it is possible that when Stalin met Mikołajczyk on 9 August he had still not definitively made up his mind. He had, as yet, given no reply to the Western Allies about his position on the uprising. One possible reading of the history is that between the meeting with Mikołajczyk on the 9th and the TASS statement on the 13th Stalin changed his mind. On 9 August he was inclined to help; by the 13th he had decided he wouldn't.

At first sight such a reading of the evidence seems hardly persuasive. Hadn't Stalin already shown that he wanted to destroy the Home Army? But we must not read back into history what we know subsequently happened. In August 1944 Stalin knew he faced battles ahead with the Western Allies over the composition of any future Polish administration. He had no reason to suppose that the British and Americans would eventually go along with his wishes and recognize a modified version of his puppet government. Maybe he felt that summer that if the London Poles agreed to be subsumed into the Lublin Poles then he had to offer some kind of assistance to the Warsaw Uprising as a kind of primitive quid pro quo.

We can't know for sure. Probably, Stalin was always inclined to act as he did and refuse help to the Poles in Warsaw. That refusal fits a consistent pattern of behaviour, one in which the Soviet leader had demonstrated time and time again his distrust of the Poles and his desire to see the Home Army disbanded and ‘neutralized’. But if Stalin did always intend to dismiss the Poles' request for help, then there was no need for him to go as far as he did in appearing to accede to their requests at the meeting of 9 August. In his first meeting with Mikołajczyk on the 3rd Stalin had been careful only to say he was issuing ‘necessary’ orders about the uprising. And he could have been just as evasive on the 9th.

In any event, by 13 August Stalin had made up his mind, and during August, the crucial period of the rising, the Soviets refused to offer any assistance with the air supplies. And although it is arguable whether or not the Red Army could have reached Warsaw in August – they faced a military setback on the 2nd when the Germans mounted a counter-attack on the front line east of the
city – what is certain is that they could have made the air bridge work much more successfully if they had wanted to. But they didn't. In fact, a statement made by an official from the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to the American ambassador on 18 August made their policy quite clear: ‘The Soviet government cannot, of course, object to English or American aircraft dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, since this is an American and British affair. But they decidedly object to British or American aircraft, after dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, landing on Soviet Territory, since the Soviet Government do not wish to associate themselves either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw’.
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In the light of Stalin's position, Churchill tried to enlist Roosevelt's help in sending a combative reply, only to be told on 26 August by the American President that: ‘I do not consider that it would prove advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you in the proposed message to UJ (Uncle Joe, i.e., Stalin)’.
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Hugh Lunghi, as a member of the British military mission to Moscow, went with the chief of staff of the mission to the Soviet Ministry of Defence to try to get the Soviets to help with the air supplies: ‘I must have gone there with him almost daily for the first two weeks, and afterwards it became sort of hopeless. We realized they were not going to allow either us or the Americans to land on Soviet territory. And this seemed to us the most terrible betrayal, not only of the Poles but of the [Western] Allies. And again, another example of Stalin cutting off his nose to spite his own face, because it meant the Germans would put down this uprising more easily and then the remaining Germans would be available to oppose the Soviet army. So it seemed quite crazy to us, but also terrible. We were fuming. We were absolutely furious in the military mission’.

Of course, there was a sense in which Stalin's action was not ‘cutting off his nose to spite his own face’, because if he stood back and did nothing, then the Home Army, which he openly disparaged, would almost certainly be annihilated. And that is what was now happening inside Warsaw. During August, German SS soldiers, supported by various collaborators – including Cossacks from the
15th Cossack Cavalry Corps – conducted a brutal house-to-house war in the Polish capital.

The most notorious SS unit in Warsaw was led by Oskar Dirlewanger. This ruthless commander (who, although a brute, was certainly not an ignorant brute – he gained a PhD in political science in the 1920s) presided over a gang of ill-disciplined and bloodthirsty soldiers. Most of them were convicted criminals released from captivity and they were already infamous for their mistreatment of civilians in the occupied Soviet Union.

Matthias Schenk,
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a Belgian conscripted into the German army, was eighteen years old when he served as a demolition engineer in Warsaw alongside the SS Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, and the sights he saw haunt him still: ‘Once we went towards a house [which served as a school] with 350 children. We went upstairs and the children came down – children of nine to thirteen years old. They held up their hands [and said]:
“Nicht Partisan!”
[Not Partisan!] and they stood on the steps. And the SS started to shoot. And then the commander said: “No ammunition – use the butt of the gun!” And the blood spilled down the stairs’.

This was not an isolated crime, for the Axis units in the city committed a whole series of atrocities. And many of them witnessed by Matthias Schenk seem purely sadistic: ‘In front of my position was a little girl, ten or twelve years old and she had probably lost her way and stood there frightened. She looked at me, lifted her hand and said “
Nicht Partisan!”
And I asked her to come towards me and then her small head burst in the air. And then [the SS officer next to him] said: “Wasn't that a master shot!”’

In other incidents during the uprising, Schenk witnessed members of the SS demonstrating their warped sense of ‘fun’. Early in the uprising, the unit had ‘adopted’ a Polish boy of about twelve or thirteen who was disabled. He only had one leg and would hobble about on crutches performing menial tasks for the soldiers: ‘One day, they [the soldiers] asked him to come close to them, and I saw that they stuck something into his trouser pocket and then I saw the signal and then they asked him to move very fast – run away. The boy was jumping around and then he flew up
in the air. They had put hand grenades in his pocket. And that's how it was every day in Warsaw…. Women and children were absolutely slaughtered’.

When a hospital held by the Home Army was stormed by the Dirlewanger brigade, he saw, in the aftermath, Polish nurses sexually assaulted by the SS: ‘They tore the clothes off these women and jumped on top of them, held them down by way of force…then they were raped’. That night half a dozen nurses were subjected to a final, gross assault when they were paraded with their hands above their heads in the ‘Adolf Hitler Platz’ in the centre of Warsaw: ‘Then Dirlewanger drove them through the [German] crowd, which cajoled and applauded them to the gallows’.

The appalling actions that Matthias Schenk witnessed were not isolated incidents of brutality, but part of a systematic German plan to crush the uprising. Under the overall command of SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who had previously overseen the shooting of Jews and partisans in the occupied Soviet Union, the Germans targeted civilians as well as members of the Home Army. By 8 August, in one district of the city alone, the Germans had killed at least forty thousand civilians.

The overall atmosphere of the German action against the Poles was captured by the SS commander-in-chief Heinrich Himmler, who later stated that he had told Hitler at the time of uprising that: ‘From the historical point of view the action of the Poles is a blessing…. Warsaw will be liquidated; and this city which is the intellectual capital of a sixteen to seventeen million strong nation that has blocked our path to the east for seven hundred years…will have ceased to exist. By the same token… the Poles themselves will cease to be a problem, for our children and for all who follow us’.
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Himmler's use of language is significant. The phrase ‘the Poles themselves will cease to be a problem, for our children and for all who follow us’ is reminiscent of the ‘justification’ he gave to senior Nazis for the extermination of Jewish children. They had to be killed along with their parents, said Himmler, because otherwise they would only cause problems for future generations of Nazis. (At Poznań in Poland in October 1943, Himmler had said in a
speech to SS officers: ‘We come to the question: how is it with the [Jewish] women and the children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men – so to speak killing or ordering them killed – and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons’.)
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Danuta Gałkowa
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old at the time of the uprising, fighting the Germans in the centre of Warsaw. And on 2 September she experienced personally the brutality of the German troops and their auxiliaries when she took a wounded comrade to the ‘hospital under the lantern’, a makeshift medical station just outside the walls of the old town. Inside the hospital, in the dark basement rooms where the wounded were treated, she heard German auxiliary soldiers arriving outside. A male friend said: ‘Lie down on this stretcher – I'll cover you with a blanket’, and she hurriedly managed to hide as the soldiers stormed into the hospital. The first group of soldiers searched for valuables on the wounded, such as gold crosses and watches, but those that followed – many of whom were drunk – came in and raped the women: ‘It was for them, and I am sorry that I use this word, it was for them entertainment. They were excited by the fact that the people were yelling…. I was in despair, I was afraid only of rape, because I wouldn't be able to live through that’.

Danuta managed to remain concealed, but she ‘heard these voices. “Sister, help!” The tragic voices. “Colleagues, don't abandon me!” I felt helpless’. Inside the cellar the soldiers rampaged around in a frenzy of sadistic sexual excitement. The wounded men of the Home Army who were present could do nothing to protect the women: ‘Normally every boy defends a girl, but here when he was wounded in the stomach or his legs were broken and he had only one hand he could move, what could he do? Nothing!’

All this horror lasted ‘from eight in the morning until it became dark…. When it was getting dark they left’. As they went, the German auxiliaries set fire to the hospital. Danuta then tried to escape, dragging with her the wounded Home Army officer who had protected her on the stretcher: ‘I pulled him to the entrance,
and in front of us there was a fourteen-year-old boy who was also crawling up the steps to the street. And this one enemy soldier, he shot him in the head and the boy just said: “Oh, mamma!” and he fell right in front of our feet’. The German auxiliary then turned his gun on Danuta but it jammed, and in the chaos and smoke she managed to get away and find another door that led on to the courtyard of the hospital: ‘I opened it and there was a terrible sight of executed people – girls without gowns who had been raped and murdered’. In the darkness she made her escape, together with her wounded companion. Eventually, after many adventures, this man who had saved her became her husband.