The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (27 page)

government-in-waiting made up of Communists who had the backing and support of the Soviet Union. The Red Army planned to transfer nominal control of liber- ated Polish territory to this body, just as Churchill had prophesied. And there was more: troops of the Soviet secret police—the NKVD—began to hunt down and arrest Polish resistance members in eastern Poland. There could be no question that the Red Army’s inten- tion was to seize control of the country and crush the internal Home Army. The London Poles had only one card left to play. Warsaw must liberate itself from the Germans. Only the physical possession of the capital city would give the Poles leverage against Stalin as they faced off in the final struggle over who would control this country’s destiny.

The tragic story of the Warsaw Rising turns on a para- dox: its chief aim was to forestall the Soviet conquest of the city, yet the rising was crushed because the So- viets failed to do just that. During July, the Red Army had made breathtaking advances against the Germans, and the military commander of the Polish Home Army, General Tadeusz Komorowski (whose underground name was “Bór”), believed it likely that the Soviet troops would be in Warsaw imminently. The military advance of the Soviets would bring about the much- desired defeat of the Germans, yet at the same time,

would assuredly bring Soviet and Communist domi- nation. On July 12, General Bór-Komorowski told his Home Army commanders that the Soviets were “dan- gerous conquerors threatening our cardinal principal, independence.”
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Knowing that his own Home Army soldiers—40,000 at most—were armed with only pis- tols, homemade explosives, and a few machine guns, and would be unable to defeat the Germans in Warsaw single-handedly, Bór-Komorowski had to gauge the right moment to call an uprising against the Germans in the city. By July 25, it looked as if the Germans were starting to withdraw their administrative machinery from the capital, and on July 31, reports came in that Russian tanks had arrived in the eastern suburb of the city, across the wide Vistula river.
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The sounds of fight- ing east of the city could clearly be heard in the capi- tal.
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Without any information about the state of these Soviet troops, their orders, or about the German inten- tions in Warsaw, General Bór-Komorowski ordered his underground army to rise up against the Germans and seize control of the city.
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On August 1, at 5:00 P.M. precisely, Warsaw erupted in a hail of small-arms fire, as 600 small units of Home Army troops assailed the 20,000 German occupiers at strategic strong-points across the city. German units were dug in behind barricades and gun emplacements,

and they suspected an assault was coming. The first day went badly for the resistance. In the historic center of the city, Home Army attacks were repulsed, their loss- es were high, and none of the principal strong-points were captured. But by fortifying and blockading apart- ment blocks, streets, and alleys, the resistance man- aged to carve out three central pockets of territory in the city that they could defend from German assaults. They believed they would only have to wait a few days at most, until the Red Army arrived. And so the front lines in an urban battle of attrition were laid out in the first few days.

Of course, the Germans were infuriated by the upris- ing, and embarrassed at their own inability to quell it immediately. It was essential for them to hold Warsaw, as it was a vital strong-point in the entire Russian- German front. Hitler had declared it a “fortress city.” The commander of the German troops in Warsaw, Gen- eral Rainer Stahel, called for reinforcements, and by August 4, the Dirlewanger Regiment and the Kaminski Brigade—two notorious units of criminals, thugs, and collaborating former Ukrainian soldiers—had arrived on the scene to “pacify” the civilian population. In the western section of the city, called Wola, these units went from block to block herding citizens into the streets and shooting them to death: 30,000 to 40,000

people were shot to death in this manner on or around August 5. Extensive looting by the Dirlewanger Regi- ment accompanied these atrocities, as did the mass rape of the female population and the burning of hos- pitals.
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At the same time, SS Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach assumed command of the rapidly grow- ing German force in the city. Von dem Bach had been hunting down partisan units across Poland and Rus- sia for two years; the Warsaw operation called for his brand of brutality. Aircraft were called in to bomb and strafe Home Army positions; artillery was rained down upon apartment blocks in which Home Army units might be hiding; human shields, formed of terrified ci- vilians, were gathered in front of German tanks as they passed down barricaded alleys. In the contested areas, in which 100,000 people now huddled in cellars, elec- tricity and water were cut off. Food supplies dwindled, and sanitation became impossible. By August 13, von dem Bach had 26,000 soldiers under his command, along with twenty-six tanks, plenty of artillery, and air- craft support. The Germans were severely hampered by fighting amidst urban destruction, huge piles of smoking rubble, narrow streets, and resilient snipers. Thousands of Home Army soldiers managed to survive in this desolation. But their fate was sealed. The rising could not possibly defeat the Germans in a battle for control of the city. Their only hope was to hold out long

enough until their liberators—the Red Army—could save them.
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Ominously, the Russian advance toward Warsaw, so swift and brutal during the previous five weeks, and upon which the hopes of the rising depended, came to a halt on the same day the rising began. There were se- rious military reasons for the Soviet delay, as historian John Erickson has shown. The Germans maintained as many as fifteen armored divisions to the east of War- saw that counterattacked the Red Army in late July and early August, threatening their flank and communica- tion lines. Furthermore, the Vistula river was a major natural obstacle that held back the Russian advance not just at Warsaw but to the north and south of the city. In mid- September, the Soviets took the eastern portion of the city, but could not cross the Vistula.
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In this con- text, the actions of the Home Army—which ordered the insurrection in the absence of any coordination with the Soviets or knowledge of their intentions—may have doomed the rising from the start.
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Yet of course it is impossible to detach this purely military explanation from Stalin’s own cynical reasoning and his profound suspicion, indeed loathing, for the nationalist Poles. During the first two weeks of August, Stalin pretended the uprising was insignificant, a “reckless adventure” for which he bore no responsibility.
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Furthermore, Sta-

lin refused to give permission to the Anglo-American air forces to use Soviet landing fields from which to stage air relief efforts of the beleaguered Home Army. Stalin told the Allied leaders that the Warsaw Rising had been launched by “a handful of power-seeking crimi- nals” and that far from aiding the Polish cause, the up- rising had exposed civilians to danger and slowed the liberation of the city by drawing in enormous German reinforcements.
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The RAF and U.S. Army Air Forces did launch a relief effort from bases in Italy, but the route was long and hazardous and the parachuted supplies often fell into German hands. Only on September 10 did Stalin relent, ordering airdrops to the Home Army in Warsaw and allowing Allied planes limited access to Soviet airfields. But these drops were too late, and de- signed chiefly to inoculate Stalin from the claim that he had done nothing to help the Poles. Stalin was content to see Warsaw burn, and to see the Home Army die with it.

The failure of the Red Army to enter Warsaw in August and September condemned the rising to death. For sixty-three days, the Poles held out against enormous odds, but finally succumbed to superior firepower, hunger, thirst, and wounds. On October 2, General Bór-Komorowski capitulated to the Germans. Fifteen thousand Home Army soldiers had been killed, and as

many as 200,000 civilians of this sprawling city of over a million had died at the hands of the relentless Ger- man bombing and slaughter. Over 200,000 surviving civilians were deported from the city and sent to labor camps or concentration camps. Hitler ordered the city to be razed. Building by building, the Germans pro- ceeded to demolish what remained of Warsaw. By the time of their final withdrawal in January 1945, the Ger- mans had demolished 85 percent of the city. Warsaw had all but ceased to exist.
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There is a coda to this achingly sad tale. One week after the capitulation of the Home Army to the Germans— indeed, precisely at the same moment as thousands of Warsaw residents were being expelled from their city and herded into boxcars for a journey to the camps— Winston Churchill flew to Moscow to confer with Sta- lin about the map of Eastern Europe. For two months, Churchill had fumed and railed against Soviet treach- ery in Warsaw and the failure to help the heroic Poles. Yet suddenly, all seemed forgiven. “ We alighted at Mos- cow on the afternoon of October 9,” wrote Churchill in his memoirs, “and were received very heartily and with full ceremonial by Molotov and many high Russian personages.” That very evening, Churchill and Stalin had their infamous “percentages” conversation about southeastern Europe, through which the Red Army was

marching steadily and relentlessly. Churchill suggest- ed a rough division of the spheres of influence, with the Soviet Union holding “ninety percent predominance” in Romania and 75 percent share of Bulgaria; Britain would have “ninety percent of the say in Greece,” and the two would “go fifty-fifty” over Yugoslavia and Hun- gary. Stalin assented. Churchill seemed immediately embarrassed by his own high-handedness, and of- fered to burn the document on which these percent- ages were written, though Stalin, more comfortable with such methods, suggested Churchill keep it. Even so, the British prime minister knew, as he wrote later, the percentages “would be considered crude, even cal- lous, if they were exposed to the scrutiny of the Foreign Office and diplomats all over the world.”
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Yet when it came to tidying up the Polish question, Churchill displayed no such qualms. He had com- manded the Polish premier, Mikolajczyk, to appear in Moscow and meet his opposite numbers in the Sovi- et-sponsored Polish provisional government. He then hectored Mikolajczyk into agreeing to the Curzon Line, and seemed eager to be cured of what he called “the festering sore of Soviet-Polish affairs.” In the presence of Stalin, on October 13 in a meeting at the Spiridon- ovka Palace, Churchill told Mikolajczyk that “the sac- rifices made by the Soviet Union in the course of the

war against Germany and its efforts toward liberating Poland entitle it, in our opinion, to a Western frontier along the Curzon line.” Britain too, he went on, had fought on Poland’s behalf and now had the “the right to ask the Poles for a great gesture in the interests of Euro- pean peace.” The next day, Churchill threatened Miko- lajczyk: if he did not accept the Curzon Line, Britain would wash its hands of the London Poles. “ We shall tell the world how unreasonable you are…. Unless you accept the frontier you are out of business forever.” When Mikolajczyk continued to refuse to agree to the loss of Poland’s eastern territories to the Soviet Union, Churchill shouted, “ You are callous people who want to wreck Europe. I shall leave you to your own troubles…. You do not care about the future of Europe, you have only your own miserable interests in mind.” And finally, with complete exasperation, Churchill erupted: “I feel as if I were in a lunatic asylum.” Mikolajczyk refused to accept the fait accompli that had been in place since Tehran. He glumly agreed to take the matter back to his cabinet in London; a month later, unable to persuade his colleagues to agree to the Curzon Line, he resigned. Stalin’s Communist proxies now took center stage, pre- pared to govern under Soviet rule. The London Poles would never regain power in postwar Poland, and the nation’s borders emerged from the war precisely as they had been etched into the map at Tehran by Stalin’s

red crayon.
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OMETIME IN THE early fall of 1944, as Operation Bagration gobbled up territory and pushed the Wehrmacht out of the Soviet Union, the Soviet

war correspondent Vasily Grossman jotted down in his notebook the following description of the murder of two German POWs:

A partisan, a small man, has killed two Germans with a stake. He had pleaded with the guards of the column to give him these Germans. He had convinced himself that they were the ones who had killed his daughter Olya and his sons, his two boys. He broke all their bones, and smashed their skulls, and while he was beating them, he was crying and shouting: “Here you are—for Olya! Here you are—for Kolya!” When they were dead, he propped the bodies up against a tree stump and continued to beat them.

As the Red Army penetrated into Germany proper in January 1945, scenes like this became common. Brutal- ity was meted out to Germans on a vast, epic, inhuman scale. The Soviet soldiers descended onto Germany in a tidal wave of rape, beatings, wanton violence, looting,

destruction, murder. Was this officially sanctioned? Some have suggested that this sort of violence was the fault of Ilya Ehrenburg, whose foaming editorials had seemed to give license to such behavior. Certainly, throughout the war, Red Star had given voice to a cho- rus of anti- German diatribes. And Ehrenburg was not beyond whetting the sexual appetites of his Red Army readers. In April 1944 he wrote a piece called “ The Grief of a Girl,” in which he described the pitiful fate of one Zina Baranova, who had been deported from Russia to work as a serving girl in Heidelberg. A group of young German boys, having a party in the home in which she worked, “forced her to strip, then diced for her.” Zina hanged herself afterward. Ehrenburg stoked up the rage of the men who read his newspaper:

Russian soldier! Hero of Stalingrad, Kursk, Korsun, the Dniester—you hear what the Germans did to Zina, a Russian girl? If you know what love is, if you have a heart, you will never forgive this thing. You will go to Heidelberg, too. You will find her violators. You won’t deny yourself the honor of defending a girl’s honor. Thousands of girls are languishing in Germany. They may be saved. They must be saved. They are our flow- ers, our birds, our love. They are awaiting you, soldier of Russia.
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