The German War (8 page)

Meanwhile, the two Polish armies which had been trapped in the Polish Corridor managed to retreat from the borderlands and form a formidable force under General Tadeusz Kutrzeba. Stuck between German forces holding the north bank of the Vistula and those on the south bank of the Bzura river, Kutrzeba seized his one advantage. The Germans had lost contact with his forces and did not know that he was poised to strike the exposed lines of the 30th Infantry Division, stretched over a 30-kilometre defensive line while the rest of Blaskowitz’s 8th Army continued its march towards Warsaw. It was this thin line that Gerhard M. and his comrades found themselves defending on 10 September. The German command was forced to call off the 4th Panzer Division’s assault on Warsaw and bring it back, redirecting the main force of the German 10th Army and the reserves of Army Group South to shore up their weak lines. By 12 September, the initial Polish attack had petered out. Kutrzeba began to withdraw his Pozna
Army to defend Warsaw, while the Pomorze Army soon found itself encircled, bombarded by German artillery and Heinkel 111 bombers which set the woods protecting the Polish troops ablaze.

While the battle of the Bzura was still raging, the Polish government and military command fell back towards the Romanian border. Their plan to withdraw into the interior was rendered hopeless when the Red Army invaded Poland from the east, on 17 September, finally fulfilling its secret pact with Germany. With nowhere left to retreat to, President Mo
cicki decided to establish a government-in-exile in Paris, and crossed the border into neutral Romania. The Polish survivors of the battle of the Bzura surrendered two days later. The battle had bought the Poles time to strengthen the defences of Warsaw. Abandoned by the government, the capital held out, despite massive German air raids, until 28 September.

Further west, the very speed of the German advance seemed to have left daily life untouched. Accompanied by a non-commissioned officer and six men, Wilm Hosenfeld drove into Pabianice, 10 kilometres south-west of Łód
, looking for quarters for his company. Covered in dust from the unsealed roads, the men jumped out of the car and doused themselves under the pump in a courtyard. What really caught the attention of the children looking on was Hosenfeld getting out his toothbrush. He gave 10 pfennig to the boy who had pumped the water and the Germans wandered off to buy chocolate ice cream from a stand in the park. The next day Hosenfeld went shopping. There was little war damage; just crowds of refugees from the border regions, their thin horses pulling overloaded carts. Many of the women and children tramped barefoot in the dust, carrying heavy bundles, pulling handcarts and pushing prams.
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Hosenfeld and his company were detailed to guard the large prisoner-of-war camp which had been set up in one of the town’s textile mills. Each day, thousands of prisoners arrived. Ethnic Germans, who had served in the Polish Army, were immediately released and sent home. Jewish soldiers were singled out too. ‘The rough treatment outrages me,’ Hosenfeld wrote, but he noted too how the Polish prisoners watched it ‘with relish’, telling anyone who would listen how the Jews had exploited them. Finding no rich Jews in the town, Hosenfeld concluded that since ‘the rich J[ews] have left anyway, the poor Jews have to pay the price’. Pabianice’s Jews were quickly set to work shovelling the earth back into the defensive trenches which had been dug during the previous weeks. Back in the camp, Hosenfeld admired the Polish officers’ impromptu evensong and choral singing and the German Catholic automatically removed his service cap. With 10,000 prisoners crammed into the textile works, food became desperately scarce and the men restive from hunger and overcrowding. Hosenfeld was ordered to make the camp secure, guarding it with barbed wire, watch towers and machine guns.
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The Polish campaign achieved a swift and decisive victory. In September 1939, the German military discovered how to wage a new kind of ‘total’ war, strafing and dive-bombing refugee columns, bombing cities without restriction and carrying out mass reprisals against prisoners of war and civilians, with little or no normative restraint. Speaking to his senior military commanders on 22 August, Hitler had had no compunction in advising them that they were to wage a racial war. His main points are preserved in graphic diary notes: ‘In the foreground the destruction of Poland. Aim is not reaching a particular line, but getting rid of the living reserves . . . Close the heart against sympathy. Brutal action. 80 million [German] people must have their rights. Their existence must be secured. The stronger has the right. Greatest harshness.’
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Ordinary soldiers like Gerhard M. could not know what was said at Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. But it was clear to them that all means served the purpose of rapidly and completely destroying the enemy’s forces. From the outset, there was a veritable flood of reports of ‘snipers’, ‘guerrillas’, ‘bands’ and other civilian ‘irregulars’ operating in the German rear. There was also an ominous lack of details, and the German military police units charged with investigating them generally found the allegations groundless. One army group admitted that in their first encounter with the enemy, ‘the troops easily see spectres and lose their nerve’; for the inexperienced German soldiers, ‘air attacks, a hostile population and irregulars are all bound to increase’ this tendency.
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A week after the invasion began, the respected Berlin daily, the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,
published a long article on the international laws of war, confirming that ‘Germany has the right to take hard but effective measures. In doing so it would be acting within the recognised boundaries of international law.’ Often no more than a few shots fired by Polish soldiers trying to defend a hamlet proved sufficient for the highly strung German troops to take drastic reprisals against the civilian population, as Gerhard M. was candid enough to record. These spontaneous responses were ratified by orders from above. On 10 September, General Fedor von Bock issued an order to Army Group North: ‘If there is shooting from a village behind the front and if it proves impossible to identify the house from which the shots came, then the whole village is to be burned to the ground.’ Other commanders followed suit. It was no more than what Gerhard M. and his comrades were already doing. During the four weeks of fighting and the further four weeks of German military administration in Poland, between 16,000 and 27,000 Poles were executed and 531 towns and villages torched. By the time the generals handed over to civilian administrators on 26 October 1939, they were worrying about how to maintain military discipline over their troops and admitting that their men suffered from a ‘psychosis’ about irregulars. Such fears had not developed in a void. From their derogatory references to ‘Polacks’ to the expectation that they would be shot at from behind, the German armies had been ideologically primed to fight a culturally inferior and cowardly opponent.
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In Pabianice, Hosenfeld noted that the ethnic Germans ‘have a terrible rage against the Poles’. He was increasingly shocked by what he read and heard during the second half of September. All had been well, so Hosenfeld understood, till the beginning of the year and then it had changed, with the onset of anti-German agitation. ‘I have already spoken with so many, you always hear the same thing,’ Hosenfeld wrote to his elder son, Helmut, on 30 September. Trying to gauge human nature, he added: ‘Since seeing the roughness of our own soldiers with my own eyes, I believe in the bestial behaviour of the Poles who were irresponsibly incited.’ Whatever the Germans were capable of, he assumed the Poles would have exceeded.
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It was much worse in the disputed western Polish border regions, like the former Prussian province of the Posen. In the town of K
pno/Kempen, the reservist Konrad Jarausch listened to the tales of ethnic German refugees when he sat down to eat at the German hotel. They told how they had been marched in pairs through Thorn to Łowicz, their wrists tied to each other. Stragglers had been shot. In Łowicz, 5,000 of them were herded into the church square and they could see the machine guns which had been set up to execute them, when German troops liberated them in the nick of time. Despite their bedraggled state, the refugees impressed Jarausch. The thoughtful high-school teacher at a Gymnasium in Magdeburg had ‘never been greeted with a Hitler salute with such shining eyes’. Not a Nazi but a conservative, Protestant nationalist, Jarausch regarded the gesture as their embrace of ‘everything which aligns itself with Germandom’. More ominously, the refugees all blamed the atrocities on ‘the Papists and Jews’.
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During the summer, the Army High Command had agreed that a special task force, or
Einsatzgruppe,
led by the SS Security Service, the SD, should be attached to each of the five invading armies in order to ‘repress all hostile elements’ in the rear. Two further
Einsatzgruppen
were soon added. Fielding no more than 2,700 men, they were far too few and lacked the local knowledge to cope with the tasks they were given: they were rapidly supplemented by 100,000 local ethnic Germans eager to volunteer for service. Even before the battle of the Bzura ended, these local German militias were rampaging through the Polish Corridor in and around Bromberg.
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They were not just looking for ‘revenge’ for the events of the previous weeks and months, but were intent on finishing off the business of the immediate post-war years. In 1919–21, rival militias had fought each other to determine the outcome of ethno-national plebiscites in the border areas of the ‘successor states’ to the old multinational empires: here US President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ had given ample scope for terror and civil war. When the overwhelmingly German town of Konitz, for example, was allotted to Poland after the First World War, all civic and religious institutions in the town had split along national and ethnic lines. Throughout this formerly West Prussian region, religion acted as a proxy for nationality, with Protestants seen as Germans and Catholics as Poles. Although the Jewish communities in West Prussia declared their unshakeable allegiances to ‘Germandom’ as early as 1919, decrying ‘Polish arbitrariness and intolerance’ as the greater threat, their loyalty did not save them two decades later. When German militiamen entered Konitz in 1939, they immediately turned on their Polish Catholic and Jewish neighbours. On 26 September, they shot forty people. The next day a Polish priest was killed, and the day after that the killing extended to the 208 psychiatric patients at the Konitz hospital. By January 1940, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, the local militias had killed 900 Poles and Jews from Konitz and its surrounding villages.
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