The Rape of Europa (12 page)

For the state museums of Poland the need to store or evacuate their holdings was a particularly cruel blow. Warsaw, Cracow, and Katowice were still working out the problems of installation in the brand-new museums being designed to receive the reorganized national collections, much of which had been recovered from Russian confiscation only in the early twenties. Warsaw Castle, the residence of the President of Poland, and the Wawel Castle in Cracow had been splendidly restored and furnished thanks to state expenditure and private donations. Reluctantly, curators returned to the construction of packing cases. Museums close to the German border sent things eastward, but Warsaw itself was considered quite safe; there, objects were simply put in the storage areas.

This was perhaps the wisest decision from the curatorial point of view, when one considers the extraordinary peregrinations of the 136 magnificent
hangings from Arras known as the Jagellonian tapestries, which had decorated the castle at Cracow. The series, depicting animal and biblical themes, had been commissioned by King Sigismund Augustus and given to the nation in 1571. These were evacuated just as hostilities began. By a miracle they arrived eventually in Canada. Count Raczynski, the Polish ambassador to London at the time, described just how:

They arrived at the Embassy one day in a lorry…. There were seventy items altogether, consisting either of tin boxes or of bundles sewn up in cloth. They had been brought by the Curator and his assistant who, to their great credit, managed to get them away safely, first from Poland and then from France. They first of all shipped them down the Vistula on a barge from Cracow, which was bombed at Kazimiersz near Lublin; they then requisitioned some lorries and drove all the way to Roumania, whence they reached France via Italy. They tried to entrust the treasure to the Pope, but the Vatican refused for fear of political complications, so they took it with them to France. After the capitulation they succeeded, with the help of some Polish refugees, in loading the consignment onto a tramp steamer which brought it to England…. After a short respite, the zealous guardians were ready for a further stage of their journey: they secured a passage in July 1940 on the Polish ship Batory bound for Canada.
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As relations with Germany deteriorated, churches, synagogues, and monasteries dismantled their altars and cleared their treasuries. The Bishop of Pomerania ordered the most sacred objects of his diocese sent to Torun. Exquisite gold vessels, ancient vestments, and altarpieces were piled up in the city museum. In the Church of Our Lady at Cracow, the larger-than-life polychromed figures of the Veit Stoss altarpiece (which had been restored at great cost in 1933) were taken down from their towering framework and also floated by barge down the Vistula to the vaults of the Cathedral of Sandomierz. Smaller parts of the altarpiece were hidden in the University Museum in Cracow. In the midst of all this activity came the devastating announcement, on August 23, of the signing of Hitler’s alliance with Stalin. There was now no place to hide.

Within hours of the German crossing of the Polish frontier on September 1, observers noticed that this campaign seemed to have an extra edge of viciousness. Herman Field, representative of a British Committee for Refugees, fleeing Poland in his car, witnessed the bombing of small rural towns and farms well behind the front lines: “It became so evident that we always stopped our car when planes came overhead,
away
from any farmhouse.”
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Later, members of the United States mission, making their separate
ways to Romania “in order to avoid attracting attention,” saw more of the same. The military attaché noted the unnecessary use of incendiary bombs, which would “seem to indicate [the Germans’] intention to use the presence of railways, highways or telephone lines as a justification of terroristic bombing of the civil population…. The excuse of inaccuracy seems devoid of foundation.” Even Walter Schellenberg, in Poland as intelligence adviser to Himmler, was surprised by the ferocity of destruction in Gdynia:

I was deeply struck by the total destruction of the residential districts, and I could not help asking myself why the Wehrmacht had carried the war into these parts. Until then I had had no real conception of what total war meant.
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The Veit Stoss altar in the Church of Our Lady, Cracow

But just as the Blitzkrieg was no bolt from the blue, this treatment of the Polish people had been carefully drilled into Hitler’s military leaders. In an extraordinary speech to his highest commanders, delivered on August 22 just after he had agreed to sign the Russian treaty, Hitler had urged his forces to “act brutally … be harsh and remorseless,” and had encouraged them to “kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language” in the coming “invasion and extermination of Poland.”
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For Poland was to become Germany’s creature totally. Its culture and peoples were to be eliminated and replaced by Hitler’s “New Order.” The Nazis were only too eager to put their racial theories into actual practice in a place where resistance could be countered with total brutality. They believed without any qualms that Slavs, Christian or otherwise, were so inferior that they could not be considered human. They, along with the Jews, were the “degenerate art” of the human race.

At a conference of SS officers on September 21, before the surrender of Poland and over the objections of the regular Army command, who did not like this threat to their authority, Heydrich and Eichmann drew up instructions for their Einsatzgruppen (Special Forces) to “prepare lists of Polish government leaders, nobility, clergy, professionals, and intellectuals of all types, for a fate as yet unclear.” The Jews would be concentrated in ghettos “for better control.” Hitler was less subtle: in a dinner conversation with Bormann and Hans Frank sometime later, he declared that “the Poles shall be the slaves of the Greater German Reich.”
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Monuments and works of art would be no less required to fit into the new Germanic scheme of things than people. A certain amount of damage and looting are inevitable in the heat of battle, but in this invasion two unusual elements were quickly evident: excessive destruction of Polish monuments, and singularly detailed knowledge of the locations of works of art.

The bombing of the monastery which contained the miraculous picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa and was Poland’s holiest shrine and pilgrimage place could not have been a military necessity, but it was not until his armies reached Warsaw that the depths of Hitler’s hatred of the East were revealed. Irritated by the stiff resistance of the city, which had halted their previously unstoppable advance, the Germans, at one point directed by Hitler himself, poured incendiary bombs and artillery into the oldest parts of the town. The Royal Palace, an excellent target, was badly damaged. Water mains burst; fire control was impossible. Otto Abetz, a member of Hitler’s entourage who later became the Nazi ambassador to France, recalled that the Führer had been reading a history of Genghis Khan during the siege.
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The German armies had done much better in the rest of Poland. The Fourteenth Army, under General List, had arrived at Sandomierz on September 8. Within the week an SS unit had opened the repository containing the Veit Stoss figures and in the first week of October they were sent off to Berlin. The conditions were not ideal. SS Untersturmführer Paulsen, who was in charge of the operation, wrote to a friend:

Transportation of the Veit Stoss figures turns out to be rather difficult. Military movements are a serious hindrance to the ride…. The boxes in the Sandomierz Cathedral are rather large. Four of them weigh eight hundred kilograms apiece. On account of bad road conditions we had to drive without a trailer, and for reasons of security the ride could only be made during daytime.
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The bricked-up vaults containing the Czartoryski collections at Sienawa were immediately betrayed to the Gestapo, who made off with a set of famous twelfth-to-sixteenth-century Limoges enamels, a magnificent collection of goldsmith’s work, coins, invaluable Polish relics, and a large number of engravings by Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, and others.
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The priceless pictures, too hard to move or hide, were, for the moment, left behind.

All through the countryside big houses on the routes of the advance were ransacked. Count Julian Tarnowski was forced to reveal the location of his collection under Gestapo duress, but some were luckier. Countess Matgozata Radziwill had sent her widowed daughter-in-law, Jadwiga Potocki, rushing back to Warsaw from their country house near Bialystok with instructions to retrieve the family jewels from a safe-deposit box. She was dismayed to find the bank in German hands. Nazi officers were methodically opening every box to inspect the contents. When the manager laid the fabulous collection before them, he laughed and said, “What a pity none of this is real!” The Germans did not seem to know the difference, and waved the box on. The delighted manager whispered triumphantly to his client, “We have saved the Countess’s jewelry!”
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The occupation of Poland was well organized even before the final surrender of the Polish armies on October 5. On the seventh the country was divided into several areas. The western districts were annexed to the Reich, while the Russians took the easternmost provinces. The south-central area, which included the major cities of Warsaw, Cracow, and Lublin, became a special entity called the Generalgouvernement. Within this zone some modicum of Polish life would be allowed to continue. Supreme power in this region of some 14 million souls, covering 120,000
square kilometers, was handed over to Hans Frank, Hitler’s former defense lawyer.

In the areas annexed to the Reich, “Germanization” was immediately begun by Heydrich’s Special Forces, under the overall supervision of SS chief Himmler himself, graced since October 9 with the glorious title of Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of German Folkdom. All Poles, Jewish and otherwise, were to be deported and eliminated. Their businesses, houses, villages, and possessions were to be given or sold to ethnic Germans, who would be brought in from the Reich itself or from various German settlements such as those in the Baltic states. Victims
were given virtually no notice of what was to happen. Families were rudely awakened in the middle of the night, often separated, and sent off to the Generalgouvernement in freezing cattle cars, leaving all their possessions behind. After November 15 the SS put the entire rail system at the disposal of the resettlement program. The Nazis had hoped to achieve this initial “cleaning out” within a month. It took nearly six, still impressive considering that more than a million people were displaced. In the following years of the occupation, further tens of thousands were shipped to Germany and various sites in Poland to be used as slave labor.

In all areas the Church was reduced to almost nothing. Hundreds of priests were murdered, and no services, confessions, or hymns were allowed in Polish. Inscriptions on tombs were erased and rewritten in German. All but a minimum of regalia and treasure were removed and the churches themselves were converted to dance halls, hay barns, garages, and storerooms. Roadside shrines were sadistically desecrated. Synagogues were simply burnt or otherwise destroyed, their holy books and scrolls often thrown onto bonfires, and the headstones of Jewish cemeteries were used as paving stones.