On August 1, 1944 the Polish resistance, led by the Armia Krajowa (AK, or Home Army)
launched an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw. What followed was 63 days
of urban warfare characterized by an intensity, according to eyewitnesses,
similar to that of Stalingrad about two years before. The powstanie warszawskie led to the deaths of 150,000-200,000 civilians and tens of thousand of combatants. The Germans rampaged in a berserk frenzy
while the Soviets dithered on the other side of the Vistula River. The uprising concluded in a Polish defeat. While a point of great national pride, it remains
a topic of fierce debate in Poland to this very day.
To mark the 60th anniversary of the uprising,
Poland announced the opening of the Warsaw
Uprising Museum on July 31, 2004. The museum is both supremely moving and
super-modern, including a short 3-D film called Miasto Ruin (“City of Ruins”) that shows a digital reconstruction of the
devastation the city experienced during the Second World War. The museum is
located, fittingly enough, in the Wola neighborhood, where the Nazis committed
the mass slaughter of
tens of thousands of people in a matter of days (to be discussed in more detail
below). When I was taking a walking tour of Warsaw, my guide recommended the
museum to my fellow tourists and me, although she added a caveat that the
museum was, in her opinion, too triumphal about the uprising. In her mind, she
explained carefully, the rising should not have occurred at all.
This jived uncomfortably with posters and signs everywhere
dedicated to, when I was visiting, the 70th anniversary of this
iconic event. Graffiti of the logo of the AK – an anchor
(in Polish, Kotwica) formed out of
the letters “P” and “W”, which stand for Polska
Walcząca (“Fighting
Poland”)– was to be found throughout the city, including on the walls
of alleys and under street bridges. A huge commemorative barricade sat on Nowy Świat
(or perhaps the street was at that point Krakowskie Przedmieście, which Nowy Świat becomes as one walks north up the Royal Route), as a reminder of the sacrifices made not only by members of the
AK, but by civilians, who overturned tram cars and used everything they could
get their hands on to serve as barricades against the Germans. This would not
have sit well with my interlocutor on the tour. A young woman, likely in her
late 20s, she expressed her unease at the triumphalism with which the uprising
is remembered. This is understandable: is the death of up to 200,000 civilians and the near-total destruction of a major city ever justifiable, even upon the altar of national dignity? To which a graffiti
artist of the Kotwica might retort:
“Our honor as Poles depended upon rising up against the Germans to show that we
were a people willing to give our all for our capital city. We needed to show
the world that we had fought and died for our country so that it could remain
ours.” This, crudely, sums up the debate over the powstanie.
The
Red Army captured several Polish cities in quick succession in the
summer of 1944: Wilno on July 13, Lublin on July 23, Brześć on July 26, and Lwów
on July 27. When arriving in Lublin, the Soviets set up the Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (PKWN,
or Polish Committee of National Liberation – known informally to history as the
Lublin Committee) – a puppet regime of non-representative Polish Communists,
the majority of whom had spent the war not in Poland under the Nazi jackboot,
but in Moscow in service of the Soviet regime. The Soviets intended the PKWN to
govern Poland rather than the Polish government-in-exile, which operated from
London. Stalin and the Soviet government considered the government-in-exile, as
they viewed all Poles, as bourgeois, if not outright fascist, agents in thrall
to capitalist influence.
For
a brief historical recap: in August 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second
World War, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop met with Soviet
Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow and signed a
nonaggression treaty. According to its terms, the countries would not
interfere with each other’s conquests. In a secret annex, it was agreed that they
would split the territories in between them (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
Belarus, Ukraine) into respective spheres of influence. Poland as far east as the
Bug River would be German; east of that territory would be Soviet. The Germans
invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and the Soviets followed on September 17.
The Soviets, viewing the Poles and especially their officers as a reactionary
body, sought to decapitate this class. In April and May 1940, the NKVD, the
Soviet secret police, shot
some 22,000 Polish officers, including at Katyń. In June 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa,
the invasion of the Soviet Union, putting an end to the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact. The Soviets and the Poles began a queasy alliance of sorts, but when the
Poles would inquire as to the fate of these officers, Stalin would put them off
with excuses. In April 1943, the Germans discovered a mass grave at Katyń outside of Smolensk in the Soviet
Union. While the Soviets insisted that it was in fact a German atrocity
(certainly not hard to believe given German murderousness), the Poles suspected
otherwise; in this tense time, the Soviets abruptly cut off their diplomatic
relations with Poland. The Western Allies, shamefully, demanded that the Poles swallow their pride and accept the Soviet explanation.
This episode sets the stage for the Warsaw
Uprising. Before June 1944, when the Soviets were approaching Polish territory,
Polish politicians and military officers debated the best course of action upon
a German retreat. The consensus was that, should diplomatic relations be
restored, the AK soldiers would reveal themselves to the Red Army; otherwise,
they would remain hidden and await further notice. The commander-in-chief of
the AK, Kazimierz
Sosnkowski, was opposed to an uprising unless if the following held: the
Allies had expressed their support for the Polish position regarding Poland’s
eastern frontier; the Western Allies were on the German doorstep; and the Nazi
government was on the verge of collapse. None of these was remotely the case as the
Soviets approached Polish soil – the Western Allies had not even landed on the
Normandy beaches. Sosnkowski’s deputy, Tadeusz
Bór-Komorowski, was strongly in favor of an uprising. His plan, Operation
Tempest (Akcja Burza), called for
rolling uprisings that would occur as the Germans were retreating and as the
Soviets were approaching. The AK would fight the Germans as they fled westward
and join up with the Soviets, having the knowledge and dignity of having
liberated their cities themselves.
The first operation of Burza was near Kowel (now in western Ukraine) – the AK fought the Wehrmacht and then linked up with the
Soviets. While the Poles did not know it, the Kremlin had passed down an order
in November 1943 that, when the Red Army encountered the AK, it was to
disarm AK fighters and execute anyone who refused to give up his weapons.
This happened to the Polish fighters of the AK in Kowel and Lwów – they fought
the Nazis only to be humiliatingly disarmed, or murdered, by the Soviets.
The Soviets advanced toward the Vistula and
there were rumors that they were close to entering Warsaw. On July 27, the
German governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, ordered
100,000 Polish men and women to report for duty to begin constructing defensive
fortifications. Much to their credit, few Poles showed up. In the face of the
Soviet onslaught, the Germans didn’t bother to enforce their order and Fischer
fled westward (he was later hanged for war crimes at Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison).
Soviet tanks were spotted east of Praga, Warsaw’s easternmost district. This
convinced the head of the AK in Warsaw, Antoni Chruściel, that an uprising was
necessary (he had previously been against the idea). The main purpose was to
have shown that they had fought the Germans, liberated their capital city
themselves, and were therefore able to rule themselves in a postwar world.
And so the uprising began on August 1, 1944.
The Germans responded with utter ferocity. Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler
passed down orders that “Warsaw was to be wiped from the face of the earth, all
of the inhabitants were to be killed, there were to be no prisoners.” Himmler
appointed one of his most trusted men, SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem
Bach-Zelewski, as head of the German troops in Warsaw. Bach-Zelewski's expertise lay in the wholesale slaughter of men, women, and children, mostly Jews, in "anti-partisan" actions in Belarus. Under his command
served Bronislaw
Kaminski, a Russian turncoat, and Oskar Dirlewanger, a child molester and necrophiliac who led a motley crew of criminals known as the Dirlewanger
Brigade. This unit committed atrocities of the utmost savagery in Warsaw.
The initial objective of the Polish resistance
(led by the AK and including fighters ranging from Communists, who were few, to
the nationalist right, who were many, and everything in between, including Jews
of all ideological stripes who had survived the Ghetto) was to secure main
east-west roads in the city and bridges over the Vistula, as well as to capture
the major districts of the city, including the Old Town, the city center, and
other areas. The Poles faced an onslaught of Germans who fought without mercy.
Between August 5-12, the Germans entered the
Wola neighborhood as they pushed west to east toward Warsaw’s city center.
There, they interpreted Hitler and Himmler’s orders quite literally. They went
house to house and murdered everyone they found, regardless of age or sex. Heinz Reinefarth, a
German commander in Wola, later estimated that 10,000 civilians were murdered on August
5 alone. The Germans used human shields as they advanced, making Polish
civilians walk in front of them and having Polish women sit atop their tanks.
During this German rampage in Wola, some 40,000-50,000 civilians were killed.
Later, the Germans impressed Polish civilians in the so-called Verbrennungskommando
Warschau, where they were forced to recover the victims’ bodies and
burn them.
The Polish resistance fought bravely, but were
cut off from food and supplies of weapons and ammunition, and had to rely upon the Allies for assistance. The AK only counted on the uprising lasting for a few days and did not have the supplies necessary for such a long battle. The
inter-Allied politics of the moment ultimately greased the way for the
elimination of the Warsaw Uprising. The Soviets were the obvious Allied power
in the territory proximate to Warsaw. However, they were only able to capture
Praga from the Germans on September 11, about 40 days after the uprising began.
While it is undeniable that the Red Army was exhausted and a rest at the
Vistula was necessary, what is also undeniable
is that the Soviets were not too sad about seeing the destruction of the AK.
The Nazis were, in many ways, doing the dirty work for them. The AK and other
resistance groups would certainly have become the seed of any future
anti-Communist resistance in Poland.
Churchill was adamant about supporting the
Polish fighters in Warsaw. The British, South Africans, and Poles based in
Italy flew air sorties and dropped food, ammunition, and weapons. The Soviets,
however, would not allow the planes to refuel at their air bases, meaning that
the pilots had to make a perilous journey from Bari and Brindisi, Italy to
Warsaw and then back without stopping. Many of them were shot down by the
Germans on their way to or from Warsaw. When Churchill pressed Roosevelt to
help him in trying to convince Stalin to allow them the use of Soviet airbases,
Roosevelt responded, “I do not consider it advantageous to the long range
general war prospect for me to join with you in the proposed message.” The
Soviets had spilled the most blood in defeating the Nazi enemy, fighting
tenaciously in the streets of Stalingrad and the fields of Kursk, and it would
not do to ruffle their feathers. In essence, Poland, for whom the Allies had
gone to war in 1939 (and whose men had fought beside the Western Allies in the skies above Britain, at Monte Cassino, and on the beaches of Normandy, among other places), was sacrificed to placate Stalin (and, to be fair, in
recognition of the geopolitical situation). While the Soviets had excuses
before they reached the east bank of the Vistula in mid-September, these wore
thin and they agreed to make airdrops to the Polish fighters beginning on
September 13. Their fighters had to fly low so as to be accurate in dropping
supplies to the increasingly small areas that the Poles controlled in Warsaw;
unfortunately, this being the case (plus a lack of parachutes), many of the
supplies that were dropped were destroyed upon landing. When the Soviets
finally allowed the U.S. to use its air base in Poltava, U.S. pilots
proceeded to carry out airdrops over Warsaw, only to accidentally drop the vast
majority of the supplies in German hands.
The combination of overpowering German firepower and the lack of food and supplies thinned the areas under Polish
control. In mid-September, after the beginning of Soviet airdrops, the 1st
Polish Army under Zygmunt
Berling, fighting under Soviet command, attempted to cross westward over
the Vistula to link up with the AK. In the face of heavy German fire, only a
few made it to the west bank, and these had to retreat back eastward after a
short while. The Poles were squeezed in the areas of the Old City and Mokotów.
Reading the writing on the wall, the Poles of the Old City escaped the Germans
through the sewer system (indeed, the
image of Polish fighters emerging from manholes became an icon of the uprising – one of the sculptures at the Warsaw Uprising memorial depicts
such a scene).
Bór-Komorowski was eventually forced to
surrender to Bach-Zelewski on October 2. The Polish general demanded that the
AK be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention – that is, to be treated
properly as prisoners of war, something that could not be taken for granted
when it came to the Nazis. The Germans agreed, and they also allowed the
civilian population to leave the city. The civilians were evacuated to a
transit camp at Pruszków, whence tens of thousands were shipped as foreign
laborers to Germany and thousands more to the concentration camps at Auschwitz
and Mauthausen.
Meanwhile, the Soviets treated the Polish
resistance fighters as they had been treating the AK throughout Poland. They
forcibly disarmed them and arrested them as fascist agents and Nazi
collaborators. Sixteen high-ranking AK officers were arrested and put on a show
trial in March 1945 in the so-called Trial of the Sixteen.
Thousands of AK members wound up in the Soviet Gulag and many were never to see
their native Poland again. Meanwhile, at the Yalta Conference, the Allies
agreed to Stalin’s demand that the Soviets retain all of the Polish land they
had acquired in 1939 – that is, in their agreement reached with Nazi Germany.
The Poles were to receive territorial compensation at the expense of Germany in
the west, which is why formerly German cities such as Breslau and Stettin are
today the Polish cities of Wrocław and Szczecin.
Was it worth it? The Poles continue to debate
the uprising 70 years later. Certainly a majority see it as a heroic fight against
tyranny that proved to the world Polish valor and self-respect. The blood of
the martyred gave the Polish people a collective identity and pride that
allowed them to stand strong in the face of the Communist tyranny to come. Bór-Komorowski insisted upon the uprising's rightness until the end of his days. But
there is a large body of those who believe, like my tour guide, that it was not
worth it. After all, the Germans subjected the Poles to a mass slaughter. After
the battle, German Verbrennungs und
Vernichtungskommandos (Burning and Destruction Detachments) systematically
set about destroying the Polish capital. 85-90% of the city was laid waste.
This was to go toward fulfilling Heinrich Himmler’s order of October 17: “The
city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as
a transit station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every
building must be razed to its foundation.”
Was such epic destruction worth it? After all, the Soviets sat on their hands, with a few exceptions, as the Germans went about doing their dirty business. While the purpose of the uprising was to prove that the Poles had earned the right to rule themselves, the Soviets picked up where the Germans left off and subjected the people of Warsaw, and of Poland, to 45 years of oppression and misery. The Polish resistance was not as lucky as the French resistance, which rose up in Paris and was able to link up with the Western allies and get their country back. The Polish leadership, including Bór-Komorowski, knew the Soviet policy of disarming, arresting, and even executing AK fighters elsewhere in Poland - why would Warsaw be different? Perhaps it would have been better if the Poles had put down their arms and passively accepted the Soviets, if grudgingly, so as to spare the bloodletting?
Was such epic destruction worth it? After all, the Soviets sat on their hands, with a few exceptions, as the Germans went about doing their dirty business. While the purpose of the uprising was to prove that the Poles had earned the right to rule themselves, the Soviets picked up where the Germans left off and subjected the people of Warsaw, and of Poland, to 45 years of oppression and misery. The Polish resistance was not as lucky as the French resistance, which rose up in Paris and was able to link up with the Western allies and get their country back. The Polish leadership, including Bór-Komorowski, knew the Soviet policy of disarming, arresting, and even executing AK fighters elsewhere in Poland - why would Warsaw be different? Perhaps it would have been better if the Poles had put down their arms and passively accepted the Soviets, if grudgingly, so as to spare the bloodletting?
While my sympathies lie with the artists of the Kotwica, it is not for me, a non-Pole who is removed
in time, space and identity from these events, to decide whether or not the cost was worth it. But it is an eye
opening, thought-provoking tragedy that makes one question the Manichaean
Good-Evil lens through which we often view the Second World War.