Hitler's Foreign Executioners (63 page)

It had been a blistering summer. Now as the leaves in Warsaw's battered public parks began to turn, Marshall Rassovetsky's artillery could be heard growling on the eastern horizon. Warsovians apprehensively gazed upwards as Soviet aircraft roared low over the city with increasing frequency. The pressure on the home army leaders was almost unbearable. A decision had to be made – and soon. At 6 p.m. on 31 July, General Bór, after last-minute agonising, sent home army runners out across the city with orders to launch the revolt the following day at 5 p.m. – codenamed W-hour (
wybuch
, outbreak). At W-hour, Warsovians would be leaving work to get home or dashing to cafes and bars, and the city streets would be packed. General Bór hoped that the timing would catch German garrison troops off guard. As the home army messengers, most of them women, fanned out through every district of Warsaw, it was as if a tremendous electrical current hummed and then flashed from point to point. As the clock ticked down to W-hour, streets and trams began brimming with people hurrying homeward in the sultry heat, oblivious to the troglodyte home army units dashing to their positions beneath their rushing feet. A few shop and cafe owners had been forewarned and they slammed shut their doors and shutters.

The Warsaw Uprising began precisely on schedule at 5 p.m. Home army fighters poured out of their hideouts and on to the streets and some 180 strategic German positions came under attack within minutes: bridges, aircraft runways, the railways stations and military and police headquarters. The fighting was intense and bloody. Less than half of General Bór's troops had working firearms. But few hesitated to hurl themselves at the hated occupiers. They threw up street barricades, made from anything that lay to hand: bricks, furniture, street-carts, even typewriters and picture frames. In the first few hours, the Germans reeled. By 8 p.m., three hours after W-hour, a number of landmarks had been captured, including the trophy Prudential high rise, the main post office and some city power plants. Many German strongholds held out, but as darkness fell, the Polish national flag could be seen fluttering fitfully from the prudential tower.

Telex reports from the besieged German garrisons in Warsaw flooded into General Governor Frank's headquarters in Kraków. On the fragile German front line, Warsaw occupied a pivotal position – and the home army had already severed vital supply lines to the German troops who must somehow resist the Soviet onslaught on the eastern side of the Vistula in Praga. German dismay soon metamorphosed into craving for vengeance. The last entry in Frank's diary, made on 5 August, reads: ‘The city of Warsaw is in flames for the most part. The burning of houses is also the surest method of getting insurgents out of bolt holes. After this insurrection and its crushing, Warsaw will be completely destroyed as it deserves.'
⁷

The uprising had alarming implications. The Soviet army might join forces with the Polish rebels and turn a blaze into a conflagration. General Heinz Guderian, the new Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, urged Hitler to immediately remove Warsaw from Frank's jurisdiction and make the city a militarised zone, under Wehrmacht control. Hitler, who was still in a state of shock following Colonel von Stauffenberg's explosive visit to the Wolf's Lair, brushed Guderian's suggestion aside.
⁸
Instead, he summoned his SS chief. The destruction of the Polish people that had begun in 1939 could now be finished once and for all. News of the uprising had enraged Himmler. At a meeting of some very worried Gauleiters in Poznan, he had insisted that the uprising changed nothing: ‘[Racial reconstruction] is irreversible … It is irreversible that we create a garden of Germanic blood in the East.' He then travelled to Rastenburg for a crucial meeting with Hitler, and reported to high ranking SS officers: ‘I should like to tell you this as an example of how one should take news of this kind quite calmly.' ‘The moment is a difficult one,' he had somewhat pointlessly informed Hitler. But, he had continued, the uprising was also ‘a blessing'; an opportunity, above all, to punish the Poles who have ‘blocked us in the East for seven hundred years and stood in our way since the first Battle of Tannenburg'. He vowed to end the ‘Polish problem' forever: ‘In five or six weeks it will all be behind us. Then Warsaw will have been extinguished, the capital, the head, the intelligence of 16 to 17 million Poles.' The only possible remedy was total destruction: ‘Every block of houses is to be burnt down and blown up.' Impressed by Himmler's resolve, Hitler ordered him to crush the uprising with maximum force. Himmler blithely remarked: ‘You may well think that I am a frightful barbarian. I am, if you like, when I have to be.'

Back in Poznan, Himmler summoned his most battle hardened and dedicated SS generals. Heinz Reinefarth had been born in Germany's eastern borderlands and studied law at Jena University, where he had also acquired an impressive collection of duelling scars. Reinefarth had enjoyed a glittering SS career, serving in Bohemia-Moravia and at the Order Police Main Office in Berlin. At the
beginning of 1944, Himmler had appointed him SS and Police Leader (SSPF) in the Reichsgau ‘Wartheland', where he had energetically pursued the task of murdering any recalcitrant Poles. Himmler ordered Reinefarth to form a battle group (Kampfgruppe) and proceed immediately to Warsaw where he would join forces with SS General Erich von dem Bach (formerly Bach-Zelewski). It will be recalled that it was Bach-Zelewski who, in July 1941, had masterminded the destruction of Jewish villages in the Pripet Marshes and who had later been appointed Chief of Bandit Warfare (Chef der Bandenkampfverbände, Ch.BKV) in June 1943. Bach's codename was ‘Arminius', after the Germanic warrior who defeated the Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest. His chubby appearance and professorial manner belied his expertise as a ruthless killer of Jews and ‘bandits'.

In 1959, when German prosecutors finally caught up with Bach-Zelewski, who had been reduced to working as a parking garage guard, he provided a detailed account of the orders he had received from Himmler: ‘captured insurgents must be killed' whether or not they are fighting ‘in accordance with the Hague convention'. Even those ‘not fighting' – the women and children – ‘should likewise be killed'. All Warsaw, Himmler instructed, ‘must be levelled to the ground'. Nothing could be left standing. The razing of Warsaw would provide a lesson for the rest of Europe: ‘then,' Himmler concluded, ‘the Polish problem will no longer be a large problem historically for our children, who come after us, nor indeed for us.' Bach-Zelewski's defence strategy was the most banal. He was just ‘following orders' and, as the court soon discovered, he had taken Himmler's writ as gospel.

To accomplish this monstrous task, Himmler chose his forces with care. He wanted ‘hard men' who would relish the duty. At his headquarters, Himmler set about building an SS army of vicious German criminals who would be set to work alongside vengeful ‘Eastern troops' among them Cossacks, Azerbaijanis and a few Ukrainians. These renegades would join forces with other European SS volunteers, serving in the ‘Wiking' division already stationed on the east bank of the Vistula. Bach's Korpsgruppe (that incorporated Reinefarth's Kampfgruppe) comprised some 8,000 men backed by diverse SS and police battalions.
⁹
Himmler and Bach assigned a vanguard role to the notorious SS ‘Dirlewanger' brigade, commanded by a perverted fanatic called Dr Oskar Dirlewanger. The Sonderkommando Dirlewanger recruited hardcore criminal types dredged from German prisons and army punishment cells: poachers, petty criminals, SS men on punishment duty and a few hundred foreign SS recruits who had ended up on probation. The lugubriously featured Dirlewanger had once been convicted of raping a minor. His good friend SS recruitment chief Gottlob Berger had got the charges dropped. Dirlewanger and his vicious crew had proved their worth to Himmler's ‘bandit war'
on countless occasions, most recently in Slovakia where they had fought alongside the ‘Galizien' SS division. At his trial, Bach-Zelewski defended Dirlewanger's cutthroats: ‘Although their moral qualities left much to be desired, their fighting ability was extremely high. They had nothing to lose and everything to win. They gave no mercy in battle and did not expect any.' He insisted that: ‘To remove [the Dirlewanger Brigade] from the battle would have been nothing less than to give up any idea of an offensive.'
¹⁰
He demonstrated, perhaps inadvertently, that the military ethics of the Dirlewanger Sonderkommando defined the ethical horror of the SS assault on Warsaw: it was by intent a criminal act.

On 3 August, SS General Bach settled into an abandoned Polish mansion at Ożarów, 8 miles west of Warsaw's Old Town. From here, he would direct operations under the blank gaze of long-dead landowners, whose portraits still hung on the dirt-streaked walls. Bach reinforced Dirlewanger's two battalions with an Azerbaijani regiment (the 111th) and added to this poisonous mix three Cossack regiments, two more Azerbaijani battalions, the 22nd SS Cavalry Brigade ‘Maria Theresa', made up of Hungarian ethnic Germans, and the 29th Waffen Grenadier Division RONA, led by a Soviet deserter SS-Oberführer Bronislaw Kaminski. In Warsaw, the RONA men showed no mercy or restraint. How had these men and their brutish commander ended up serving in Himmler's SS?

In a speech made to Waffen-SS troops in Stettin in July 1941, Himmler elaborated on the meaning of ‘struggle of races': ‘beautiful, decent and egalitarian', Germany faced ‘a mixture of races, whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that we can shoot them without mercy or compassion'. He then spelt out his core argument: these races had been ‘welded into one religion, one ideology, that is called Bolshevism' by Jews.
¹¹
In 1941, SS murder squads targeted Turkmen who had survived the Soviet liquidation of independent Turkestan. The Einsatzgruppe reports also refer to the execution of ‘Asiatics' and in Kiev, German physicians used lethal injections to murder ‘Turkmen' and ‘low grade Caucasians'.
¹²

In Germany, powerful voices rose to protest against this plainly short-sighted and murderous policy. Not all ‘Asiatics' were Bolsheviks and Jews, they insisted; many Central Asian peoples were devout Muslims who hated Stalin as much as any decent German. Gerhard von Mende was the most prominent member of this cabal and he would revolutionise German relations with the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Like Alfred Rosenberg, von Mende was a Baltic German and an ardent anti-Bolshevik.
¹³
When I interviewed Gerhard's son Erling in 2007,
he remembered a frequently absent father who dressed with dapper good taste and possessed a mordant sense of humour. Born in 1904 in Riga, Gerhard had seen his father shot dead by Bolshevik soldiers when he had just turned 14. The family escaped to Germany, where Gerhard struggled to get an education; he finally entered Berlin University at a mature 24. His fellow alumni remember a blonde, blue-eyed and strikingly scrawny young man with a wandering left eye. In Berlin, then the holy grail of ‘Oriental Studies', Gerhard's star rose fast. He was an able and hard-working scholar who spoke Latvian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and different Turkic dialects. Germans had long been fascinated by the rich Muslim cultures threaded along the ‘Silk Road' – a term that was invented by a German scholar. German ideologues like Rosenberg and scholars like von Mende despised the so-called ‘Muscovite' centre, which had become, in their view, the headquarters of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism' and looked instead to the more exotic and turbulent Muslim peripheries. For centuries, Imperial Russia had struggled to master their troublesome minority peoples – and the ‘nationalities question' haunted Stalin's nightmares. The tsars had bequeathed to their Soviet heirs two sprawling regions where Russians formed a minority. Central Asia, which we refer to today as ‘the ‘Stans', comprised Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In the mid-twentieth century, geographers simply referred to the entire region as ‘Turkestan' and its Muslim peoples as ‘Turkmen'. The Caucasus (known to linguistic historians as the ‘Mountain of Tongues') had nurtured a profusion of ethnicities and distinct languages: from Christian Georgia and Armenia in the south to the Muslim enclaves of the north, inhabited by fractious and tribal-minded Dagestanis, Kalmyks, Chechens and Ossetians.

In 1936, von Mende published his magnum opus:
Der Nationale Kampf der Rußlandtürken: Ein Beitrag zur nationalen Frage in der Sovjetunion
. He argued that the Turkic peoples (by which he meant Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Tatars) might, with suitable guidance, provide a kind of reserve army of anti-Bolshevik forces. He argued that these fissiparous peoples were unlikely to turn into genuine nation builders. Furthermore, the Soviet Union would need to suffer a ‘severe shock' before any Turkic peoples dared rise up against their ‘Muscovite' oppressors. In 1933, von Mende had joined the Sturm Abteilung (SA) (simply because NSDAP membership lists had been temporarily closed as opportunist ‘March Violets' rushed in their application forms) and began using his SA contacts to make friends with influential party members in the revamped German ministries. Although his son Erling von Mende vehemently denies the fact, his father was an unashamed anti-Semite, denouncing the ‘exceptional Jewification of … the Soviet Union' in a pamphlet and passing on damaging information about a Jewish colleague who worked at
the Reich Education Ministry.
¹⁴
This contempt for Jews infected many of von Mende's academic publications, and no doubt he shared these views with his many Turkic colleagues and friends. Von Mende formed a close bond with a community of Turkic exiles known as the Prometheus Movement – originally founded to rid the Russian Empire of Russians. Based in Paris and Warsaw, the Prometheans had reformed as an anti-Bolshevik faction. They referred to Mende as ‘Lord Protector' – and even during the period of Nazi-Soviet rapprochement he helped his friends set up ‘national committees' with ambitions to become governments in exile.