Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (17 page)

Capital cities awaiting liberation were dangerous places. Everyone knew that something could erupt at any moment. After years of Nazi Occupation and repression, the populace was straining at the leash for blessed relief, and in some cases for summary revenge. The German garrisons were restless. They could see that the end of the war was coming, that it would come to a close either with an armistice as in 1918, or, if their Nazi leaders were really mad, in one last grand onslaught on the Fatherland. Either way, they had no wish to be killed on the eve of a settlement or in the retreat from some godforsaken corner of a foreign town. For ordinary soldiers at least, there was only one desire – to escape from the mess and to find their way home.

Yet the garrison commanders faced some acute dilemmas. They were trapped between the advancing Allied armies and the resentful population, who could turn on them at any moment. So above all else they needed freedom of manoeuvre – freedom to conciliate the citizens where possible, and freedom to move their troops into defensive positions. In this, they faced a mountain of troubles. As officers of the Wehrmacht, which on 20 July had been shown to harbour would-be assassins of the
Führer
, they were coming under immense suspicion. They would have known about Rommel, who had recently been given the choice between suicide and a show trial. More immediately, they were surrounded by assorted SS units, Nazi Party officials, and Gestapo types who would counsel a fight to the death. Worst of all, they were subject to a High Command that had ceased to respond to reasonable requests. As at Stalingrad, the
Führer
had always preferred a catastrophic stand to a prudent retreat. And his obstinacy was growing. If faced by open rebellion, he was more likely to sacrifice a few European cities, with everyone in them, rather than let his subordinates withdraw and prepare for the next line of defence.

The tensions in such beleaguered cities affected every single man, woman, and child. Secret resistance fighters oiled their weapons, waiting for the signal to rush out and kill Germans. Secret radio operators and encoders stood by to transmit the vital messages. German patrols stood at street corners, looking for suspicious characters, or toured the suburbs looking for illegal gatherings. Gestapo men scoured their lists of unreliable elements and prepared to pounce. Technicians crouched in their direction-finding vans, listening for unauthorized broadcasts. Policemen busied themselves with routine tasks, wondering if they would soon have new superiors. Especially at night, people hung around in their gardens, or leant out of windows, straining their ears for the rumble of distant artillery. Collaborators quaked at the thought of retribution. Women who had slept with the enemy, or worked in army brothels, feared for their lives. Criminals and profiteers racked their brains for new ways of making their ill-gotten gains. Priests witnessed a rise in weddings and confessions. Sellers of sandbags, planks, canisters, jam jars, candles, sugar, and false papers did brisk business. Prisoners and forced labourers, who rotted in cells or in Nazi camps, hoped against hope that they would be able to make a break. Jews in hiding trembled to think that their ordeal might soon be over. Parents worried themselves to distraction, knowing that their teenage sons and daughters had plans of their own. Grandparents rambled on about earlier battles and the passage of other armies. Doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers did their rounds, knowing that their duties might suddenly increase. Patriots and oppressors alike steeled themselves for the moment of truth. They all knew what to expect. First would come the bombers, then the artillery barrage, and finally the tanks. Once someone caught sight of the first Allied tank, it would be obvious that action was about to be joined.

G
ERMANS OF ONE SORT
or another had occupied Warsaw on several occasions. In 1656, the Brandenburgers captured the capital in the course of their alliance with the Swedes during the first Northern War. In 1697, the Saxons arrived in pursuance of their Elector’s elevation to the throne of Poland–Lithuania. The Polish–Saxon Union lasted sixty-six years. In 1795, the Prussians were given Warsaw as part of their deal with the Russians which ended the War of the Third Partition. They stayed for over a decade until driven out by Napoleon’s great drive to the east. In 1915–18, the Kaiser’s army took Warsaw as part of the victorious campaigns against the Russian Empire. Each of these occupations, whether long or short, was an episode that invariably ended badly. For the Varsovians, it helped create an important background consciousness in which the appearance of yet another conquering German army did not cause excessive surprise and in which the latest occupation was not expected to last forever.

On one point, however, most Varsovians and most of the Germans would have agreed. Despite the long periods when Polish–German relations had been harmonious,
¹
both sides had been taught that the wars of the twentieth century were but the latest rounds in an endless, irreconcilable conflict between Teuton and Slav that had been in progress since the Middle Ages. Warsaw, after all, long before it became the capital of Poland, was the historic capital of the Duchy of Mazovia; and it was Conrad, Duke of Mazovia, who had taken the fatal step to call in the Teutonic Knights to help in his war against the ancient Prussians. Instead of honouring their contract and leaving, the ‘Black Crusaders’ stayed on to conquer Prussia for themselves, to Germanize the Prussian people, and to set up a militaristic settler state, which took over the Baltic seaboard, occupied the Vistula delta around Danzig, and blocked Mazovia’s free access to the sea. In German lore, the Knights were heroes; in Polish lore they were villains.

In the era of nationalism, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, German nationalism and Polish nationalism fed off each other and
produced an unprecedented degree of mutual antagonism. German nationalists, who were peacock-proud of the achievements of their new Empire, tended to look down on their eastern neighbours as the inferior relics of a defeated civilization. Polish nationalists of the variety that founded the National Democratic Party of Roman D. both hated and admired the new Germany. They sought to emulate Germany’s social and economic progress. At the same time, they feared German power above all else; and they were prepared to cooperate with backward Russia in order to keep ‘the Teutonic tide’ at bay. Though they commanded probably the largest single opinion group in Poland they were never able to gain political control. Their rivals and opponents, the anti-Nationalists of Joseph Pilsudski, who denounced the slogans of ‘Poland for the Poles’, were always able to forge a dominant coalition against them. Pilsudski’s disciples offered a welcome to Poland’s ethnic minorities, including Jews, put a premium on winning and upholding national independence, and were the heirs of the country’s historic insurrectionary tradition. They feared Russian imperialism above all else; and to this end they were prepared to envisage limited cooperation with Germany and Austria. During the First World War, Pilsudski’s Legions fought on the Eastern Front in the ranks of the Austrian army. But they laid down their arms when pressed to swear an oath of allegiance to the German Kaiser. After the war, when they constituted the leading political force, they developed the ‘Doctrine of Two Enemies’, viewing Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union with equal contempt.

The German Occupation of 1915–18 – which had come to an end only twenty-one years before the Nazis arrived – brought many substantial benefits. In the nature of things, it could not deliver the sovereign, independent Poland for which the most ardent patriots yearned. But by the standards of the day it was markedly indulgent to local sensitivities. It was certainly much more liberal than the preceding Russian Occupation, which had persisted through much of the nineteenth century and which, for many of the decades before the First World War, had been implacably hostile to Polish national politics, to Polish culture, and to the Polish language itself. The Germans of the Kaiser’s vintage, like the British and the French, were not favourable to the Wilsonian ideal of national self-determination. But they sought to exploit the weaknesses of the Tsarist Empire by making concessions to the numerous national-liberation movements in Eastern Europe. They helped create an independent Lithuania, an independent Byelorussia, and an independent Ukraine. In their part of
occupied Poland, after ruling for a time through a military General Government, they restored the autonomous Kingdom of Poland, which the Russians had suppressed fifty years before. They did not have time to appoint a suitably dependent monarch or even to find a permanent regent. But they did set up a ruling Regency Council, which consisted of a Polish prince, a Polish count, and a Polish archbishop; and in the last year of the war, they permitted the regents to establish an executive Council of State or ‘Government’ from a mixture of appointed and elected members. This was not the heavy-handed sort of political exploitation that was practised before 1914 and after 1939.

Warsaw, in particular, had gained enormously. It gained economically, as a major logistical and industrial centre serving the German and Austrian armies on the Eastern Front. It gained politically by ceasing to be a peripheral provincial city and recovered the status of an administrative capital hosting numerous ministries, and even the headquarters of a German-run
Polnische Wehrmacht
. Above all, it gained enormously in the cultural field. The Polish language was restored both in education and in administration. The University of Warsaw was restored as a seat of Polish higher learning. National symbols and festivals, such as the celebrations of the Third of May, were reinstituted. And a serious initiative was taken to introduce Reform Judaism, thereby encouraging Jewish assimilation and easing ethnic tensions. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Jewish population had been multiplying rapidly, both in the Polish lands generally and in Warsaw in particular. Warsaw had long possessed the largest Jewish community in the world, until overtaken by New York, many of whose immigrant Jews hailed from Warsaw. By 1918, Varsovian Jews had passed the 40 per cent mark in the city’s population, and seemed to be heading for an absolute majority.

Thanks to Imperial Germany’s relatively benevolent stance, a group of Polish politicians was able to activate a pro-German movement. Its leading light, Ladislas S.-G., admired German culture, welcomed Germany’s military strength and administrative order, feared Russia, and believed that full national independence was a pipe-dream.
²

The end of German rule in 1918 came about in the most extraordinary way. For most of the preceding months, the German hold on the east looked unassailable. Russia had collapsed into Revolution. German troops were stationed in the Baltic states, in Byelorussia, and throughout Ukraine. The German-run Kingdom of Poland was preparing for a lengthy innings. Its opponents had been defeated. The Polish nationalist leader, Roman D.,
was living in exile in Paris. His lifetime rival, Pilsudski, was incarcerated as a political prisoner in Magdeburg castle, his legions disbanded. And then, with very little warning, the German Empire collapsed. Revolution broke out in Berlin. The Kaiser abdicated. The occupation regimes in Eastern Europe folded. Pilsudski was released from jail by German intelligence officers who shrewdly calculated that he was the only person left to forestall Roman D.’s pro-Western Committee. He arrived in Warsaw on the night of 10/11 November, and assumed power from the Regency Council without a shot being fired. German soldiers, who for four years had manned the most fearsome military machine in Europe, were meekly disarmed on the streets of Warsaw by small boys. No Varsovian could fail to miss this startling lesson about the fickleness of politics and the vanity of power. If it had happened once, it could happen again.

Interwar Warsaw was the capital of a fiercely patriotic Republic. Its patriotism was greatly increased by the thrill of Pilsudski’s victory in August 1920 over the Red Army, which had sought to throttle the infant republic in its cradle. Poles of that generation were naturally impressed by two imperatives. One concerned their duty to defend their country against all comers. This did not seem in the least unrealistic since they had recently seen how both Russia and Germany had feet of clay. The other was to model themselves on the Western powers, whose victory in 1918 was taken to prove not only their superiority but their invincibility.

In barely twenty years, Warsaw expanded mightily, both in population and in built-up area. The number of its citizens rose by 38 per cent from 937,000 in 1921 to 1,289,000 in 1939. The Old City and surrounding districts were refurbished and adorned with patriotic monuments forbidden by the preceding regimes. The Russian Orthodox Cathedral, which had dominated the skyline, was pulled down. New suburbs were developed to accommodate the villas and residences of the burgeoning professional and administrative classes. A new cooperative movement attacked the problems of working-class housing that were exacerbated by the rapid influx of job-seekers from the countryside. Yet despite the stresses and strains, municipal services kept pace with the expansion. Employment was provided by several large industrial enterprises in the metal-working, electro-technical, textile, and food-processing sectors. There was a modern tramway network. A modern infrastructure supplied electricity, gas, and water, and there was a solid system of fine brick-lined sewers.

Warsaw’s ethnic problems centred on the intermittent tensions between Catholics and Jews that had already come into the open before 1914. These tensions should not be exaggerated. It is important not to read history backwards and not to interpret the pre-war scene in the light of subsequent developments. For the coexistence of Catholics and Jews in Warsaw between 1918 and 1939 cannot be characterized in terms of inveterate hostility; and it cannot be seriously analysed merely by recounting the grievances of one side or the other.