Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (23 page)

Nearly 2 million Polish workers were forcibly deported, most of them from the General Government. Once in Germany, they were obliged to wear a violet letter ‘P’ on their arms, and were forbidden to go to church or the cinema, to use public transportation, or to engage in sexual intercourse. Sex with a German could invoke a death sentence. And Germans who showed any kindness could end up in prison. ‘Germans!’ they were told, ‘Poles . . . are beneath all Germans whether on the farm or in the factory . . . Never forget that you belong to the
Herrenvolk
’.
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Sooner or later, word of these outrages filtered back home.

One of three special camps for child detention was set up at Lodz, 45km (thirty miles) from Warsaw. It was filled with ‘young offenders’, who had been caught selling matches or railway coal perhaps, or who had not qualified for Germanization. Up to 12,000 out of 13,000 child detainees at that one camp died.
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Once the ‘Final Solution’ was drawing to a close, the SS turned to the next stage of their racial programme, the clearance of the inhabitants of good agricultural areas designated for colonization by Germans. The pilot scheme was started in November 1942 in the district of Zamost, renamed Himmlerstadt. Varsovians were well aware of the ethnic cleansing practised in 1943–44 in a neighbouring district. SS, Wehrmacht, and Ukrainian auxiliary units descended on defenceless villages. The villagers were given a few minutes to pack and leave, then sorted into four categories. Some were sent to work in the Reich. Some were sent for racial examination. Some were slated for killing. 30,000 children were seized for forcible Germanization. When word spread to Warsaw of trains carrying children to Germany, women lined the tracks offering food and water, and money to bribe the guards for ransoms. 110,000 peasants were removed in two phases. Resisters were shot, their houses burned. Tens of thousands took to the woods. The General Government saw hundreds of Lidices. Further clearances were postponed through German setbacks on the Eastern Front.

News and refugees also reached Warsaw from the
Reichskommissariat Ukraine
and the District of Galicia, where ethnic cleansing on a still grander scale had broken out. Once again, the victims were Polish peasants. The cleansers belonged to a radical branch of the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement, the UPA, encouraged, no doubt, by the Nazis. The savagery matched anything that had been seen in actions against Jewish settlements. Whole families were burned alive in their own homes or churches.
Innocent villagers had their throats cut in the middle of the night. Men, women, and children were axed to death, decapitated, and mutilated. Catholic priests were specially targeted. Babies were butchered, pregnant mothers bayoneted. The murders topped a hundred thousand, and were largely hidden to the outside world for half a century.
⁴⁸
But they were well known in Warsaw from the accounts of refugees.

The overall effect of Nazi rule, therefore, was to feed the growing impression that the ultimate fate of the ‘Non-Germans’ could well be the same as that of Warsaw’s Jews. If Germany were to lose the war against the Soviet Union, as looked increasingly likely, the Nazis were quite capable of doing what the NKVD had already done in 1941, massacring its slaves and its prisoners before withdrawing. If, on the other hand, Germany were to win the war – which in 1944 was still not impossible – the Nazis would be left in control, and would have all the time in the world to complete the racial reconstruction of their
Lebensraum
.

The number of Jews who survived the clearances of the Ghetto and the Ghetto Rising was larger than is often supposed. The
Encyclopedia Judaica
put it at 15,000 living on the Aryan side in 1944.
⁴⁹
Other estimates are even higher. The Nazi policy of keeping Jews and non-Jews entirely separate had failed. The effect was to make every single Varsovian fully conscious of what the Nazis could do.
⁵⁰

Naturally, no one outside the Nazi leadership knew for certain in 1944 what Himmler and his aides were planning. But in due course, documents and witnesses were to be found showing firstly that the Final Solution was but one stage in a wider programme of racial engineering, and secondly that the worst suspicions of the Poles had been very well grounded. All original copies of the
Generalplan-Ost
seem to have been destroyed, but its contents have been reconstructed, among other things from testimony presented at Nuremberg. It was composed by officials of the RSHA in May 1942, and circulated among SS experts for comment. It contained a precise definition of the
Lebensraum
that was due for repopulation, and made detailed estimates of the number and categories of people to be relocated or eliminated. It named three ‘settlement regions’ –
Ingermanland
(Novgorod and Petersburg), the
Memel–Narev Gebiet
(Lithuania and Bialystok), and the
Gotengau
(Crimea and Dniepropetrovsk) – and a further thirty-six smaller ‘resettlement centres’, including Chenstohova, Zamost, and Lvuv. Only 14 million out of 45 million inhabitants of the
Lebensraum
were to be left untouched. Up to 85 per cent of the 19–20 million Poles deemed
unsuitable for Germanization were destined either for liquidation or for expulsion to western Siberia.
⁵¹

Totalitarian regimes can extract a measure of collaboration from all those who fall into their grasp. They can coerce people to observe deviant norms, to oppose their own best interests, to give support to undesirable goals, and to work for unwanted war efforts. Except for those who physically flee to the woods, everyone is contaminated.

Collaboration, therefore, in the sense of ‘working for the enemy’, does not have the same connotation that applies in free countries or under milder regimes. In Nazi-ruled Warsaw it can only be fairly applied to people who chose to assist the occupiers in ways that could otherwise have been avoided.

Furthermore, the issue of collaboration is complicated by the fact that wartime Poland was subjected to two sets of occupiers – Germans and Soviets – and hence saw two quite separate sets of collaborators. Impartial historians must take this fact into account. They must avoid the pitfall where most Western historiography flounders by regarding ‘collaboration’ with the Nazis as despicable and ‘cooperation’ with the Soviets as desirable. For moral judgements on collaboration/cooperation can only be made after consideration both of the type of regime involved and the particular circumstances of the collaborators. From the moral standpoint, voluntary assistance for mass murderers cannot be easily justified in any circumstances.

The issue becomes still more tangled when it is used to fuel inter-ethnic antagonism. During the war, for example, huge resentment was caused in Poland by the welcome afforded by
some
Jews to the Red Army in 1939, and, by implication, to the murders and deportations that followed. Those events were well documented at the time by highly respected observers such as the courier Karski, and are not in doubt.
⁵²
Yet within a short time they were being used in certain circles to suggest, with no foundation at all, that Jews in general were Soviet sympathizers and hence that all Jews were ‘anti-Polish’. On 5 May 1943, in the middle of the Ghetto Rising, an underground paper produced in Warsaw by the Nationalist Movement printed the following dubious opinion:

With respect to the attitude of Jews to Poland . . . it is evidenced by their behaviour during the Soviet occupation, when Jews regularly
stripped our soldiers of their arms, killed them, betrayed our community leaders, and openly crossed to the side of the occupier. In [a small town not 30km (twenty miles) from Warsaw], which in 1939 was momentarily in the hands of the Soviets . . . Jews erected a triumphal arch for the Soviet troops to pass through and all wore red armbands and cockades. That was, and is, their attitude to Poland. Everyone in Poland should remember this . . .
⁵³

It is not hard to see how the actions of some Jews had been inflated into a stereotypical perception about Jews as a whole.

By the same token, discussions about the actions of
some
Poles during the war have been allowed to inflate to the point where
all
Poles can be perceived as anti-Semitic. This perception is grossly unfair, but it is not uncommon. In the summer of 1941, for example, it was well known in Warsaw that massacres of Jews had begun as soon as German forces and Nazi officials moved into towns and villages recently vacated by the Soviets. It was rumoured that in one or two cases local people had participated. Yedvabne, which lies less than 160km (a hundred miles) from Warsaw, was one such country town. From 1939 to 1941, it had been the scene of murders, deportations and repressions by a Soviet-run militia. On 10 July 1941 it was the scene of a particularly brutal massacre, in which, as is now well documented, a group of locals took part, probably for reasons of collective revenge. It was a shameful event that necessarily gives pause for reflection. But it cannot be used to fuel stereotypical misconceptions about all Poles being incipient Nazi collaborators or, still worse, eager participants in the Holocaust. After all, occupied Poland contained between ten and twenty thousand towns and villages like Yedvabne. The number of reports about massacres with a similar scenario can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
⁵⁴

Nonetheless, the Nazi campaign of genocide against the Jews greatly inflamed the overall climate of fear, anxiety, and anger in the country, where the Nazis had decided to perpetrate the crime. Its special nature and full extent were becoming apparent only gradually. And the name ‘Holocaust’ had not been invented. But it could not fail to disturb the minds of the population. Though the involvement of locals was minimal, and though the killing usually took place behind tight military cordons, most people had a growing realization of what was happening. For Varsovians, the Warsaw Ghetto was evidence enough. And every train that pulled into Warsaw carried passengers who told stories about one
town after another that had been ringed by the SS and from which all the Jewish inhabitants had disappeared. Every Varsovian who made a trip into the countryside would come across these eerie, emptied towns and villages, where half the houses were boarded up or used by squatters, and where the shops and markets had ceased to function. The face of the land was being changed beyond repair. And no respite was at hand. The Holocaust, which reached its peak in the General Government in 1943, was taking place during the years when the German–Soviet War hung in the balance. By 1944, fresh anxieties reared their head. If the Germans recovered and stopped the Soviet tide, the Nazis would turn to the further stages of constructing their
Lebensraum
. If they didn’t, the Soviets would arrive and the NKVD would be given a free hand to restart the appalling murders and deportations that had marked their rule in the eastern provinces in 1939–41.

The Gestapo made wide use of ‘greasers’, informers and extortionists who preyed on the vulnerable. Some of these despicable types were themselves caught in a web of blackmail and exploitation. Others acted purely for money or revenge. But it is quite improper to describe them in ethnic terms, for they included Jews as well as Catholics, and they were as ready to shop a member of the Underground or an illegal trader as they were to sell a fugitive from the Ghetto. The Gestapo had a very long list of ‘wanted’, and a variety of shady or broken individuals were ready to supply their wants.

The police must equally be judged without ethnic bias. For the ‘Blue Police’ on the Aryan side found themselves in a position not totally dissimilar from that of the Jewish Police in the Ghetto. They could not refuse the orders of their German superiors; and they were subject to ferocious discipline. Nor, though bribery was rife, could they easily choose whom to favour. They helped arrange executions in their own community just as they were ordered on occasion to join in the persecution of the Jews. Nonetheless, when given the chance, they were capable of compassion. In one case, a Jewish family living outside the Ghetto under their own name was saved when a ‘blue policeman’ called round one evening and advised them to flee. An anonymous informer had given their address to the Gestapo, and a raid could be expected. The family moved without delay, and was not molested for the rest of the war.
⁵⁵

Very few Varsovians joined the German military. The
Waffen
-SS did not raise volunteers in the General Government, as they did in most other occupied countries, including France, Denmark, Norway, Belgium,
Holland, Hungary, and Ukraine. And the Wehrmacht did not usually attempt to raise Polish recruits, as they did as a matter of course in Silesia or Pomerania. Warsaw’s small pre-war German community was the only substantial source of Varsovians serving in the
Führer’s
armed forces.

From time to time, the Nazis succeeded not only in capturing members of the Underground but also in turning them against their former comrades. Such was the origin of the Kalkstein Affair, when a group of Underground officers were somehow persuaded, apparently without torture, to work for their captors. Louis K. was a young Underground officer of the Home Army (AK), who, after being turned, recruited his fiancée and his brother-in-law to Gestapo service. Their chief catch was none other than the commanding officer of the Home Army, Gen. ‘Arrow’, who was trapped in an SS ambush on 30 June 1943.
⁵⁶

Thanks to their unrelentingly murderous conduct, the Nazis attracted no significant body of voluntary collaborators in the General Government, not even among the anti-Semitic tendency. There was no Polish Quisling. The National Democrats and their fascistic offshoot, the ultra-rightist, illegal pre-war ONR, were fiercely anti-German. They could have no truck whatsoever with a regime which was sworn to sever the ‘eternal bond’ of the Polish nation with the so-called Polish ‘soil’. The sort of figures who had worked with the Germans in the First World War were no longer prepared to do so. Adolf Hitler had no more admirers on the Aryan side than in the Ghetto.