Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Within days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the British government began pressuring the Polish government in exile to make peace with the Soviets. For the Poles, the idea of the Soviet Union as an ally was a grotesque oxymoron. Less than two years earlier, Stalin, with Hitler’s secret blessing, had attacked and occupied eastern Poland, annexing roughly half of all Polish territory at almost exactly the same time that the Germans annexed the other half. The Soviets’ treatment of the Poles under their control was nearly as brutal as Germany’s: the American diplomat George Kennan would later call it “little short of genocide.”

  During the twenty-one months that the Soviets dominated eastern Poland, an estimated 1.5 million Polish citizens were taken from their homes and deported in freight trains to Siberia and other Soviet regions. Thousands froze to death along the way or died of starvation and disease. Those who survived ended up in slave labor camps or were dumped onto collective farms. Most were never seen again.

  Like Hitler, Stalin singled out military leaders and other members of the educated Polish elite—government officials, lawyers, landowners, priests, writers, doctors, teachers—for elimination. Indeed, officers of the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB) met regularly with representatives of the Nazi SS to coordinate their twin repressions. In those murderous campaigns, Hitler and Stalin hoped to finish what their predecessors—the tsars, emperors, and kaisers—had begun to do in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: to erase Poland from the face of the earth.

  Among those who disappeared in the Soviet roundup were more than 15,000 Polish army officers, including many in the army’s top field command, who had been taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939. After the Soviet Union joined the Allies, Stalin told the Polish government in exile that he had no idea where the missing officers were. In fact, shortly after their capture, he had ordered them to be murdered. In the early spring of 1940, many of them had been taken in small groups to a clearing in the Katyn Forest, near the southwestern Russian town of Smolensk. There they were forced to kneel at the edge of huge pits and were shot in the back of the head; their bodies were pitched into the mass graves “with the precision of machines coming off a production belt.” This convoy of death continued for more than five weeks.

  The Poles in London would not learn of Katyn until 1943, but they were aware of the grim fate of more than a million other countrymen who had been caught up in the Soviet maw. When Churchill and Anthony Eden pressured them to sign a treaty with Stalin in July 1941 that would pledge military cooperation and restore diplomatic relations between the two countries, the Poles initially resisted.

  Churchill would have none of it. Up to that point, Poland had contributed more to Britain’s survival and the overall war effort than any other declared ally. But much as he valued the Poles’ help, Churchill was unable to see the Soviet-Polish conflict through Polish eyes. The Soviets were now Britain’s valued allies, and he was determined to make Poland acknowledge them as such. “Whether you wish it or not, a treaty must be signed,” Eden informed General Sikorski, who finally acceded.

  One stipulation of the treaty actually turned out to be of great importance to the Poles—and would be of tremendous help to the Allied cause in the years to come. Under the pact, Stalin was required to release all Poles deported to his country. Although in the end he freed only a fraction of them, there were more than enough to form a new Polish army. Looking more like corpses than soldiers, tens of thousands of Poles—emaciated, toothless, many lacking fingers and toes because of frostbite—streamed out of prisons, slave labor camps, and collective farms, all of them heading for makeshift army camps on the Volga River. Their commander there was Polish general Władysław Anders, who had been wounded twice by the Soviets in 1939 and confined to Lubjanka Prison in Moscow for more than a year. In 1942, Anders moved his makeshift army, accompanied by thousands of Polish women and children, from Soviet Russia to the Middle East, where the scarecrow soldiers began to regain their health and to train in earnest. Called the Polish II Corps, they eventually numbered more than 100,000 men. By 1944, Anders’s army, which would capture Monte Cassino, would be regarded, according to John Keegan, as “one of the greatest fighting formations of the war.”

  As important as the prisoners’ release was, however, the deliberate omission from the treaty of one Polish demand was of far more consequence to the country’s long-term future. The Poles wanted to include a section in which the Soviets would promise to return all of the Polish lands they had seized in 1939. Stalin, however, refused to make that pledge. In fact, from the first days of his new alliance with the West, the Soviet leader hinted that he planned not only to retain the annexed territory but eventually to gain power over the rest of Poland as well. The Soviets “neither sought nor cared about Polish friendship,” Count Raczyński remarked. “Their purpose, as of old, was to gain control of Poland and subject it entirely to their will, with the view to absorbing it completely.”

  When the Poles expressed their anxieties about all this to Churchill, he again refused to listen. The final treaty left open the question of Poland’s postwar borders.

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  ONE OF THE TANTALIZING “what-ifs” of World War II is what might have happened to Poland and Czechoslovakia—two vulnerable nations adjoining each other in a strategically important borderland between West and East—if they could have formed some sort of protective federation after the war. For more than a year, officials from the two countries met in London to discuss doing just that. Specifically, they examined the possibility of each nation retaining its sovereignty but cooperating on political and military matters and establishing common economic and foreign policies. As the negotiators knew, such an alliance would result in a formidable combination of manpower, arms, and fortifications, all of which would be vital in ensuring the postwar security and independence of their countries.

  On the surface, Poland and Czechoslovakia seemed to have much in common. Having spent many years under foreign domination, both nations had regained their independence following World War I. And although located in eastern Europe, each leaned heavily toward the West. When it came to their national character, however, the differences between them were striking. The Czechs were regarded—and saw themselves—as a sober, sensible, middle-class people who focused on hard work and shied away from flashy heroics. “To survive is an obsession with the Czechs,” Time magazine noted in March 1944. “It is also their greatest talent. They never had notions of grandeur. They always realized that their role is to adjust themselves to conditions not of their making—and survive.”

  The Poles were polar opposites. Unlike the Czechs, who had been occupied by the relatively benign Austro-Hungarian empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of Poland had been subjugated by the much more brutal Russians and Prussians, with only the southwestern corner held by Austro-Hungary. Even if the Poles had been inclined to get along with their occupiers—which they were not—it would have done no good. Hotheaded and rebellious by temperament, they repeatedly rose up, particularly against the Russians, and just as repeatedly were crushed. “The Poles are not troublesome as aggressors,” the New York Times correspondent John Darnton observed, “but as victims who refuse to lie down.”

  The romantic, emotional Poles tended to disparage the Czechs for what they perceived as their neighbors’ dullness and industriousness. “The Czechs seem to the Poles solid, heavy people, much like liver dumplings,” A. J. Liebling noted in the New Yorker in 1942. For their part, the Czechs regarded the Poles as arrogant, foolhardy, autocratic, and suicidally reckless.

  In the early twentieth century, this traditional antipathy was heightened by a virulent dispute over a highly industrialized sliver of land, called Teschen, that lay on the two countries’ common border. After gaining their independence in 1918, both nations claimed Teschen, whose population was more than half Polish but that also had sizable Czech and German minorities. When the Czechs forcibly occupied a large portion
of Teschen, Allied leaders at the Paris peace conference ordered them to withdraw and to divide the region fairly with the Poles. Czechoslovakia, however, got the better part of the deal, acquiring most of Teschen’s land and industry.

  Furious over the Czechs’ high-handedness, the Poles took their revenge following the 1938 Munich Conference, when Hitler allowed them to seize Teschen from their neighbor. Whatever justice there might have been to Poland’s claim to Teschen, its willingness to capitalize on Czechoslovakia’s misfortune was both a moral failing and an enormous blow to Poland’s reputation in the rest of the world.

  Although Teschen remained a point of contention in the early 1940s, both sides in the federation negotiations in London thought a resolution might be possible. A major reason for their optimism lay in the marked differences between the wartime Polish government under General Sikorski and the prewar regime responsible for the snatching of Teschen. Sikorski, an outspoken opponent of the prewar government, and the men around him were far more liberal and democratic than their predecessors and had actively opposed their authoritarian policies. From London, Sikorski promised his countrymen that his administration would institute free elections and social reforms in Poland after the war, similar to those in prewar Czechoslovakia.

  But in the end, none of that mattered. When news broke in early 1942 that Sikorski and Beneš had embarked on formal negotiations to mend their countries’ relationship and consider a possible federation, Stalin made it clear he was not pleased. And when Stalin was not pleased, Beneš, who was determined to do nothing to antagonize the Kremlin, paid close attention.

  Unlike the Poles, the Czechs were not immediate neighbors of Russia, had never been conquered by Russia, and lived outside the traditional Russian sphere of interest. Beneš, having by now lost all faith in the West, chose to believe that Stalin would protect Czechoslovakia’s independence after the war, even though the Soviets had done nothing to aid the Czechs against German aggression in 1938 and 1939.

  After he joined the Allies, Stalin did everything he could to encourage the idea that he was indeed Czechoslovakia’s new best friend. The Soviet Union, for example, was the first Allied nation to recognize Beneš and his followers as the official Czech government in exile, signing the recognition agreement four hours before the British government did the same.

  Stalin also made a promise to the Czechs that he refused to offer the Poles: Soviet recognition of their country’s postwar independence, with no interference in its internal affairs. František Moravec, the head of Czech intelligence; Jan Masaryk; and others in the government were skeptical, but Beneš put his faith in Stalin’s pledge. The Czech president “lost all realistic perspective toward Communism, blinding him to new dangers from the East,” Moravec later wrote. “Throughout the war, despite the advice of many, including myself, he persisted in his accommodating attitude toward Soviets and Czech Communists in order to demonstrate his goodwill. He refused to see the ugly reality until it was too late.”

  But as Beneš viewed the situation, what choice did he have? He was sure that neither Britain nor the United States would do anything to help his country or the rest of eastern Europe. Wisely or not, he elected to gamble on Stalin, who did not wait long before demanding his first quid pro quo: a stepped-up sabotage campaign by the Czech resistance against the Germans, similar to the one being waged by communist insurgents in France.

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  LIKE THE POLES, THE CZECHS in London had left intelligence and resistance organizations behind when they had escaped from their homeland in the late 1930s. Their intelligence operation was by far the stronger of the two, designed primarily to transmit material from their prize agent, Abwehr officer Paul Thümmel, to British intelligence in London.

  To Beneš’s chagrin, Czechoslovakia’s resistance efforts had not lived up to the country’s intelligence achievements. One explanation for the underground’s relative weakness, especially when compared to Poland’s, was that Czechoslovakia had not been attacked and conquered; instead, it had been traded away to the enemy by its so-called allies. Many Czechs, as demoralized as Beneš by the West’s desertion, saw little reason to put their lives at risk for the Allied cause.

  In addition, Germany, at least in the beginning, was far more lenient toward Czechoslovakia, which had a huge armaments industry and rich agricultural lands, than toward Poland. Because the Reich badly needed the Czechs’ cooperation to further its war effort, it did not treat most of the population with the savagery it showed other Slavs. Early in the occupation, “those who kept their mouths shut and heads down could go on about their lives,” Madeleine Albright observed.

  The SS, however, did not show the same moderation to students, intellectuals, and others who protested against German rule. After a series of peaceful demonstrations at Czech universities in September 1939, thousands of students were arrested. Some were tortured and executed, while many more were shipped off to German concentration camps. From then until the end of the war, all Czech institutions of higher learning were closed.

  After the reprisals, the organized Czech resistance movement, afraid that any kind of dramatic action would touch off further retaliation, burrowed even more deeply underground. Its reticence was highly embarrassing for Beneš, who was being bombarded by urgent Soviet requests for the Czech resistance to come to the aid of the Red Army by sabotaging production of German war matériel and cutting Wehrmacht communications. Churchill and British military leaders, unable to give Stalin the second front he was demanding, were also pressuring the beleaguered Czech president to help the Soviets.

  Unfortunately for Beneš, the stepped-up demands from his allies coincided with the appointment of the SS’s infamous Reinhard Heydrich as governor of what was now called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich began his rule in September 1941 with a bloody Gestapo crackdown on the already weakened Czech resistance movement. “It was futile for us to send messages home asking for an increase in resistance activity,” František Moravec recalled. “We tried it. Nothing happened.”

  So Moravec and Beneš turned to their only remaining assets: some 150 Czech soldiers in England who were undergoing training as SOE agents. In the fall of 1941, the Czech government in exile informed resistance leaders that teams of operatives would soon parachute into Czechoslovakia to rebuild the underground and launch sabotage campaigns against enemy communications, railway traffic, and war-related industry. In an obvious attempt to counter any objections from the home front, Beneš warned that “our whole situation would definitely appear in an unfavorable light if we…did not at least keep up with the other [occupied countries].”

  There was yet another secret mission planned. It would turn out to be one of the most daring operations of the entire war—nothing less than the assassination of the thirty-eight-year-old “butcher of Prague,” Reinhard Heydrich himself.

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  ONE OF THE MOST powerful men in the Third Reich, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Heydrich made a vivid impression on all who encountered him. SS colleagues variously described him as “a blond god” and “a predatory animal.” After meeting Heydrich for the first time, Hitler declared, “This man is extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily dangerous.” According to Heydrich’s deputy, Walter Schellenberg, he “had an ice-cold intellect and was untouched by pangs of conscience….Torture and killing were his daily occupations.”

  As the head of the Gestapo and all other SS intelligence and security organizations, Heydrich was already responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of civilians in Europe and the Soviet Union. They included the victims of special SS extermination squads, known as the Einsatzgruppen, which followed German armies into Poland and Soviet lands and machine-gunned Jews, intellectuals, clergymen, political leaders, and anyone else who happened to be on their long kill list. Having been appointed in early 1941 to organize the Final Solution, Heydrich was also hard at work planning the systematic, scientific slaughter of all the Jews of Europe.

  Rein
hard Heydrich

  Yet it was not enough for him to be a killing machine; he also wanted major roles for himself and the SS in shaping the destiny of a Germanized Europe. To further that ambition, he was engaged in a ruthless power struggle with the German military establishment, particularly with the Abwehr, the military’s intelligence operation.

  The Abwehr’s patrician chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, despised Heydrich and the murderous thugs working for him. In September 1939, Canaris protested the Einsatzgruppen’s “orgy of massacre” in Poland to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the German armed forces, to no avail. Canaris was opposed “to any infringement whatsoever of the unwritten laws of humanity,” noted Hermann Giskes, a high-level Abwehr officer.

  Heydrich, in turn, had nothing but contempt for Canaris, complaining to Hitler and Heinrich Himmler that the Abwehr was far too weak and lenient in its dealings with the citizens of occupied Europe. To bolster his argument, he noted the slowly rising tide of resistance in France and the other captive countries controlled by the German military, where SS operatives did not have the unbridled freedom to kill that they did in the Soviet Union and Poland. Though hardly widespread, this upsurge instilled a sense of dread in top Nazi circles. “The epidemic of assassination is spreading alarmingly in French cities,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in late 1941. “Our Wehrmacht commands are not energetic enough in trying to stop it.”

  Heydrich, who saw Czechoslovakia as his first stepping-stone to greater power, exploited the high-level angst by declaring that an “obviously large-scale resistance movement” in the protectorate not only endangered Nazi rule there but posed a major threat to the productivity of Czech industry, so essential to the German war effort. Although patently untrue, his claim convinced Hitler to fire the current Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia and replace him with Heydrich.