by George Bruce
Inevitably, fire from Captain Sosna’s company was stayed, but any kind of stand against the massive German force was impossible. The Poles retreated east along the broad thoroughfare of the Elektoralna, leading to the Town Hall and Theatre Square. Another German wedge advanced along Leszno Street, parallel to the north. SS-Brigadeführer Kaminski’s brigade of Cossack former prisoners-of-war made only slight advances from Ochota north-east towards the adjacent City Centre. To fighting, they preferred the indiscriminate slaughter and pillage of thousands of the civilian population there, including women and children.
Kaminski and his troops had become interested in a vodka factory. From the afternoon of 5 August Kaminski urgently requested air support to enable him to enter.[197] Because the 9th Army distrusted him his radio conversations were tapped and filed:
Kaminski to Reinefarth: Bandits taking up a fixed position in the grounds of the Machorka factory. Further attack only after cleansing of these grounds. Frolow.
Kaminski to Reinefarth, later: Reached the Machorka factory. Heavily occupied and defended by bandits. Factory grounds enclosed by high wall. Request urgently means for blowing up and burning.
Reinefarth to Kaminski, 6th August, 14.00 hours: Make detailed sketch map of Machorka factory immediately. Also height of the object. Because of the use of Stukas. Sketch map will be collected.
Kaminski to Reinefarth: Platoon of tanks firing at my regiment.
Reinefarth: Does armoured train or tank gun protect factory? Hurry, urgent. Reinefarth.
Kaminski: North side of factory is protected by guns. Assumption: perhaps a platoon of tanks. Frolow.
Kaminski: Bandits have finished building heavy fortifications and barricades. For the second time I ask you for heavy artillery, pioneers and flame-throwers. Three times during the assault I tried to seize the barricades. However, proved unsuccessful. I am expecting tanks and flame-throwers. Frolow.
Kaminski’s urgent requests for aid were of course simply camouflage. Vodka had detained him. He was later court-martialled and shot.
The situation now looked bleak for the Home Army. Then during the afternoon a Polish counter-attack from Mirowski Square succeeded in driving one of the German wedges back in the direction of Wola, but a Panther tank and several armoured cars swiftly checked it. By the evening, the insurgents had retreated to their starting-point.
By about 8 o’clock in the evening of 7 August the Germans were in complete control of the Wolska-Chlodna-Elektoralna-Saxon Gardens artery, with the Kierbedz Bridge only one or two hundred yards away on the far side of the Royal Castle which the Poles still held. That evening a large crowd of Polish civilians were forced at gunpoint to clear all barricades and ruins from the streets along this line of communication to the bridge. They were afterwards shot in the Mirowski Market.
A terrible massacre of the civilian population by Reinefarth’s and Dirlewanger’s troops had begun in Elektoralna Street, the surrounding area and in the parts of Wola in which Home Army units had been overwhelmed. Although the actual deeds were done by Kaminski’s renegade Cossacks and Dirlewanger’s criminal troops, German officers permitted these murders of tens of thousands of unarmed men, women and children.
On 5 August, the hospital of the Marie Curie Radium Institute had been invaded by drunken Cossacks who assembled the staff and patients, about one hundred and seventy in all, robbed them, drove some of them into the hospital garden and thence to a camp near Mokotow Field, where the women were raped. Those patients still in their beds were shot dead, the building was pillaged, saturated with petrol and set on fire. Later the staff and patients who had been taken to the camp were shot through the head by a German officer.[198] Similar barbarities were carried out at the Wola Hospital and the St Lazarus Hospital.
After having taken Wolska Street the Germans set fire to the houses there with petrol bottles and drove the inhabitants to the yard of the Ursus factory near by. Here the Germans shot them in the back of the head and stacked their bodies in heaps ready for burning. One woman who escaped after her three children had been murdered there later estimated that there were five to seven thousand dead in the yard.[199]
On man among a throng of civilians who were driven similarly out of Elektoralna Street on 7 August later testified how they had stumbled in the darkness along Chlodna Street, where the houses were burning like torches. ‘It sometimes seemed as though it was one great wall of fire. Our personal experiences, driven as we were like cattle, haunted by fear, facing endless danger from the continuous shooting among the ruins and the huge fires — took on terrible unearthly dimensions,’ he wrote.[200]
The procession, marching slowly from St Charles Borromeo’s Church to Zelazna Street, suffered terrible maltreatment and even torture… For a time I carried a little girl, Basia, two years old, in my arms. The child had lost both father and mother. The attitude of the women was deeply touching. Grave and obstinate, only paying attention to their children and bundles, they marched on like soldiers, taking care not to expose the little ones to danger. During the whole time, that is, until we reached Zelazna Street, where the women were separated from us, I heard not a single complaint, no bitter weeping, no begging for help… There were moments when the heat from the burning houses made our progress quite impossible. The wind blew up clouds of biting smoke which hid everything… I saw in several places in Zelazna Street corpses of murdered people lying in the streets. They could not have been victims of bombing or of stray shots for they lay in groups.
A young woman named Wanda was seized while taking shelter among hundreds of other people in the Ministry of Commerce building in Elektoralna Street. A German dragged her aside and tried to rape her, but when she resisted fiercely he chose another woman and fired at Wanda with his pistol, but missed. She ran out through the burning street into another house. The next day Wanda was driven with a procession of mostly young women with children towards Wola.[201]
They stopped at a street crossing because the insurgents were firing from Kercely Square towards them. German troops there stopped the procession and ordered the women to lie down from one side of the street to the other as a living barricade. ‘We were all prepared to die, and said the Rosary aloud. Bullets whistled over our heads or past our ears… As if by some miracle they only hit the Germans… They were bewildered by the fact that only they were falling… We thought they would take their revenge on us. Stupefied and astonished they looked towards the insurgent posts and then at our quiet, resigned attitude, and the children clinging to their mothers.
‘At last they let us go.’
A man called Marian among the refugees in the Commerce Ministry building in Elektoralna Street was ordered out by the Germans late in the evening of 7 August with about one hundred and fifty other men and marched to Mirowski Square where they were ordered to remove the corpses, mainly civilians, scores of which lay on the ground where they had fallen after being shot. After an hour and a half’s work stacking the bodies they were marched to the Market Hall in Chlodna Street. Inside it was full of black smoke from a fire burning in a vast hole in the floor. The prisoners were ordered to stand with their faces to the wall and their hands up.[202]
There was a burst of automatic fire. Although not hit Marian fell with those beside him and heard their groans and moans. A little later he cautiously lifted his head and saw Poles forced at gunpoint to carry the bodies and throw them into the flames issuing from the hole. In the smoke and the gloom he escaped into the lavatory and hid behind a partition. A little later another man, Dr Jerzy Lakota, of the Child Jesus Hospital, joined him there. Together they sat there for several hours, listening to the intermittent firing in the hall and the noise of the bodies burning in the fire hole. Just before daylight they crept out of this frightful charnel house and escaped through the flaming streets to Krochmalna Street.
The 5 to 7 of August saw days and nights of appalling horror in Wola, the western part of the City Centre and Ochota, where Kaminski’s Soviet renegade troops
were let loose. As part of a deliberate plan based on Himmler’s order nearly 40,000 civilians were executed and burnt in this inferno.
While the tide of fighting in Wola moved nearer and nearer to his GHQ Komorowski’s fears about the chances of Soviet aid were temporarily dispelled. Polish troops in the City Centre took to Colonel Chrusciel a short thick-set man of athletic build who had asked in Russian and German to be taken to the Polish Commander. He told Chrusciel: ‘My name is Konstantin Kalugin. I am a Russian officer under orders of Marshal Rokossovsky.’[203] He produced a miniature inch-square identity card out of a knot in a red handkerchief which under a magnifying glass showed this name and that he was an intelligence officer in contact with the Czarny Group, a Red Army guerrilla unit operating behind the German lines.
Kalugin said that he and a companion were dropped by parachute on 15 July near Lublin, one hundred and fifty miles south-east of Warsaw. Their assignment was to make contact with the Polish underground in the capital, but reaching it on 1 August they had lost contact with each other. Unfortunately the other man carried the radio transmitter and codes, so he now had no way of getting in touch with his commanding officers. He therefore sought permission to send a report to Stalin on the Warsaw situation with a request for aid.
Kalugin said with much confidence that the Red Army possessed overwhelming numerical superiority over the Germans and without any doubt it should enter Warsaw within the next two or three days.
Informed about Kalugin and his request, Komorowski decided that while Prime Minister Mikolajczyk in Moscow would have kept Marshal Stalin fully informed about the course of the fighting against the Germans, this confirmation from a Soviet officer could be of much value, especially as the means of establishing liaison with Rokossovsky.
He therefore authorized Chrusciel to transmit Kalugin’s message to London for onward transmission to Stalin. The message asked that German concentrations in certain areas of Warsaw should be attacked from the air, that the airfields at Okecie and Bielany should be bombed and most important that arms and ammunition should be dropped in specified streets and squares. Kalugin added: ‘The brave people in Warsaw believe that you will give them the most positive help in the next few hours. Please facilitate my liaison with Marshal Rokossovsky.’ He signed the message: Captain Konstantin Kalugin of Czarny Group, Warsaw. Chrusciel also transmitted a message from Kalugin to Rokossovsky via London and Moscow.
The Chief of the Polish General Staff in London acknowledged both messages: ‘Proposals of both Kalugin and the OC Warsaw Sector, Home Army, immediately transmitted to Moscow through British channels, as were your previous requests for Soviet attacks from outside. No Soviet answer yet received.’ There is no record of any Soviet reply to these messages.
Kalugin remained at Chrusciel’s headquarters until some weeks later in September the Russians occupied the suburb of Praga, when he crossed the Vistula and rejoined them. During this period he was given complete freedom of movement so that he could observe the fighting in the various sectors.
The German advance through Wola brought Komorowski’s GHQ into the centre of the battle. By the evening of 6 August the Kamler factory was the target of more or less continuous machine-gun fire. The humbly-named ‘messenger-girls’ — ‘staff-assistants’ would have been more appropriate — bravely risked their lives time and again in their work of liaison, but keeping links intact with the various Home Army groups had become almost impossible. Radio sets in the Kamler building, the sole means of communication with the world outside Warsaw, were also all too vulnerable.
Komorowski therefore ordered the removal of the GHQ to the Old Town, or Stare Miasto. The route lay across the ruins of the Ghetto, dominated by machine-guns on the tower of the Pawiak prison church. One of the captured tanks first shelled the tower and knocked them out. Led by a well-armed Polish infantry platoon Komorowski and his staff in single file doubled forward through paths of rubble and past the shells of buildings, bending low to avoid shots from the Germans in their Pawiak stronghold. Their journey across this lifeless wasteland lasted two hours.
In the Old Town everything was still untouched by bombing or shellfire. The tall, narrow old houses with their embellished façades and elaborate doorways, the churches, the little shops were still more or less as they were when built within the city walls by prosperous merchants in the Middle Ages. Komorowski’s new headquarters were in a school in Barakowa Street which the Germans had pressed into use as a hospital. A tall building, its roof offered a panorama of Warsaw’s chequer-board of battle actions.
Home Army strongpoints for the defence of the district included the Treasury Printing Building and the Royal Castle, the Town Hall slightly south of it on the northern verge of the City Centre and the Bank of Poland on the flanks. The Old Town was immensely over-crowded. Refugees from elsewhere in the city had flooded in until there were an estimated 170,000 people there, about double the normal.
While the defeat and the massacre went on in Wola, Mikolajczyk had more fruitless meetings in Moscow with the Polish Communist National Committee of Liberation. In view of their failure his last hopes rested on Stalin. But on 6 August, before this meeting, he received a startling telegram from Jankowski. ‘Since the battle for Warsaw began the Red Army on the Warsaw front has stopped all military operations,’ Jankowski accused.
A complete cessation continues even now, while for the second day running the Germans heavily bombard the town from the air. In other words, there is no Soviet intervention.
This incomprehensible, passive and ostentatious behaviour of the Soviet troops at a distance of a dozen kilometres from Warsaw has its political significance, a matter which the Government must raise with Allied quarters, jointly with the Premier, who is now in Moscow. The question is urgent and its immediate solution is necessary in view of the further development of our action.[204]
Jankowski had given a dangerous political slant to the question of the Red Army’s activities. It was dangerous because untrue, because in the inflammable state of Russo-Polish relations it spread like wildfire and because its slanderous content would antagonize the Soviet leaders just when the Home Army was begging for their help.
Mikolajczyk did not yet know that Rokossovsky’s forces on the 1st Belorussian Front, ordered to take the Warsaw suburb of Praga by 5th to 8th August[205] and to establish bridgeheads on the Vistula’s western bank south of Warsaw, had by then withdrawn from their battle with the Germans a dozen kilometres east of the city with the loss of some five hundred tanks and an estimated six thousand men. Nor that the Red Air Force had temporarily lost superiority over the battle area.[206]
The Germans were by the evening of 7 August in partial control of the Wolska-Chlodna-Saxon Gardens route. Colonel Radosław’s group was isolated in the cemetery area to the north of Wola and west of the Ghetto. As well as numerous fortified strongpoints within Polish-held districts the Germans also now held wedges of territory thrusting deep into the city. Thus they had won their secondary objective of splitting up the districts in Polish hands so that these had become three different sectors with very little liaison.
In the south of the city the Home Army held Mokotow and Czerniakow, then the City Centre — with a German wedge thrusting deep into it — abutting on to Powisle along the river bank; and in the north the cemetery sector, the Old Town and Zoliborz, separate from it but in contact with troops in the near-by Kampinos Forest area.
The immediate effects of this became quickly clear. Colonel Chrusciel found that effective command of his troops was no longer possible. He had to turn to reliable officers who could take command in their areas and fight on independently. Fortunately the Home Army did not lack them. He appointed Colonel Karol Ziemski to command the Old Town, with Zoliborz and Kampinos also subordinated to him, about 9,000 men, designated Group North; Colonel Radwan, the City Centre and Powisle, and Colonel Kaminiski (code-name ‘Daniel’) to command Mokotow and Czerniakow. Their tasks: to hold their perimeters and to destro
y German strong-points inside them.[207]
Colonel Ziemski also wanted to resume contact with his forces in Zoliborz and Kampinos. He knew that to defend the Old Town it was essential to prevent the Germans from occupying the Ghetto ruins and the Krasinski Gardens, for this would pin his forces down against the river. He divided his troops into three, placing the eastern section under Major Rog, the southern under Major Sienkiewicz and the western section, which joined the cemetery area, he added to Colonel Radosław’s command. He instructed Radosław and Sienkiewicz to maintain close contact and help each other by intermittent counter-attacks. Ziemski also organized workshops for the repair of weapons and set up a small arsenal for the manufacture of hand-grenades with explosive removed from unexploded German bombs and shells.
Meanwhile, in Wola, after Komorowski’s removal to the Old Town, Polish troops fought a rearguard action and finally withdrew on 8 August, establishing a new line of defence along the western boundary of the City Centre.
The Germans now launched a massive assault on the Polish positions guarding the remaining part of the vital route to the Kierbedz Bridge. Supported by twenty tanks, by assault guns and more or less constant attacks by dive-bombers; by burning and dynamiting houses on either side of the route, including the Polish national monument of the Unknown Soldier, over which rolled tanks and armoured cars, they won their route to it on 9 August.
The loss cut off the Old Town and the Home Army GHQ from all contact with the City Centre. The Home Army was now fighting isolated battles against the Germans with almost entire lack of liaison between the separate groups. Somehow the Poles kept their morale high. Defeatism did not exist, even though they knew well enough how desperate their situation had become, in face especially of the silence across the Vistula and the freedom of the skies above Warsaw which the Red Air Force allowed the Germans.
