First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  These words would stay with the city’s inhabitants. That afternoon, shortly after three o’clock, the main power station serving Warsaw was destroyed in a German air raid. With that, the electricity supply failed and the radio was abruptly silenced during a broadcast of the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto in C minor.84 Starzyński too was condemned to silence. More worryingly, German forces stood poised for what Hitler hoped would be the final chapter in Polish defiance.

  8

  Impenitent Thieves

  On the same day that Hitler was peering at Warsaw through field glasses and the empty platitudes of the Western Allies were being honed in Hove, Poland suffered another existential blow: Lwów, the country’s south-eastern cultural and political centre, and the centrepiece of Poland’s defence in the region, surrendered to the Red Army.

  Lwów had been bombed by the Germans on the very first day of the war and had duly begun to prepare itself for a conflict that appeared, at that time at least, to be geographically distant. The city was a major Polish bastion in the eastern borderlands, home to over 300,000 people, as well as a prestigious university, the famous Ossoliński Library and a host of other political and cultural institutions. After being added to the Polish realm in 1349, Lwów had resisted invading Swedes, Cossacks, Hungarians, Turks and Russians, earning the soubriquet of ‘Semper Fidelis’ in 1658, in recognition of its vital role in defending Christian Europe’s eastern approaches.

  Restored to a reborn Poland in 1919, Lwów became the country’s third largest city and an important regional centre. Its university, which had been founded in 1661, gained renown for its School of Mathematics, under Professor Stefan Banach, whose scholars used to meet in the city’s ‘Scottish Café’ to ponder theoretical issues, with prizes offered for solving the most challenging problems. In addition, the School of Law would come to prominence for two of its alumni – Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafał Lemkin – who were later instrumental in framing the legal concepts enshrined in the post-war International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.1 Lwów was also culturally very mixed – a ‘city of blurred borders’, as journalist Joseph Roth had called it – with around a quarter of the population Jewish and a smaller minority of Ukrainians. However, the vibrant melting pot of the nineteenth century had changed into something rather more sinister by the 1930s, with anti-Jewish riots erupting in 1932. Such tensions would rise again, as the storm clouds of war gathered in the summer of 1939. Lwów would be forced to fight for its existence, and test its loyalty to Poland, once again.

  By mid-September, Lwów was a shadow of its former self. The ravages of war had already taken their toll and, clogged with countless refugees, the city appeared no longer as a proud eastern bastion of the nation. According to Stanisław Maczek, commander of the 10th Motorised Cavalry Brigade, who arrived in Lwów on 15 September, it showed a rather different face: ‘lurking like someone anticipating an expected strike with resignation, dark, dirty … illuminated only by occasional dying fires from air raids’. This was no longer the city that had earned the tag of eternal fidelity and had proudly resisted the Soviet onslaught in 1920. Now, Maczek noted mournfully, it was a ‘dying flicker of hope’: a refuge approached from the west by ‘a crumbling Poland’ that hoped ‘with its final breath for one last show of resistance, perhaps for nothing more than history’s sake’.2

  For all the symbolism, Lwów’s significance to Poland in 1939 was primarily strategic. As the gateway to the south-east, and key to any possible withdrawal towards the Romanian frontier, it was crucial to Poland’s fortunes, synonymous almost with the idea of a last-ditch defence. Consequently, Lwów would be vigorously defended, its forces marshalled by the garrison commander, General Władysław Langner. A native of the region, Langner had fought in the Polish Legions in the First World War and spent most of his subsequent career away from Lwów before returning to the city as commander of the military district, early in 1938. His layered defence plan began with an outer line some 25 kilometres west of the city, running from Bełżec and Rawa Ruska (Rava-Rus’ka) in the north to Gródek Jagielloński (Horodok) and Komarno in the south-west. Within the city itself, geographical features, such as Kortumowa Hill (Kortumova Hora), were fortified as much as possible, with an additional network of barricades and anti-tank ditches on the city’s periphery, constructed by local volunteers. In addition, the garrison boasted two battalions of infantry, a volunteer battalion, a brigade of militia, three batteries of artillery and assorted other elements, which were to be concentrated in strongpoints along the main approaches of any expected attack.3

  Those preparations were required sooner than had been expected. The Wehrmacht advanced swiftly into Galicia, and by 10 September German troops were at Jarosław, battling the Polish rearguard – containing the 10th Motorised Cavalry Brigade under the redoubtable Colonel Maczek – in an effort to cross the river San, one of the last natural barriers to their eastward advance. Maczek later remembered the battle at Jarosław – the exhaustion, the lack of supplies and the stress of constant combat – as ‘the most excruciating experience not only for me as brigade commander, but also for my soldiers right down to the last man’.4 Nonetheless, he and his brigade ultimately withdrew in good order, under cover of darkness: they would remain undefeated. However, once the crossing of the San had been forced, German infantry made their way across the pontoon bridges and on towards Lwów.5

  By that time, German spearheads were already well advanced. Starting from the Eastern Beskids in Slovakia, units of the 1st Gebirgs (Mountain) Division had bypassed Polish defences and – after a vicious engagement on the Dukla Pass – had advanced into south-eastern Poland. Already on 11 September, five days after the fall of Kraków, they had taken Sambor (Sambir), less than 70 kilometres south-west of Lwów. Driven on by the ruthless ambition and ideological conviction of one of the division’s commanders, Ferdinand Schörner – a fanatical Nazi loyalist – the units were already forging ahead towards Lwów.6 According to one German eye-witness account of the time, the Gebirgsjäger raced on through Galicia, past the detritus of war: ‘discarded helmets, guns, ammunition, equipment lying behind, then more dead horses, gradually bloating in the heat, giving off a sweetish smell, some armoured cars with broken wheels and shafts … We come across exhausted prisoners in long columns; they stare … with blank expressions.’7 When they reached the city’s western outskirts the following day, 12 September, they are said to have overtaken two buses of Polish soldiers, who could only gaze at them in bewilderment.8

  True to their order to take Lwów by storm, the Gebirgsjäger attempted a surprise assault on the city that same afternoon, and advanced down the main western approach road, Gródecka Street (Horodotska Street). Assailed by sniper fire and artillery barrages, they reached the Church of St Elizabeth, not far from the city centre, where they were forced to withdraw. As one of the artillerymen who met the German attack that day recalled:

  When they saw us, they started jumping out, but they were too late … our faithful field guns blared out with head-on fire. All that was left of that vehicle after that first salvo was a heap of iron and a wisp of smoke. The rest of the column soon met the same fate. Infantry tried to run into the nearby buildings, but the gates were locked and our heavy machine gun kept sweeping the street.9

  The following day, as artillery duels raged, the probing attacks began again and a successful German assault was made on Kortumowa Hill, to the north-west of the city. Subsequent Polish counter-attacks failed to dislodge the invaders. On 14 September, a delegation from the city council went to speak with General Langner, to suggest that military operations should be suspended for fear that the city would be destroyed. Already the power plant, water supply and gas works had been hit. In addition, the large numbers of refugees who had streamed into the city in previous weeks had swollen the population far beyond what could reasonably be sustained; food supplies were running low, and the city’s makeshift hospitals were full.10 To his dismay, Langner had also been f
orced to allow many of the local police and government staff to leave the city. As he recorded in his diary: ‘I am left alone without administrative authorities or security organs.’11

  For all their difficulties, however, if the inhabitants of Lwów needed any impetus to spur on the defence of their city, they would have found it in the fate of Przemyśl, 90 kilometres to the west. After it fell to the German 7th Infantry Division on 15 September, Przemyśl had been exposed to the full force of Nazi barbarism, with the 20,000-strong Jewish community immediately singled out for abuse and persecution. That persecution quickly became murderous, when Einsatzgruppen units began carrying out round-ups of the Jewish population. As one eye-witness recalled, the victims were herded through the streets, pursued by a mob of soldiers, who beat and pistol-whipped those who fell behind. The brutal journey ended in the cemetery of the nearby village of Pikulice.

  It was a scene out of Dante’s hell. All the men driven through the streets in the morning lay there dead. Some men from the nearby houses told me what had happened. The Jews had been driven up to the side of the hill and ordered to turn around. A truck was already standing there. A canvas had been lifted off a heavy machine gun, and several bursts of fire rang out, sweeping back and forth. Then a few more shots were fired into the few bodies that were still writhing. All was still. The soldiers climbed into the truck, and drove away.

  I went quietly up to the little hill. The corpses were lying on their backs or sides in the most contorted positions, some on top of others, with their arms outstretched, their heads shattered by the bullets. Here were pools of blood; there the earth was rust-coloured with blood; the grass glistened with blood; blood was drying on the corpses. Women with bloodied hands were hunting through the pile of bodies for their fathers, husbands, sons. A sickish sweet smell pervaded the air.12

  It is thought that as many as 600 people were murdered in Przemyśl in a three-day killing spree, making it the largest single massacre of the Polish campaign. The city’s Wehrmacht commander identified the perpetrators as members of the Einsatzgruppe von Woyrsch.13 A Polish eye-witness, meanwhile, noted simply that they were ‘laughing young Germans, the proud representatives of Hitler’s New Order’.14

  If the defenders of Lwów were not short on motivation, they were certainly lacking reinforcement. In addition, as Langner complained to his diary, his soldiers were often ill trained and unaccustomed to urban warfare. As a result, he wrote, ‘our losses are disproportionately high’ with most casualties coming from gunfire and shrapnel.15 Another problem he faced was that of the failing loyalty of the city’s Ukrainian minority. Not only did they assist the German advance, he claimed, they also fired on Polish troops. In nearby Stanisławów, it was reported that a rebellion of Ukrainian locals had resulted in Polish army units being disarmed and officers being murdered.16

  Despite such challenges, the repeated probing attacks of the Germans within Lwów were beaten back. The speedy advance of the Gebirgsjäger had succeeded in penetrating the city’s western suburbs, but it had proved unable to take the city in a coup de main, and – more seriously – it had outstripped the German supply column, leaving many soldiers to subsist on looted maize and captured ammunition.17 Moreover, while the battle for Lwów continued, numerous Polish units were left behind in the wake of that German spearhead, their escape routes to the south and east now cut off. Three of these – the 11th, 24th and 38th infantry divisions, together comprising the remains of the Małopolska Army – found themselves near Sądowa Wisznia (Sudova Vyshnya), 50 kilometres west of Lwów, and were resolved to fight their way into the city to assist in its defence. Under its commander, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski – who had refused a desk job on the outbreak of war to lead at the front – the Małopolska Army still numbered some 16,000 troops, albeit many of them exhausted and lacking artillery, armour and transport.18 The plan was a bold one: as his biographer later wrote, Sosnkowski was now creating a front ‘where nothing but the maddest patriotism existed’.19 His men would fight their way north-east and break through the overstretched German flank, in an attempt to reach the forest of Janów, from where they would cut through the German lines into Lwów. The action would come to be known as the Battle of Jaworów.

  It began on the evening of 15 September, when Polish forces moved off under cover of darkness to engage the German units that lay before them. Though they lacked artillery and transport, they made good progress, surprising a number of German detachments that were exhausted after the forced march across Galicia. According to a gunner in the German 79th Gebirgs Artillery Regiment, he and his comrades had marched some 60 kilometres that day alone and were begging for rest.20 They would not get their wish. One by one, the villages to the west of Lwów were liberated – Tuczapy, Czarnokońce (Chornokuntsi), Rodatycze (Rodatychi) – as the Poles fought on, taking the German forces by surprise with a close-range infantry assault. ‘They barely managed to open fire’, one veteran of the battle wrote, ‘when we pounced on them in their foxholes’.21 In Hartfeld, which had been founded by German colonists and still retained an ethnic German presence, the fighting was especially bitter, with hand-to-hand combat resulting in heavy losses on both sides. When it was finally taken by the Poles in the early hours of the next morning, the village had been destroyed. According to one artilleryman, the fires of what remained lent the scene a ‘tragic ambience’.22

  Contemporary German propaganda accounts, and their modern echoes, tend to focus on the fighting at Hartfeld, but the most remarkable engagement of the Battle of Jaworów was undoubtedly that at Mużyłowice (Muzhylovychi), 4 kilometres to the north-west, where elements of the 11th and 38th divisions met the 3rd battalion of the elite SS division Germania. The SS-Germania was one of three divisions established to serve at the personal disposal of Hitler, known as the SS-Verfügungstruppe, which had been raised from SS members and were, effectively, Hitler’s private army. The invasion of Poland was intended to be the SS’ ‘blooding’; its chance to prove itself as a fighting force on the battlefield. The engagement at Mużyłowice, however, would show how far the SS still had to go. Despite being very well equipped and well armed, and facing Polish troops who lacked armour, artillery and transport, the SS-Germania was caught at rest and spread out in woodland, where it was evidently not expecting to be attacked. In the fierce fighting that followed, men of the Polish 49th Hutsul Rifle Regiment stormed the German positions in a night-time bayonet assault, ‘slashing and stabbing … at anything that moved’. Arriving soon after the main attack, the commander of the 11th Infantry Division, Colonel Bronisław Prugar-Ketling, described the scene:

  Bursts of machine gun fire started and fell silent. One could almost see the hand which pressed the trigger suddenly stiffen and lifelessly fall, paralysed by the strike of a rifle stock or a bayonet. There were no screams. The fight went on in darkness and ominous silence. No one was directing it any longer, and no one pleaded for mercy. The whole thing made one shiver. And the horror which overcame the Germans must have exceeded everything they had experienced before. They certainly had never encountered such surprise and such an assault. The corpses we later saw looked ghastly. The terror in which they died still showed on their faces.23

  When the battle was over, the commander of Germania’s 3rd battalion, SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) Heinrich Köppen – a portly, bespectacled, 48-year-old Bavarian – had been killed, along with twenty-two of his men; the remainder had been forced to flee in ignominy. Alongside the dead, a foggy dawn revealed a rich material booty: ‘We rubbed our eyes to make sure it was not an illusion,’ Prugar-Ketling wrote. ‘It looked so unbelievable. A large, rich village … packed to the brim with equipment and war materiel.’24 Kazimierz Sosnkowski was similarly impressed:

  When we reached the high street running north–south through the whole spread-out village, an unforgettable sight opened before our eyes: as far as the eye could see, the broad street was piled with crammed motor cars, cannons and trailers, armoured cars for th
e crews, ammunition wagons, motorcycles. It was easy to guess the dramatic course of events. Here, the enemy had no longer fought: the proper battle had taken place on the western outskirts of the village. At the first attempt to move the column, the whole convoy jammed and the Germans, thrown into panic, abandoned their gear and took to their heels. According to local eye-witnesses, some of them fled with nothing but their underpants.25

  In the aftermath of the engagement, Sosnkowski counted some 400 abandoned vehicles.

  With hard-fought successes such as these, the Polish Małopolska Army eventually reached Janów Forest, from where, it was hoped, a passage could be forced into Lwów. The men were exhausted, however, needing ‘only to pause in their march to slump to the ground and instantly fall asleep’.26 Moreover, given that they could no longer exploit the tactic of surprise, and the Germans now knew where they were, they had surrendered the initiative. Very quickly, therefore, they were subjected to a pulverising air and artillery attack, which took a heavy toll. Prugar-Ketling wrote:

  Even to eyes well accustomed to the horrors of war, it was a terrible picture. The horribly massacred bodies of men and horses, scattered in pieces across a large area on the ground and in the trees, gave the impression of some satanic revenge. Upturned cars, wagons and cannon limbers blocked the passages between mutilated branches. Everywhere, scraps of uniforms, tents, blankets and other equipment hung from the trees or lay scattered on the bloody, cratered earth … I had seen many a battlefield, many a time witnessed heavy and bloody combat, but never had I seen such a dreadful harvest of war.27