On 16 May 1944 Himmler visited the SS ‘Galizien’ at a camp in Neuhammer. After Wächter had shown off the prowess of his recruits, Himmler spoke to the officer corps in German, with Paliiv translating for the Ukrainians. Himmler offered congratulations to the German officers and men of the SS ‘Galizien’: ‘the designation “Galician” has been chosen according to the name of your beautiful homeland … [which] has become even more beautiful since it lost, through our intervention, those inhabitants who often sullied the name of Galicia, namely Jews.’50
Officers and NCOs, German and Ukrainian, applauded loudly.
Part Three:
March 1944–April 1945
13
‘We Shall Finish Them Off’
For the past five weeks, we have been fighting for Warsaw … We’ll get through and then Warsaw, the capital city, the brain, the intelligence of this … Polish nation will have been obliterated.
Himmler, 21 September 19441
In the spring of 1944, a succession of catastrophic hammer blows overwhelmed Hitler’s armies along the Eastern Front from the Baltic in the north all the way to the Black Sea in the south. The armoured might of Stalin’s armies remorselessly drove the Germans back along every sector of the Eastern Front. In the Crimea, the Russians cut off 120,000 German and Romanian troops and crushed them without mercy. In May, Stalin and his generals turned their attention to the central Belorussian sector of the German line that had been caught in a pincer movement to north and south leaving a giant protrusion eastwards. A massive new strategic push, Operation Bagration, named after a Georgian prince, was set in motion to hurl the Germans back across the Polish border and into Romania. As Marshall Georgi Zhukov mustered prodigious numbers of troops, tanks and artillery, Soviet partisans unleashed a wave of deadly attacks in the German rear, targeting railway lines and roads to cut off supplies and reinforcements. As the Wehrmacht battled to restore order, a million Soviet troops closed in on the German bulge, backed by deafening barrages of Katyusha rockets, known as ‘Stalin Organs’ by panic-stricken German troops. Zhukov’s forces gobbled up territory, driving ever closer to the strongholds of the General Government. On 17 July, a supremely confident Stalin staged a victory parade in Moscow to show off 57,000 shamed and wretched German prisoners of war.2
The spectacular success of the first phase of Operation Bagration shattered the German front line. By the autumn, Soviet forces had pushed into the Baltic overwhelming German defences in Latvia and Estonia. On 23 July, Soviet troops crossed the border of the General Government and encircled the old Galician capital of L’viv. Three days later, the local governor Otto von Wächter, who had recruited the SS ‘Galizien’ division, telexed Hans Frank in Kraków to announce that he had lost control of the ‘Distrikt Galizien’.
Hitler’s Axis began to shed allies. In Romania, Marshall Ion Antonescu, who had masterminded the slaughter of Jews in the summer of 1941, was ejected from power by Carol’s son King Michael who signed an armistice in Moscow on 12 September. German forces began pulling out of the Balkans, and Bulgaria belatedly declared war on Germany. In Hungary, the regent Admiral Miklós Hórthy, who had been reluctant to commit more than a few light divisions to the German war effort, began secret peace negotiations with the Allies, provoking a full-scale German occupation in March. The German ambassador and Plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer appointed a new government headed by the compliant Dominik Sztoja to keep Horthy in line. For the Germans, Hungary was unfinished business. Its Jewish community was still largely intact. Goebbels had always believed that Hórthy was ‘reliable’ with respect to what he called the ‘rhythm of the Jewish question’. The Hungarian was, he said, ‘murderously angry with the Jews’. But Hitler was convinced that his Hungarian ally had dragged his feet; with a more compliant regime in Budapest the matter could be settled at last. That summer, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a Sonderkommando to begin organising deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Hórthy prevaricated. In October, with the Soviet army fast approaching his borders, Hórthy sent General Béla Miklós de Dálnok to negotiate an armistice directly with the Russians. Enraged, Hitler dispatched Otto Skorzeny to Budapest with orders to depose Hórthy. Skorzeny kidnapped the astonished regent and flew him to Germany. In the meantime, Arrow Cross fanatic Ferenc Szálasi, acting on Hitler’s orders, seized power and took control of the Hungarian army. Arrow Cross death squads began murdering Jews and Eichmann returned to Budapest to begin his thwarted programme to deport the surviving Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In December, the Germans incarcerated thousands of Jews in the Budapest ghetto, where they were subjected to unrelenting deadly assault by SS units and their Arrow Cross allies.
As Hitler’s Reich shrank, Heinrich Himmler’s power as SS chief bloated. In July, a colonel called Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg botched a plan to assassinate Hitler at his headquarters near Rastenburg. In the aftermath of the bomb plot, Hitler lashed out at the Wehrmacht and Himmler, and Gottlob Berger seized the chance to ‘gather up’ all the ‘foreign’ units and divisions into the Waffen-SS. Their catch included the ill-fated Indian Legion, recruited by nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, as well as hundreds of thousands of Osttruppen, including Russians, Turkmen, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Mongolians and Georgians. In September, Himmler turned the most ruthless of these new SS warriors against the detested Polish capital of Warsaw.
During that last summer of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich, chronic stomach pain compelled Himmler to repeatedly summon his Baltic German masseur Felix Kersten, who often found his patient bedridden and tormented by gastric cramps. Himmler screamed: ‘I can’t bear this pain any longer.’ At one visit, Kersten noted that Himmler had a copy of the Koran open on his bedside table.3 But Himmler’s public rhetoric still replayed the fatuous old myths. On 26 July, he addressed a new division of SS ‘Volksgrenadiers’ (Infantry Division 545) and gloried in ‘a belief shaken by nothing, the belief in the Führer, the belief in the future of this greater Germanic Reich, the belief in our own worth, in ourselves’.4 In Himmler’s imagination, the Greater Germanic Reich clung tenaciously to life. So too did his impassioned conviction that providence would look after the bearers of Germanic blood. Himmler’s twisted optimism was nourished by the fantasy that new super weapons, Wunderwaffen, could soon be unleashed on Stalin’s ‘Asiatic’ hordes. Like many in Hitler’s court, Himmler hoped that the alliance between Bolshevik Russia and the British and Americans would sooner or later break down; then he, rather than the plainly ailing Führer, would be called upon to lead a new Germany.
As Kersten waged war on Himmler’s stomach cramps, Soviet armoured divisions ground relentlessly on towards the River Vistula, the last major natural barrier before they reached the borders of the Old Reich. Less than a quarter of the General Government now remained in German hands. By August, the Soviet vanguards had begun to approach the east bank of the Vistula. On the other side lay the city of Warsaw. The Polish capital had been Hitler’s first prize in the ‘war of annihilation’ that had begun on 1 September 1939. ‘The fact that we are governing,’ Himmler informed General Keitel, ‘should enable us to purify the Reich territory of Jews and Polacks.’ In the course of the next five years, German rule killed 6 million Poles, more than half of them Polish Jews.5 The Germans had turned occupied Poland into a slaughterhouse. Auschwitz and the Reinhardt death camps were all built on Polish soil. By the summer of 1944, Soviet General Rokossovsky and the hard-fighting First Byelorussian Front had reached Brest-Litovsk, where Hitler’s troops had massed on 22 June 1941. That month, Soviet troops entered the Lublin district which had been the epicentre of Operation Reinhardt, the systematic mass murder of the Jews in the occupied east. In 1943, Himmler had ordered ‘Action 1005’ to remove all traces of the mass murder camps, like Treblinka, or turn them into forced labour concentration camps. Despite the best ‘cleansing’ efforts of the Germans, enough damning evidence remained to shock the Soviet soldiers and journalists who discovered this ruined archipelago of deat
h. Then the Soviet forces and a small pro-Soviet Polish army led by General Zygmunt Berling pushed on towards the former Polish capital Warsaw, situated at the confluence of the Vistula and Narev rivers.
As the Soviets came ever closer, a grotesque procession began pouring back across the Vistula bridges and then through the old centre of Warsaw. Clad in frayed and tattered bloodstained uniforms, German SS men fled west alongside Ukrainians, Hungarians and Cossacks. Few had any transport; most walked or hobbled painfully. Extreme fatigue and hunger scarred their mud-caked faces. Few still carried arms. In the wake of these shattered relics of Hitler’s war machine came a much bigger wave of civilian refugees. Inside Warsaw, the Germans began dismantling factories and sending industrial plants back to the Reich. Although Hitler had refused to arm any Poles, the German SS governor Ludwig Fischer harangued the Warsovians to ‘demonstrate their anti-Bolshevik sentiments’ as they had when they sent Lenin’s army packing in 1920. Warsaw, he ranted, had become the ‘breakwater for the Red flood’. He ordered Poles to begin building defences. ‘One hundred thousand volunteers immediately!’ But not a single Pole was prepared to lift a finger to defend the hated German garrison.
As this human tide streamed through and past Warsaw, SS staff began incinerating the accumulated paperwork that documented five years of occupation. On 29 July, Poles watched with astonishment as immaculately turned out (and well-fed) soldiers of the Heeresgruppe Weichsel that comprised the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the SS ‘Wiking’, its ranks crowded with Swedes, Estonians, Danes and Norwegians, marched east across the Vistula and through the satellite town of Praga on the east bank. Hitler’s multinational armies dug in to defend Fortress Warsaw (Festung Warschau) and repel the ‘Red tide’ that bore down towards the city – unaware that another hostile army was being mustered in their midst.
From his secret command centre in an old tobacco factory, Polish general Tadeusz Komorowski (codename Bór, the forest) had mustered a secret ‘home army’, comprising some 40,000 fighters. For months, Komorowski had been impatiently observing the retreat of demoralised German soldiers and refugees. Now, surely, it was time to strike hard and fast against the crumbling Reich. Born in L’viv, Komorowski (who had served in the Austrian army and spoke perfect German) was convinced that he and the Polish government in exile could not afford to dither. The Polish resistance was divided. Stalin, who had joined forces with Hitler in 1939 to dismember the Polish state, now backed the communist Polish Committee for National Liberation to ensure that, after the destruction of the Reich, Poland would be securely locked up inside a new Soviet empire. As the war raced to a climax in the east, General Bór and his advisors concluded, after impassioned debate, that seizing the former Polish capital provided the only way to resist the Soviet tide. So they began to hatch up a plan codenamed ‘Tempest’ to seize the initiative and destroy the German garrison. Tempest was planned in secret and no attempt was made to warn the ordinary people of Warsaw of the fire storm that would consume their city. In his underground fortress, General Bór fretted and argued.6
It had been a blistering summer. Now as the leaves in Warsaw’s battered public parks began to turn, Marshall Rassovetsky’s artillery could be heard growling on the eastern horizon. Warsovians apprehensively gazed upwards as Soviet aircraft roared low over the city with increasing frequency. The pressure on the home army leaders was almost unbearable. A decision had to be made – and soon. At 6 p.m. on 31 July, General Bór, after last-minute agonising, sent home army runners out across the city with orders to launch the revolt the following day at 5 p.m. – codenamed W-hour (wybuch, outbreak). At W-hour, Warsovians would be leaving work to get home or dashing to cafes and bars, and the city streets would be packed. General Bór hoped that the timing would catch German garrison troops off guard. As the home army messengers, most of them women, fanned out through every district of Warsaw, it was as if a tremendous electrical current hummed and then flashed from point to point. As the clock ticked down to W-hour, streets and trams began brimming with people hurrying homeward in the sultry heat, oblivious to the troglodyte home army units dashing to their positions beneath their rushing feet. A few shop and cafe owners had been forewarned and they slammed shut their doors and shutters.
The Warsaw Uprising began precisely on schedule at 5 p.m. Home army fighters poured out of their hideouts and on to the streets and some 180 strategic German positions came under attack within minutes: bridges, aircraft runways, the railways stations and military and police headquarters. The fighting was intense and bloody. Less than half of General Bór’s troops had working firearms. But few hesitated to hurl themselves at the hated occupiers. They threw up street barricades, made from anything that lay to hand: bricks, furniture, street-carts, even typewriters and picture frames. In the first few hours, the Germans reeled. By 8 p.m., three hours after W-hour, a number of landmarks had been captured, including the trophy Prudential high rise, the main post office and some city power plants. Many German strongholds held out, but as darkness fell, the Polish national flag could be seen fluttering fitfully from the prudential tower.
Telex reports from the besieged German garrisons in Warsaw flooded into General Governor Frank’s headquarters in Kraków. On the fragile German front line, Warsaw occupied a pivotal position – and the home army had already severed vital supply lines to the German troops who must somehow resist the Soviet onslaught on the eastern side of the Vistula in Praga. German dismay soon metamorphosed into craving for vengeance. The last entry in Frank’s diary, made on 5 August, reads: ‘The city of Warsaw is in flames for the most part. The burning of houses is also the surest method of getting insurgents out of bolt holes. After this insurrection and its crushing, Warsaw will be completely destroyed as it deserves.’7
The uprising had alarming implications. The Soviet army might join forces with the Polish rebels and turn a blaze into a conflagration. General Heinz Guderian, the new Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, urged Hitler to immediately remove Warsaw from Frank’s jurisdiction and make the city a militarised zone, under Wehrmacht control. Hitler, who was still in a state of shock following Colonel von Stauffenberg’s explosive visit to the Wolf’s Lair, brushed Guderian’s suggestion aside.8 Instead, he summoned his SS chief. The destruction of the Polish people that had begun in 1939 could now be finished once and for all. News of the uprising had enraged Himmler. At a meeting of some very worried Gauleiters in Poznan, he had insisted that the uprising changed nothing: ‘[Racial reconstruction] is irreversible … It is irreversible that we create a garden of Germanic blood in the East.’ He then travelled to Rastenburg for a crucial meeting with Hitler, and reported to high ranking SS officers: ‘I should like to tell you this as an example of how one should take news of this kind quite calmly.’ ‘The moment is a difficult one,’ he had somewhat pointlessly informed Hitler. But, he had continued, the uprising was also ‘a blessing’; an opportunity, above all, to punish the Poles who have ‘blocked us in the East for seven hundred years and stood in our way since the first Battle of Tannenburg’. He vowed to end the ‘Polish problem’ forever: ‘In five or six weeks it will all be behind us. Then Warsaw will have been extinguished, the capital, the head, the intelligence of 16 to 17 million Poles.’ The only possible remedy was total destruction: ‘Every block of houses is to be burnt down and blown up.’ Impressed by Himmler’s resolve, Hitler ordered him to crush the uprising with maximum force. Himmler blithely remarked: ‘You may well think that I am a frightful barbarian. I am, if you like, when I have to be.’
Back in Poznan, Himmler summoned his most battle hardened and dedicated SS generals. Heinz Reinefarth had been born in Germany’s eastern borderlands and studied law at Jena University, where he had also acquired an impressive collection of duelling scars. Reinefarth had enjoyed a glittering SS career, serving in Bohemia-Moravia and at the Order Police Main Office in Berlin. At the beginning of 1944, Himmler had appointed him SS and Police Leader (SSPF) in the Reichsgau ‘Wartheland’, where he had energet
ically pursued the task of murdering any recalcitrant Poles. Himmler ordered Reinefarth to form a battle group (Kampfgruppe) and proceed immediately to Warsaw where he would join forces with SS General Erich von dem Bach (formerly Bach-Zelewski). It will be recalled that it was Bach-Zelewski who, in July 1941, had masterminded the destruction of Jewish villages in the Pripet Marshes and who had later been appointed Chief of Bandit Warfare (Chef der Bandenkampfverbände, Ch.BKV) in June 1943. Bach’s codename was ‘Arminius’, after the Germanic warrior who defeated the Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest. His chubby appearance and professorial manner belied his expertise as a ruthless killer of Jews and ‘bandits’.
In 1959, when German prosecutors finally caught up with Bach-Zelewski, who had been reduced to working as a parking garage guard, he provided a detailed account of the orders he had received from Himmler: ‘captured insurgents must be killed’ whether or not they are fighting ‘in accordance with the Hague convention’. Even those ‘not fighting’ – the women and children – ‘should likewise be killed’. All Warsaw, Himmler instructed, ‘must be levelled to the ground’. Nothing could be left standing. The razing of Warsaw would provide a lesson for the rest of Europe: ‘then,’ Himmler concluded, ‘the Polish problem will no longer be a large problem historically for our children, who come after us, nor indeed for us.’ Bach-Zelewski’s defence strategy was the most banal. He was just ‘following orders’ and, as the court soon discovered, he had taken Himmler’s writ as gospel.
To accomplish this monstrous task, Himmler chose his forces with care. He wanted ‘hard men’ who would relish the duty. At his headquarters, Himmler set about building an SS army of vicious German criminals who would be set to work alongside vengeful ‘Eastern troops’ among them Cossacks, Azerbaijanis and a few Ukrainians. These renegades would join forces with other European SS volunteers, serving in the ‘Wiking’ division already stationed on the east bank of the Vistula. Bach’s Korpsgruppe (that incorporated Reinefarth’s Kampfgruppe) comprised some 8,000 men backed by diverse SS and police battalions.9 Himmler and Bach assigned a vanguard role to the notorious SS ‘Dirlewanger’ brigade, commanded by a perverted fanatic called Dr Oskar Dirlewanger. The Sonderkommando Dirlewanger recruited hardcore criminal types dredged from German prisons and army punishment cells: poachers, petty criminals, SS men on punishment duty and a few hundred foreign SS recruits who had ended up on probation. The lugubriously featured Dirlewanger had once been convicted of raping a minor. His good friend SS recruitment chief Gottlob Berger had got the charges dropped. Dirlewanger and his vicious crew had proved their worth to Himmler’s ‘bandit war’ on countless occasions, most recently in Slovakia where they had fought alongside the ‘Galizien’ SS division. At his trial, Bach-Zelewski defended Dirlewanger’s cutthroats: ‘Although their moral qualities left much to be desired, their fighting ability was extremely high. They had nothing to lose and everything to win. They gave no mercy in battle and did not expect any.’ He insisted that: ‘To remove [the Dirlewanger Brigade] from the battle would have been nothing less than to give up any idea of an offensive.’10 He demonstrated, perhaps inadvertently, that the military ethics of the Dirlewanger Sonderkommando defined the ethical horror of the SS assault on Warsaw: it was by intent a criminal act.
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 46
