On 5 August, the German assault began with a massive artillery barrage. Bach-Zelewski’s strategy depended on seizing home army strongholds in the centre of Warsaw, located deep beneath the winding streets of the Old Town. Since Polish units still controlled the main road arteries that led from the western suburbs east towards the heart of the city, the SS ‘Attack Group’ would first need to smash enemy strongholds in the Wola district. Warsaw resembled a medieval vision of hell. A thick column of black smoke rose high above the Old Town. German garrison troops, still besieged in the Old Town, began shooting Polish civilians, usually on the pretext that home army insurgents had been spotted firing from their houses; a flood of terrified women, children and the elderly, streamed west – straight into the path of the SS assault. No mercy would be shown to any Pole armed or unarmed. Heading the attack, the Dirlewanger Brigade and their Azerbaijani accomplices battered their way through Wola with unrelenting savagery. One eyewitness saw German troops pushing screaming women and children back into a burning apartment block. Many Polish families fled inside Wola’s old macaroni factory. It was a deathtrap. SS troops set fire to the factory then machine-gunned anyone who tried to escape or let loose their hunt dogs. At the macaroni factory 3,000 unarmed civilians are thought to have been killed. At another factory nearby, SS soldiers murdered some 5,000 people in the same way.
Hospitals too offered Himmler’s SS warriors special opportunities to wreak havoc. At Wolski Hospital, German troops fanned out through the wards, shooting some of the sick and injured where they lay. Anyone who could walk or run they drove onto a nearby railway viaduct where a machine gun had been set up. The Wolksi was burnt to the ground. Many other hospitals suffered the same dreadful fate. Just one escaped destruction. This was where Dr Dirlewanger set up a temporary headquarters.
The assault on Warsaw, in other words, was the climax of Himmler’s Bandenbekämpfung – fought this time not in the forests and swamps of Belorussia and Ukraine, but in city streets by Chief SS Bandit Hunter, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. A German army observer recalled that Dr Dirlewanger seemed to be ‘everywhere’: ‘a fellow with a pronounced, remarkable look of a hanging bird.’ As they fought their way towards the Old Town, building by building, street by street, the Dirlewanger’s men hurled both the living and the dead from apartment windows on to the streets where they ‘lay still’. On another occasion, the same witness watched as Dirlewanger rounded up Polish women and children and drove them forward as a human shield.25
In the neighbouring western suburb of Ochota, Bach-Zelewski unleashed the RONA or Kaminsky Brigade. Commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Bronislav Kaminsky, these wild-eyed, habitually intoxicated young Russian men attacked city hospitals with as much relish as Dirlewanger’s thugs. Inside the famous Madame Curie Institute, they robbed and looted patients, raped and murdered nurses. When the RONA men tired of this sport, they corralled any surviving patients and staff in the hospital garden. As the RONA men raced through the hospital setting it ablaze, SS men began firing wildly into the defenceless crowd of hospital workers and patients.
The RONA was the largest single group of non-Germans serving in Himmler’s army. Like the Azerbaijanis, they began as German army recruits, not Waffen-SS men. In the summer of 1942, Wehrmacht commanders set up a Selbstverwaltungsbezirk (self-administration area) in the region, centred on the small town of Lokot, south of Bryansk.26 When partisans stepped up raids in Lokot the following year, Kaminsky, a local strongman who was leader of the National Socialist Russian Workers Party, approached the Germans with a suggestion to form a local defence militia. Kaminsky was a swaggering loudmouth who impressed the Germans as someone who could get things done. Born in Vitebsk, Russia, to a Polish father and a German mother, Kaminsky studied chemistry in Leningrad and after graduating found work as an engineer. But in July 1935 he was arrested by the NKVD, accused of espionage and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. Although he served half his sentence, and even joined the Soviet army when he was released, Kaminsky was fiercely anti-Bolshevik and welcomed the German occupation.
By the end of 1942, Kaminsky’s RONA (Russkaia Osvoboditel’naia Narodnaia Armiia), or Russian Army of Liberation, had swollen to division strength, fitted out with all the trappings of a modern army at the cost to the German occupiers of 3–4 million roubles a month.27 The RONA men rampaged through Kaminsky’s fiefdom, burning villages and murdering anyone suspected of sheltering partisans. The German occupiers occasionally expressed mild disapproval. One disgruntled army officer complained that Kaminsky behaved ‘like an African chieftain’: he pilfered German supplies and, when challenged, was ‘insolent’. He used German staff cars to drive his ‘female companions’ to the theatre and cinema while displaying a sign that read ‘In the service of the Wehrmacht’. His generous fuel allowance was used taking Hurenfahrten (whoring trips). The German commanders, however, would hear nothing wrong. They spoilt Kaminsky with fine wines, spirits, cigars and, for his many female admirers, perfume.28 Hitler sent a personal message of congratulations following an especially ‘successful’ engagement with Soviet ‘bandits’.
In September 1943 the Germans closed down the Lokot experiment. Soon afterwards, as the Soviet army pushed ever closer, German troops began to pull back from Bryansk – and Kaminsky and his RONA troops followed, along with tens of thousands of their camp followers. Association with any of the Wehrmacht ‘self-administrations’ was a ticket to a gulag camp or a firing squad. With the Soviet army baying at their heels, the desperate RONA caravanserai fled to the Vitebsk region of Belorussia, and it was here that Kaminsky began courting the SS. By early 1944, the region was convulsed by Soviet partisan attacks. Although RONA was by now plagued by desertions, Kaminsky led a number of attacks on Belorussian villages and managed to impress Himmler, who awarded him an Iron Cross 2nd Class. In June, Himmler agreed to absorb the Kaminsky Brigade into the Waffen-SS as the Waffen-Sturm-Brigade RONA – later renamed (on 1 August) the 29th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (russische no 1). Kaminsky himself was appointed Waffen-Brigadeführer and general-major.29 At the end of July, Himmler dispatched the RONA to Warsaw.
As the SS attack group battered their way into Warsaw’s western suburbs, the RONA SS men rampaged from street to street, building to building, dragging anyone they discovered alive from their hiding places for summary execution. Like malicious magpies, they ransacked the dead and dying, gloating over their hoard of gold watches, rings and dental fillings … For elite German SS officers, Kaminsky’s men were barbaric Untermenschen. But Himmler had demanded the systematic plunder of the Polish capital and Kaminsky’s troops, in their fashion, obeyed. As the RONA men murdered and robbed, at Warsaw’s rail depots German auxiliary troops loaded Reichsbahn wagons with their booty and dispatched it to warehouses in Germany.
Even Bach-Zelewski was forced to report that ‘The Poles are fighting like heroes’. He was painfully aware that jealous Wehrmacht commanders like Guderian had begun to grumble that the SS ‘Attack Group’ was taking much too long to crush the home army. The toll on home army companies rose every hour, but in the Old Town the famous statue of King Sigismund III still stood proudly on his marble plinth: a precarious symbol of resistance that taunted the German SS commanders. The strategic dilemma was that Himmler’s doctrine of Bandenbekämpfung obligated the SS troops to carry out mass murder of Polish civilians – not simply to rout the home army. ‘Bandit warfare’ which conflated civilians, above all Jews and combatants, had provided the logic behind the deployment of the RONA and Dirlewanger brigades – but to fight Himmler’s ‘bandit war’ in a modern city took time. Bach-Zelewski faced complex strategic obstacles. Home army tactics forced the Germans to engage them on two closely linked fronts: on the surface in streets, apartments and public buildings, and underground in cellars, sewers and the maze of tunnels that the Polish commanders used with great cunning to both conceal and deploy their highly mobile forces. Above ground, the Germans used heavy ordnance and flamethrowers to pulverise buildi
ngs and incinerate their defenders. Below, they resorted to pumping an odourless, colourless gas called ‘A-Stoff’ into sewer and tunnel entrances. This was then ignited – with gruesome consequences for anyone caught in the explosion. As John Erickson aptly put it: ‘The German command fused ingenuity with bestiality to fight one of the ghastliest battles of the war.’30
On 9 August, after more than a week of brutal combat, General Bach’s licensed killers finally reached the Vistula and swung round to encircle the Old Town. As Allied negotiators implored Stalin to intervene, the German ring tightened remorselessly, and air and artillery bombardment reduced Warsaw with terrible speed to what General Bór admitted was a ‘city of ruins’, where there were only ‘ruins left to burn’. As the final German assault began, a fog of cloying dust thickened the sultry air. A new kind of ‘terror weapon’ now rumbled on to the streets, pushing aside smashed barricades and piles of foetid corpses. A Polish journalist nicknamed this new horror the ‘bellowing cow’ – it emitted a tremendous roar ‘like some kind of monster before the flood’; its ‘hellish breath’ incinerated buildings, turning their occupants into living torches.31
In the subterranean strongholds, home army commanders could see that their position was hopeless. On 19 August, General Bór ordered a ‘fighting withdrawal’ from the Old Town and 2,500 Polish fighters began to slip through sewers and other escape routes, carrying or dragging their ‘moveable wounded’. When the Germans finally broke their way into General Bór’s empty stronghold at the end of the month, they discovered a mound of corpses and a few wounded men. Bach-Zelewski’s licensed killers showed them neither mercy nor respect. They emptied cans of petrol over the living and the dead and set them on fire.
The terrible events that consumed the city of Warsaw in the autumn of 1944 have a troubling resonance in Polish and European history and memory. Most historians believe that the anti-communist Polish home army was betrayed by Stalin and his generals and that Great Britain and the United States offered not military aid but mere hand-wringing. According to another view, the uprising was a tragic mistake that offered Hitler and the SS the opportunity to ‘finish the job’ of extinguishing the Polish nation state – and Stalin the means to destroy the anti-Communist Polish home army. There can be no doubt that the destruction of Warsaw, its defenders and tens of thousands of Polish civilians was the final act of Himmler’s ‘war on bandits’, waged by his most fearsome bandit hunter, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Himmler admitted this to his SS officers in September: ‘I … gave orders for Warsaw to be totally destroyed … As a result, one of the biggest abscesses on the Eastern Front has been removed.’32
Resistance formally came to an end on 30 September. Historian Andrew Boroweic in his book Destroy Warsaw has published reliable figures, based in part on Bach-Zelewski’s war diary, that unequivocally demonstrate the full horror of one of the last and most terrible battles of the Second World War. In 1939, the population of Warsaw stood at 1.2 million, including 352,000 Jews. After the 1943 ghetto uprising, that figure had been reduced to 974,745, including 24,222 German occupation officials and hangers on. The SS killed 1,559 identified Poles, but estimated actual Polish losses at over 100,000, with 15,000 wounded and taken prisoner. According to Bach-Zelewski, German SS forces lost 73 officers and NCOs, and 1,453 men, with just over 8,000 wounded.
Hitler awarded the Knight’s Cross to Bach-Zelewski and to Dr Dirlewanger. Reinefarth, who had already had the award, received the Oak Leaves cluster. At Bach-Zelewski’s headquarters, the German conquerors held a riotous ‘medal party’.33 In his diary, Bach-Zelewski commented: ‘In these days I have become part of history and I am so proud for my sons.’
Hitler’s demonic lust for destruction was not yet satisfied. He dispatched teams of engineers called Brandkommandos (fire commandos) to the smouldering ruins of Warsaw. They fell on the smouldering ruins with flamethrowers and explosives, obliterating anything left standing. For weeks, these engineers of annihilation worked their way across a landscape of desolation, ripping the old Polish capital apart, brick by blackened brick. Scrap metal, however, was loaded on to carts and sent to Germany.
But not all of Himmler’s warriors shared in the triumph. SS-Brigadeführer Bronislav Kaminsky was not awarded a German medal. Kaminsky and his RONA fighters had learnt their trade as partisan hunters in the occupied Soviet Union. In Warsaw, they had applied those lessons with drunken dedication. Kaminsky clearly understood what Bandenbekämpfung meant, whether it was waged in a forest or a city. But at some point during the Warsaw campaign, Bach-Zelewski had tuned into the BBC and discovered with dismay that he had been added to the Allied list of war criminals. To begin with he expressed astonishment – after all, he had, as he put it himself, ‘always shown extreme humanity before God’. Then Bach-Zelewski began to wonder who might dare testify against him. Dr Dirlewanger was, of course, a German SS officer bound by Prussian military codes of conduct. If the Allies chose to investigate Bach-Zelewski’s wartime conduct, Dirlewanger could be relied on not to betray his commanding officer. But Kaminsky was a different matter. He would surely betray even his own Russian grandmother. So Bach-Zelewski ordered Kaminsky’s immediate arrest along with three of his staff officers and had them court-martialled. The SS court found Kaminsky guilty of ‘failing to obey orders’ and sentenced him to death.34 The sentence was duly carried out but some kind of subterfuge was needed to prevent a mutiny by the surviving RONA men. SS men upended Kaminsky’s Mercedes in a ditch and riddled it with bullets. Photographs were taken of the scene and shown to a few trustworthy RONA officers. Their beloved leader had been assassinated – by ‘bandits’.
Former SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was not brought to justice for many years after the war ended. But at the end of the 1950s, he was successfully tried and convicted of war crimes by a German court. He died, a shabby relic of Himmler’s war, in a prison cell. Heinz Reinefarth, his fellow commander, had much better luck: he enjoyed a comfortable and lucrative post-war career as mayor of Westerland on the island of Sylt – and in 1962 was elected a representative of Schleswig-Holstein. Reinefarth died peacefully at his luxurious Sylt manor in 1979.
14
Bonfire of the Collaborators
I do not regret at all my past … Every morning I can look into the mirror without shame or pangs of conscience.
French SS volunteer1
On 23 March 1945 Adolf Hitler summoned a group of German army generals to his private apartments in the battered Chancellery in Berlin. He was not happy: ‘We don’t know what all is strolling around out there [sic]. Now I hear for the first time, to my surprise, that a Ukrainian SS Division has suddenly appeared. I didn’t know anything about this Ukrainian SS Division.’ Hitler was just getting started: ‘The Indian Legion are a joke!’ He was referring to a German army infantry regiment, the Indische Freiwilligen-Legion Regiment 950, which had been recruited by the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in German and Italian POW camps. The legion had been taken over by the Waffen-SS in August 1944. ‘There are Indians who couldn’t kill a louse, who’d rather be eaten themselves. What are they still supposed to be fighting for, anyway?’ Hitler had a good idea who was to blame for this dire state of affairs: ‘Tomorrow I’d like to speak with the Reichsführer [Himmler] right away. He’s in Berlin anyway … We can’t afford the luxury of having units like that.’2 The next day, Himmler was forced to endure a ferocious dressing down. A month later, on 28 April, Hitler was informed that the ‘loyal Heinrich’ had tried to open ‘peace negotiations’ with the Allies through a Swedish intermediary, Count Folke Bernadotte.3 Reuters had put out the story and it had been picked up by the BBC. The news provoked one of the last and most violent of Hitler’s infamous temper tantrums. He sent orders to have Himmler banished from the movement and executed. Two days later Hitler was dead. The order was never carried out.
The excommunication of Heinrich Himmler seemed to be a precipitate fall from grace and power set in motion by his futile atte
mpt to negotiate with the Allies. But Himmler had known for more than a year that Hitler’s game was up. After the failure of the bomb plot in July 1944, the SS and its armies had dominated the Reich. Germany had at last become an SS state. In August, Hitler had chosen the Waffen-SS to destroy Warsaw and snubbed the German army. In Hitler’s court, grandees like Hermann Göring had fallen from grace; Martin Bormann and Propaganda Minister Goebbels were Himmler’s last rivals. In public, Himmler continued to profess absolute loyalty to the Führer. In private he knew that radical changes would need to be made to ensure that his SS empire somehow survived the certain defeat of Germany. Hitler was a broken man – but his hold on power would need to be loosened if the tide of collapse was to be stemmed. In the bitter winter of 1944/45, the old bonds between Hitler and Himmler began to crumble. In Hitler’s mind, the SS chief had let him down once too often. Given command of Army Group Vistula, he had failed and ended up feigning illness in a sanatorium. Above all, he had contaminated the once mighty armies of the Reich with the impure blood of ‘Ukrainians’ and other foreign recruits – and for this he could never be forgiven. To unfold the downfall of Heinrich Himmler we need to return to the summer of 1944, as Waffen-SS recruitment strategy entered its final phase.
The Nazi Reich had been shattered. Germany was under assault from east, west and south. Armadas of Allied bombers battered German cities day and night virtually unopposed by the Luftwaffe. More than 3.5 million German soldiers were missing or dead. On the home front, morale continued to plummet. Hitler had not been seen in public for many months and his voice was rarely heard on German radio. He refused to visit ruined German cities or wounded troops in military hospitals. In every corner of Europe, there was chaos and misery. From the east, great refugee armies fled the relentless advance of Stalin’s armies. In a futile attempt to cover up traces of the worst genocide in human history, SS men drove tens of thousands of camp survivors on death marches back towards the old German borders. Chronic disarray plagued the Nazi elite and the high command of the Wehrmacht. Hitler, drugged on amphetamines and other medications, deluded into fantasies of victory by the promise of new ‘wonder weapons’, spent his waking hours raging at his generals. In the hell of the collapsing Reich two men still prospered. One was Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and now Minister of Armaments, whose ruthless application of ‘total war’ management strategy and ruthless exploitation of slave labourers kept German factories at work. The other was SS chief and Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful member of the Nazi elite. As he scrapped with his Wehrmacht generals, Hitler enjoyed singing the praises of their hated rivals. The Waffen-SS was, he told lunch companions at the Chancellery, ‘an extraordinary body of men, devoted to an idea, loyal unto death’. But a barely acknowledged tension crackled between the two Nazi leaders. The seeds of Himmler’s downfall had been sown.
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 48
