Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

and western Ukraine were to be detained and disarmed. Ivan Serov, Lavrentii Beria’s deputy, who was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers at Katyń in 1940, and who would later crush the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was sent to Wilno to ‘guarantee’ that this was done. ‘Wilk’ and his officers were invited to discuss future ‘terms of cooperation with the Red Army’, but were taken prisoner instead; those who resisted were shot. Beria reported to Stalin that 15,000 AK soldiers had been disarmed, and requested his permission to hand those officers who had ‘operative value’ over to the NKVD, the NKGB and SMERSH; the rest were to go to NKVD camps ‘lest they undertake the organization of numerous Polish underground formations’.⁴² News of this treachery reached General Bór-Komorowski, who was now in the final stages of planning the uprising in the Polish capital. A few days later Beria moved Serov to Lublin to repeat the process there. Serov would then be sent to Warsaw, where he would have most of the AK soldiers or ‘hostile elements’ who fell into his hands either forced to join the Soviet-led Polish 1st Army, or sent to prison camps.⁴³ After the arrests in Wilno, Bór knew that Soviet treachery in Warsaw was a foregone conclusion. It was not a good omen.

      General Stahel, on the other hand, was lionized by Hitler for his defence of Wilno against the advancing Red Army. That most of his troops had been killed was irrelevant: Stahel had held on, and that was enough. Hitler awarded him Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross, and appointed him city commander of Warsaw.⁴⁴ But this was to prove irrelevant. Stahel would spend the beginning of the uprising under siege in the Brühl Palace, and Himmler would wrest control from him soon enough.

       To Kill Hitler

      The second extraordinary event to rock Germany in the summer of 1944, after the shock of Bagration, was the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July. The day after the collapse of Wilno, Hitler had moved back to the stifling atmosphere of Rastenburg in order to be close to the front, swapping the homely Berghof for the miserable Wolf’s Lair, which was situated in what even he called ‘the swampiest, most climatically unfavourable and midge-infested region possible’.⁴⁵ During the flight he had kept the blinds of the aircraft drawn to spare himself views of destroyed German towns. But he made the move believing that ‘As long as the soldiers know I am holding out here, they will be all the more determined in their struggle to stabilize the front.’⁴⁶

      Rastenburg was stifling. It was high summer, and the air was hot and sticky. The air-conditioning whined all day; even the guards wore mosquito-netting over their helmets. Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder recalled the horrible boredom and isolation there: ‘We sleep, eat, drink, and let people talk to us, if we are too lazy to talk ourselves.’ Hitler seemed to turn in upon himself, sitting in his rooms isolated from the rest of the world. According to his doctor, Morell, who by now had him hooked on various drugs, Hitler had developed a kind of ‘bunker mentality’. ‘It was the only place he felt at home … the only place he could work and think.’⁴⁷

      Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed attempt on Hitler’s life at the Wolf’s Lair on 20 July was to have dire consequences for the fate of the Warsaw Uprising. First, Hitler came out of the destroyed conference room believing that he had been saved by divine providence, and was destined to snatch Germany from the jaws of defeat. According to Christa Schroeder, he had had a premonition about the attack the night before. ‘Nothing must happen to me,’ he had told her. ‘There is nobody who can carry on the business.’ Just after the blast, Morell heard him shout, ‘I’m invulnerable! I’m immortal!’ Albert Speer found Hitler ‘triumphant’ in the days after the attack, believing that he had discovered the true reason for his failure to win the war: the treachery of his own generals. ‘Now at last the great positive turning point in the war had come. The days of treason were over, new and better generals would assume the command.’ Hitler, who had previously referred to the barbarity of the Soviet dictator, now praised Stalin for the Terror, claiming that by eliminating the former commander-in-chief of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky, and liquidating his General Staff he had ‘made room for fresh, vigorous men’, free of the tainted ideas of Tsarist times. Hitler even toyed with the preposterous notion that there had been ‘treasonous collaboration’ between the Russian and German general staffs. ‘Now I know why all my great plans in Russia had to fail in recent years. It was all treason! But for those traitors we would have won long ago!’⁴⁸

      He continued to rant against the generals and the officer corps, becoming ever more paranoid until his death in the Berlin bunker in April 1945. As the US Strategic Bombing Survey later put it, the attempt on his life ‘set in motion in the mind of that evil and uncertain man a chain of psychological reactions that separated the Führer from his advisers and friends and gradually undermined his psyche. In the end, these reactions trapped Hitler in the maze of his own obsessions and left him with self-destruction as the only escape.’⁴⁹

      The German commanders scrambled to outdo one another in the proof of their loyalty. Model was the first to write a note of condolence to the ‘great man’: ‘Mein Führer,’ he said, ‘we soldiers of Army Group Centre and Army Group Nordukraine have just heard with outrage and hatred of the criminal attempt against your life. We thank the Almighty that He kept you, and all of Germany through you, from unimaginable disaster.’⁵⁰ All the other generals followed suit, probably more to divert suspicion than out of genuine feelings of relief. They tried to ingratiate themselves in other ways, too. General Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of operations for the OKW, remembered how Keitel and Göring had announced that ‘as an indication of the unshakeable loyalty to the Führer and of the close bonds of comradeship between Wehrmacht and Party, the Party salute is to be made obligatory for all members of the Services’.⁵¹ The order was duly given. ‘The traditional salute of touching the cap with the right hand was now forbidden, and the Nazi Party salute, thrusting an outstretched right arm forward, was made mandatory. This was observed with contempt and resentment by soldiers who honoured military tradition,’ recalled Warlimont, ‘and the order was taken as an insult … it was not uncommon to observe entire companies carrying their mess tins in their right hands to avoid being compelled to demonstrate their “loyalty to the party”.’ Later, many soldiers would claim that the assassination attempt had ‘not caused a tear to be shed’ among their colleagues. They had fought on not out of loyalty to Hitler, but because they felt ‘bound to our duty by the oath we had sworn as soldiers of Germany; to swear, with weapons in hand, to defend our country even to the sacrifice of our lives. Not even a change in command or policy could free us from this oath.’⁵²

      The failed assassination attempt would have a profound effect on the course of the Warsaw Uprising precisely because the German generals had been so deeply disgraced in Hitler’s eyes. Top Nazis now vied and plotted for influence. Kurt Zeitzler, who had told Hitler to his face that his ‘fortress city’ policy was madness, had a nervous breakdown. Heinz Guderian replaced him as Army Chief of Staff on 21 July; his promotion even earned him a cover picture on Time magazine. Goebbels used the attempt as an opportunity to push harder for ‘total war’: ‘It takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason,’ he wrote.⁵³ This would affect both the use of slave labour from Warsaw during the uprising and the creation of the Volkssturm, or ‘people’s army’, which was inspired in part by the Polish resistance.

      The most chilling outcome of the failed plot to kill Hitler, and the one which would have the most significant influence on the future of Warsaw, was the meteoric rise of Heinrich Himmler and the SS. Himmler was now presumptive commander-in-chief of the army, commander of the Reserve Army (a group of units of trainees and older soldiers not yet released from service) and chief of army armament, as well as commander-in-chief of the Volksgrenadier Divisions. His new position at the head of the Reserve Army, in particular, gave him great power. Himmler saw 20 July as a chance to imbue the military with the Nazi Party spirit, and to kindle the ‘fire of the people’s holy war’. At last the Waffen SS was to be accepted as an equal partner with the army, navy and air force. National Socialist political officers were appointed to all military headquarters – a direct copy of Soviet practice perfected by the NKVD. Thus, when the uprising broke out only eleven days after the attempt on his life, Hitler would not