Speed was important. If the Third Reich was going to implode, Stalin knew that he would have to act quickly to position himself politically in Eastern and Central Europe. The Soviet dictator was now waging an all-out political, as well as military, war. As the last of the German stragglers were being hunted down in the forests around Minsk, Stalin summoned Zhukov and General A.I. Antonov to his summer house outside Moscow. ‘We are strong enough to finish off Nazi Germany single-handed,’ he declared triumphantly. Zhukov said that ‘no one had any doubt that Germany had definitely lost the war. This was settled on the Soviet–German front in 1943 and the beginning of 1944. The question now was how soon and with what political and military results the war would end.’54 Later that afternoon they were joined by Foreign Minister Molotov and other members of the State Committee for Defence. Stalin asked Zhukov: ‘Can our troops reach the Vistula without a stop, and in what sector can we commit the 1st Polish Army, which has acquired combat efficiency?’ ‘Not only can our troops reach the Vistula,’ Zhukov replied, ‘but they must secure good bridgeheads which are essential for further offensive operations in the strategic direction of Berlin. As for the 1st Polish Army, it should be directed towards Warsaw.’ At this point, Warsaw was less than two hundred kilometres from the front.
News of the assassination attempt only fuelled Stalin’s determination to set up the political structure he desperately needed before Germany collapsed completely or arranged a separate peace with the West. Always wary of his allies, he told the chief of the NKGB, Boris Merkulov, that ‘as long as Hitler is alive the Allies will not sign a separate peace with Germany. But they will sign a peace at once with a new government.’55 It was a time of frenetic activity. The day after the attempt on Hitler’s life the 47th Guards Army reached the western Bug River. On the same day the Red Army formed the Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of National Liberation, PKWN) in Chełm. Stalin announced that this was now the ‘only legitimate Polish government’ in place on Polish soil, essentially ending any chance of reconciliation between the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Soviets. The link between Soviet military conquest and political domination was becoming abundantly clear.
Zhukov was intrinsically involved in this political element of the war. On 9 July he had met Stalin and Bolesław Bierut, Edward Osóbka-Morawski and Michał Rola-Żymierski, Stalin’s Polish puppets in the PKWN. ‘The Polish comrades spoke of the plight of their people who had been suffering German occupation for over four years,’ Zhukov recalled. He conveniently forgot the fact that the war had started in 1939 with the mutual Soviet–German dismemberment of Poland, and the mass deportation and murder of tens of thousands of Poles. ‘The members of the Polish National Liberation Committee … burned to see their homeland free as soon as possible.’ Stalin decided that the new government was to be based in Lublin.
This political decision to set up a puppet government in Lublin, the largest city in the area, explains why on 21 July Stavka ordered General Bogdanovitj to move away from his original target of taking Siedlce and turn instead towards Lublin. Stavka issued an order to Rokossovsky to capture Lublin no later than 27 July. This ran counter to military logic, but Rokossovsky was told to put aside his doubts, as ‘the political situation and the democratic independent interests of Poland acutely required this’.56
On 22 July Rokossovsky’s 1st Byelorussian Front broke through against 4th Panzer Army’s weak defence. Hitler had designated Lublin another ‘fortress city’, but the term was virtually meaningless, as it was being held by a mere nine hundred men. Lublin fell on 23 July. On the same day the Soviets liberated the concentration camp at Majdanek. This horrifying place, with its huts and brick crematoria and barbed-wire enclosures, was now virtually empty. The ever-efficient SS, under the direction of camp commander SS Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel, had evacuated 15,000 prisoners in the previous weeks, the last thousand sent on a pitiless ‘death march’ just one day before the Soviets arrived. The Soviets found only a few hundred survivors trapped behind the barbed wire; most of them were severely crippled prisoners of war. They also found gas chambers, stained blue by Zyklon B, which the Germans had not had time to destroy completely. Eight hundred thousand shoes that had been earmarked for shipment to German civilians lay abandoned in a dusty pile.
Also on 23 July, the Polish underground AK started another uprising, this time in Lwów. This most elegant of cities, with its splendid pastel-coloured neoclassical buildings, once stood at the very furthest reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It had always been a tolerant and welcoming place, with myriad religions and languages. Poles and Ukrainians, Jews and Germans, Russians and Armenians had all lived and traded and argued together there. Before the war its great university had contained one of Europe’s most celebrated faculties of mathematics, including world-renowned figures such as Stefan Banach and Stanisław Ulam.
On 18 July the German civilian authorities and pro-Nazi Ukrainian troops fled, but Hitler ordered that the Wehrmacht troops hold the city. The Polish Home Army under Władysław Filipkowski was poised to rise up, but waited until the Soviet 29th Tank Brigade of the 4th Tank Army had actually reached the city limits. The Soviet attack on Lwów was part of the hugely successful Lwów–Sandomierz offensive, which in concert with Bagration forced the Germans from Ukraine and eastern Poland. That evening the AK began the uprising, capturing the main railway station and taking the large nineteenth-century fortress, which was still filled with German supplies. The Soviet approach to Lwów had been slowed by the weather and by fanatical German resistance around Brody, but unlike so many units trapped in Hitler’s ‘fortress cities’, the Lwów garrison decided not to stand and fight, and managed to escape on 26 July. The Soviet 10th Tank Corps entered the outskirts of Lwów on 23 July, and were joined by the 4th Guards Tank Army. The city fell to General Konev on 27 July, and the Soviet and AK troops cooperated in mopping up any Germans still left there. The Soviets congratulated their Polish comrades on their mutual victory. But the euphoria was not to last.
Vyacheslav Yablonsky was a member of an NKVD squad sent into towns and cities to raid Gestapo and SS headquarters before the Germans could destroy evidence of their crimes. Tearing into Lwów in his American Studebaker truck, he and his team of twenty men dodged the retreating Germans and broke into the Gestapo building, where they found documents containing the names of Nazi collaborators and other ‘enemies of the Soviet Union’, as well as all the information the Nazis had gathered on the Polish Home Army. Interrogations began immediately. ‘Informers told us if somebody hated the Soviets and was a threat to us, and we would arrest him … they could be saying bad things about us or just thinking we were bad. Once arrested the normal sentence was about fifteen years of forced labour … we thought it was normal at the time.’57 The Soviets arrested over 5,000 Home Army soldiers who had fought with them as brothers in arms only days before. Most were sent to the Miedniki gulag; those who remained were forcibly conscripted into the Red Army, usually into Stalin’s Polish 1st Army. This was treachery on a grand scale, and served as another grave warning to General Bór-Komorowski. The Warsaw Uprising was only days away. But after the arrest of so many Home Army soldiers in Lwów, Wilno and elsewhere, Bór had absolutely no reason to put his trust in Stalin.
After the fall of Lwów the Germans tried desperately to stop the Soviet advance towards the capital. General von Vormann was told to defend the Vistula’s central portion and the city of Warsaw with the reorganized 9th Army, but this was impossible. There simply were not enough troops. Von Vormann reported to Army Group Centre on 25 July that ‘there is not a single German division between Puławy and Siedlce’ – the area just east of Warsaw – while the road to Warsaw was not manned ‘by a single German soldier’.
On the same day the 8th Guards Army reached the eastern bank of the Vistula