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

official ban on university education, hundreds of students clandestinely obtained degrees during the war, the courses being overseen by the underground Department of Education and Culture. Professors deported from the University of Poznań established a secret University of Western Lands in Warsaw, with 250 teachers and 2,000 students. Other scholars risked their lives to hold lectures in their flats: one student was sitting her final exams when the Gestapo burst in and arrested her teacher in front of her.¹¹ The Poles even created a successful underground medical school. Parents and teachers organized instruction throughout the country: over 5,200 teachers illegally taught 86,000 elementary school pupils and over 5,600 teachers taught 48,000 secondary school students in the ‘General Government’ (Nazi-occupied Poland). The work was dangerous, as the Germans arrested and executed a large number of Polish teachers: in late 1942 alone 367 were rounded up, most of whom perished in Auschwitz.¹²

      When the Germans banned newspapers the Poles simply printed more; indeed, the underground press became one of the secret triumphs of occupied Poland, churning out everything from the latest speeches by Churchill and Roosevelt and interviews with key figures in the government-in-exile to warnings about local Gestapo and SS activity. It is estimated that around 690 titles were published in Warsaw alone; the AK publication Biuletyn Informacyjny reached its peak at 50,000 copies per edition.¹³ Printing presses were carefully hidden, with secret spaces made by painstakingly removing earth from under buildings by basket. General Bór-Komorowski, the commander of the AK after 1943, visited one of Warsaw’s seven large printing shops, buried underneath a perfectly ordinary-looking house. The printing press was in a stuffy room deep underground, its entrance concealed by a dusty slab of concrete, but as the workers had to arrive and leave at prearranged times, there was no way for them to step out for a breath of air. An elaborate signal system had been hidden in the walls. The presses worked away in the glow of a green light, a sign that everything upstairs was in order. If something did go wrong the old lady who acted as the guard would press a rusty nail in the wall, and a red light would turn on below. The machines would be stopped, and the workers would wait in silence for as many hours or days as it took for the danger to pass. The publications of presses like this one were distributed around town from empty beer barrels or factory cases loaded on the pushcarts used to transport everything in Warsaw in those days. An armed escort would always be nearby. ‘If anyone insisted on seeing the contents,’ Bór said, ‘a shot was the only way of finishing the argument.’¹⁴

      Poles were not officially allowed to listen to foreign radio, but illegal stations sprang up throughout the city like mushrooms; no sooner would the Germans close one down than another would appear. Some broadcast throughout the war. Władysław Rodowicz had a radio station hidden under the basement of his house on Forteczna Street in the pretty suburb of Żoliborz; it was never found, despite repeated raids. At the same time Stefan Korboński fed information from Poland to ŚWIT, a station actually located near London but masquerading as being in Poland. As a result of such stations, Warsawians were well informed about unfolding events, hearing about Stalingrad, Kursk and Normandy as the news broke; when a German defeat was announced, the people of the city quietly celebrated.

      There was entertainment too. Theatres were created in cellars and factories and churches, and Warsawians put on clandestine performances of Adam Mickiewicz, Alexander Fredro, Molière and Shaw; these were augmented by poetry readings, recitations, political discussions and literary evenings. Puppet shows satirized Hans Frank and Ludwig Fischer; one group even re-enacted the death of SS and Police Leader Franz Kutschera on the streets of Warsaw, while others parodied Adolf Hitler in skits reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. The Germans had expected the Polish people simply to forget their cultural heritage, and to go and dig potatoes or slave away in the mines, but this was impossible. One of the tragedies of the Warsaw Uprising was that so many talented men and women whom the Germans had singularly failed to silence between 1939 and July 1944 were killed in the inferno that followed.

      By 1944 some Germans, particularly Hans Frank, Governor of the General Government, realized that the policy of increased brutality was not working. The war was coming to a close, and he, like many top Nazis, assumed that he would be able to play a role in the post-war world as an elder statesman and representative of Germany. Frank hoped that the Poles could be recruited to fight on the German side in what he believed would be a new conflict between the Soviets and the Western Allies, and tried to win them over by opening a few schools and allowing the return of elements of Polish culture; he even had Frédéric Chopin Germanically renamed ‘Frederick Schopping’, thereby allowing the composer’s works to be played in public.¹⁵ Frank’s overtures came to nothing, as in reality he remained the insensitive overlord he always had been. He referred to his wife as ‘the Queen of Poland’, and had a swimming pool built for her in the beautiful Wawel Castle. He kept Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, one of Poland’s greatest treasures, in his private rooms, and tried to take it with him when he packed up and left for Germany in 1945. He paid Poles, including Roman Polanski’s mother, to work at the castle, but never deigned to speak to them as fellow human beings – they were slaves, there to serve his mighty court until they were disposed of. On any given morning he might sign a hundred death warrants or put his signature on the order for another transport bound for Auschwitz, then go in the evening to a concert by the orchestra in which a handful of Polish musicians were allowed to perform for him. Himmler thought of Frank as ‘too soft’, and neither Hitler nor Himmler would sanction any cooperation with the hated Slavs. The Poles poked fun at him constantly. When he published his ‘Days in Poland’ pamphlet for the German Kultur organization, the underground printed a parallel brochure with a new ironic text. Frank’s glowing section on ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (Strength through joy) became an ‘exhibit of manhunts and arrests at home combined with an excursion to view Polish intelligentsia in camps in Oświęcim, Dachau, and Oranienburg’.¹⁶ His true colours shone through when the uprising broke out. He felt betrayed by ‘his’ Poles, and agreed that Warsaw was ‘the point from which all unrest in this land is brought’. Like his masters, he approved of the complete destruction of the city.¹⁷

      As the Allied advance on Nazi Germany continued, the military fight in Poland was spearheaded by the AK, under the auspices of the government-in-exile in London. Under Stefan Rowecki’s leadership from 1940, the Home Army was soon operating throughout occupied Poland. Its structure mirrored the pre-war Polish army’s order of battle, with units formed into divisions, brigades and regiments.

      In order to avoid German reprisal killings, which sometimes amounted to a hundred or more innocent people for the death of one German, the AK focused primarily on intelligence and sabotage. General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, commander in chief of the Polish armed forces in London, held that intelligence-gathering was the most important task of the military underground. It was the Poles who first broke the high-security German Enigma codes, and who provided British and French intelligence with reconstructed Enigma machines on 25 July 1939, just before the outbreak of the war – Winston Churchill later told King George VI that breaking the Enigma code had been the main reason for the Allied victory. Later, the Poles sent detailed reports of the German concentration and extermination camps to the West; they even delivered parts of a captured V-2 rocket. The AK worked closely with the British centre for the coordination of resistance against the Germans in occupied Europe, the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, which in turn dropped weapons, ammunition and Cichociemni agents into Poland. Unlike the British Foreign Office, which became progressively more pro-Soviet and anti-Polish as the war went on, the SOE, whose operatives often worked in highly dangerous situations alongside Poles, had great respect for these unflinchingly pro-British resistance fighters. The Minister for Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, openly declared that ‘I like the Poles,’ while the Director of Operations for Western and Central Europe, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, was a close personal friend of General Sikorski, and got along well with his successor as the head of the government-in-exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk.¹⁸ Thomas Snowden, a British-Canadian operative who worked with his Polish counterparts in Sweden and elsewhere, was not unusual when he said that, aside from his navy colleagues, he would ‘most trust the Poles with his life’.¹⁹ Even the Germans acknowledged their effectiveness: in December 1942 Himmler complained that the Polish resistance was strong, well organized, and had become ‘very