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

lead to a knock on the door by the Gestapo. When Jan Karski was recruited by Dziepatowski, the mood turned very serious. ‘You are now a member of the underground … should you turn informer or make any attempt to betray us, you will be shot. Have I made myself clear?’²⁰ Everyone had a nom de guerre, and the organization was cellular rather than strictly hierarchical. Operatives knew only their superior officer and a handful of colleagues, which meant that they could give away only a limited amount of information even if they were tortured. Some of the most vulnerable were the ‘liaison women’ who were used to maintain contact between underground workers; the nature of their work meant they could not remain in hiding like other operatives, but always had to be reachable. As Karski put it, ‘of all the workers in the underground their lot was the most severe, their sacrifices the greatest, and their contribution the least rewarded. They were overworked and doomed. They neither held high rank nor received any great honours for their heroism. Most of the liaison women with whom I had the honour to work endured the common fate of their sisters. One of them was a young girl of about twenty-two or -three … A message smuggled out of the jail after her first and only interrogation described her condition … “when they carried her away, the lower half of her body was in shreds”.’²¹ Despite all the precautions taken, many hundreds of AK operatives were captured, tortured and shot during the war.

      After the betrayal and arrest of Rowecki in 1943, the AK was commanded by the short, slim and unassuming General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, who would soon be forced to make the agonizing decision about when to start the Warsaw Uprising. Born in 1895, he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army before joining the new Polish army after the First World War. He became a career cavalry officer and commanded the Cavalry School at Grudziądz; a superb horseman, he led the Polish equestrian team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was at the Games that he came to the attention of both Himmler’s protégé Hermann Fegelein and General-Leutnant Hans Källner of 19th Panzer Division, both of whom would fight against him in the uprising. Bór was very effective in the conspiracy, but he was not a tactical commander.²² Andrzej Pomian, one of the post-war founders of the Polish Independence Movement, first met him in London after the war: ‘In my imagination he was a great symbol of heroism and so the first meeting with him was very disappointing.’ Bór, he thought, had ‘nothing of the heroic about him’. He was ‘modest and simple’, and carried the ‘terrifying stigma of having made the decision to start the uprising’. Stanisław Jankowski, code-named ‘Agaton’, spent time in a prisoner of war camp with this ‘tired, shy, polite and friendly man’. Colonel Józef Szostak, Chief of the Operational Bureau of the AK, who had been present on numerous occasions when the fateful decision was being discussed, said of him that he was ‘honest, honourable and brave, but he had absolutely no qualifications to occupy the position that fate allocated to him. He was a pleasant, well-mannered and elegant cavalry officer … but no outstanding individual, and he did not tower over his subordinates in terms of character and valour.’²³

      The AK had been preparing for an uprising against the Germans from the beginning of the war, but that was not their only role: the organization was divided between those who were actively engaged against the enemy throughout and those who were dormant, waiting for the moment they would be called to fight. Most men and women in the AK had ordinary jobs and lived normal lives. Józef Garliński, who was a counter-intelligence officer, traded in old clothes as a cover. The handsome, tennis-playing operative was married to an Irishwoman who stayed in Poland throughout the war: ‘We never spoke about my underground work,’ he said, ‘but she knew that I was deeply engaged in it and the old-clothes trade was only a front to hide my activities. She herself, in spite of my opposition, was involved in similar activities, although to a lesser extent.’²⁴ Włodzimierz Rosłoniec, who was in charge of guarding an arsenal of weapons at Krolewska Street, hinted about his work to his mother shortly before the uprising. She cut him short, saying, ‘I am very happy for you, but don’t tell me anything more, and I won’t tell you anything about my activity – it will be better for both of us.’ They agreed to name an emergency meeting point in case of trouble, but only admitted the extent of their involvement to each other after the war.

      The AK contained a number of elite units, of which the most famous was ‘Kedyw’, a reprisal unit which consisted of men and women trained in sabotage, communications and even chemical warfare. Kedyw and other groups carried out hundreds of operations of sabotage throughout the war, and were so effective that General Siegfried Hänicke complained: ‘My troops do not understand that when they are in the General Government they are not in the Fatherland, but in a region where the majority of the population is hostile to us and opposes us with violence.’²⁵

      Kedyw operatives came from many walks of life, although most were well-educated and from professional backgrounds. One of the most exceptional was Stanisław Aronson. Having escaped from the train taking him to Treblinka, he found refuge at the home of a friend of his mother’s on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw. It was there that he was introduced to a softly-spoken philosophy professor, Józef Rybicki, who turned out to be the head of Kedyw Warsaw. Rybicki realized that this sophisticated and worldly young man might be a good fit in Kedyw, and after a long ‘interview’ he asked if he would join. Aronson agreed, and was given a new ‘Aryan’ identity, a complete set of papers and the pseudonym ‘Rysiek’. He was quickly accepted by the eight-member team of ‘Kedyw Kollegium A’; the fact that he was Jewish was discussed only once, when a colleague asked him if he was from Kresy, ‘or are you Jewish as we can’t place you exactly’. When Aronson admitted his background she promised that they would all protect his identity, and the subject was never mentioned again. All of them understood the particularly grave danger Aronson was in, as the discovery of his true identity could result in betrayal, arrest and death.

      Unlike most AK members, Aronson and his Kedyw colleagues underwent military training throughout the war. They were taught how to operate all types of weapons, from American Thompson submachine guns to German Schmeissers; they attended workshops analysing past operations; and they were trained by the dashing Cichociemni parachuted in from England. One of the more grim ‘ruthless and dark’ tasks undertaken by Aronson’s unit was the execution of traitors sentenced to death by the underground courts, including Poles who collaborated with the Gestapo. ‘Sometimes these actions took a few weeks to prepare. We hung around near the victim’s house and observed his habits. We drew a map of the surrounding streets and alleys, and the layout of the building. When everything was prepared, we went to the victim’s apartment … We then read the sentence and one of my friends carried out the execution.’²⁶

      The most famous Kedyw assassination in Warsaw was of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski’s friend and colleague Franz Kutschera (whose wife was the sister of Hermann Fegelein), who after a short time working with Bach in Byelorussia had been sent to Poland, where he became known as ‘the executioner of Warsaw’. Kutschera, a tall man with a toothy grin and a neat Hitler moustache, was a fanatical enemy of all real or imagined ‘partisans’, and seemed to take great pleasure in identifying and exterminating centres of ‘banditry’, whether as SS and police leader in Mogilev or, from September 1943, in Warsaw. For him all Poles were expendable, and he energetically carried out the policy of mass round-ups and random executions on the streets of the city. It was for this crime in particular that he was found guilty by the Special Court of the Polish Underground State, a verdict approved by the Polish government-in-exile in London. The execution order was given by General Emil August Fieldorf (‘Nil’), the commander of Kedyw for all of Poland. In a brilliantly coordinated attack in front of his residence next to the SS headquarters on 1 February 1944, Kustchera’s car was blocked by another vehicle carrying four Kedyw operatives. Bronisław Pietraszkiewicz (‘Lot’), whom Bór called one of his ‘ablest soldiers’, shot him in the head; one of his colleagues did the same to the SS driver. Within seconds the area came under heavy German fire, but the four men managed to drive off.²⁷ They raced across the bridge to the Hospital of the Transfiguration in Praga, where ‘Lot’ and ‘Cichy’ died of their wounds. The other two men, ‘Sokół’ and ‘Juno’, were later stopped by the Germans, and jumped into the Vistula to try to swim away. They were shot in the water.

      Von dem Bach made a special point of having dinner with Kutschera’s widow, and praising