The German invasion came as a terrible shock to most Poles, and they resisted Nazi rule from the very beginning. The terror was so immediate and unrelenting that collaboration was rare. That, along with the bitterness and anger at the fact that their beloved country had been invaded by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in 1939 meant that there was little serious cooperation with the enemy. There were no Polish quislings or Polish SS divisions during the Second World War; on the contrary, from the first day of the war Poles began to organize resistance movements throughout the country. By 1942 these had been consolidated under the AK – the Armia Krajowa, or Polish Home Army, which was under the auspices of the Polish government-in-exile in London. ‘Grot’ Rowecki, and following his arrest by the Gestapo his successor General ‘Bór’ Komorowski and others, eventually created a force of 300,000 volunteers, both men and women, which became the largest underground army in Europe. The AK was extremely well organized, with a military command structure based on the regular Polish army, but in which only pseudonyms were used, and members were only permitted to know those in their own ‘cell’, in case of interrogation. Weapons were gathered and recruits taught how to use them in secret training sessions; arsenals of equipment were hidden around the country; bombs were manufactured and plans drawn up for the eventual liberation of Poland.
As the Germans rounded up and imprisoned ever more Warsawians the AK engaged in operations of its own. Intelligence-gathering was a priority, and the Poles were responsible for great coups like providing Britain and France with a reconstructed Enigma machine and a V-2 rocket; they also brought proof of the extermination of Polish Jews to the Western Allies. The AK was engaged in more practical matters, too, including the assassination of Nazi officials and collaborators on the streets of Warsaw, primarily carried out by the elite Directorate of Diversion, or ‘Kedyw’ unit.
Nor did the terror stop the Poles from carrying on their cultural life. The Nazis had banned schools, universities and all Polish cultural organizations, but Warsawians set up new clandestine ones – underground university degrees were awarded throughout the occupation, and concerts, poetry readings and secret cabarets which mocked the German rulers were features of underground life. The secret life of Warsaw was testament to the spirit of the city, and offers a glimpse into the reason so many young men and women were willing to fight and to lay down their lives for the city and the country they loved when the call came in 1944.
The AK had been planning an uprising from the beginning of the war. In the early years they had hoped that liberation might come from the west, from Allied forces, but by 1944 it was clear that it would be left to the Soviets to clear the Nazis from Eastern and Central Europe. Relations between the Poles and the Soviets had declined after Stalin’s seizure of ‘his’ part of Poland in 1939; they reached rock bottom with the discovery of thousands of murdered Polish army officers in the mass graves of Katyń. The Poles knew that the Soviets were responsible for this crime, but when they called for an official Red Cross investigation Stalin feigned outrage, and used it as an excuse to break off relations with the ‘London Poles’ altogether, making it impossible for the Poles to cooperate with the Soviets in any meaningful way in the months to come. The Western Allies also knew that the Soviets were responsible for Katyń, but persisted in the charade that Hitler had committed the crime, so as not to annoy Stalin. It was an ominous foretaste of things to come.
Up until the summer of 1944 the AK’s plans for an uprising, code-named ‘Burza’ (Tempest), had called for operations aimed mainly at harassing the Germans as they were retreating, and assisting the Red Army when and where possible. Warsaw had deliberately been left out of the plans because, as Bór put it, he wanted to protect the city and the civilian population from the ravages of war. Carefully laid plans saw weapons being stored throughout Poland; indeed, crucial caches were taken from Warsaw only days before the uprising began. But in July 1944 a series of events took place which changed everything. Years of careful work were thrown out in the heat of the moment. The consequences would be tragic for the city of Warsaw.
The Warsaw Uprising is very often treated as if it were an isolated event, somehow removed from the war going on around it. On the contrary, the uprising was critically linked to three crucial events which determined its future course: the Soviet Operation ‘Bagration’, the 20 July attempt to assassinate Hitler, and Walter Model’s unexpected counter-offensive at the very gates of Warsaw on 29 July.
Bagration was the single greatest Nazi defeat of the Second World War. It began on 22 June 1944 – the third anniversary of Operation ‘Barbarossa’, the German invasion of the Soviet Union – and saw the Red Army sweep through Byelorussia at breakneck speed, taking Vitebsk and Orsha, Mogilev and Mińsk. Soviet soldiers surrounded hapless German troops in gigantic pockets and finished them off at their leisure. Three hundred thousand German soldiers were killed; twenty-eight divisions lost. The scale of the disaster echoes that of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812, and ranks as one of the greatest military defeats of all time. In order to prove the scale of his victory to a disbelieving world, Stalin had 50,000 German prisoners of war marched through Moscow’s Red Square on 17 July on their way to captivity.
The speed and force of the Soviet advance into Byelorussia shocked even Stalin. It had been planned that the Red Army would take a maximum of two hundred kilometres in the entire offensive; they covered that in a few days. The Poles watched as the Soviets raced towards Vilnius, Lwów and Lublin. The AK helped the Red Army soldiers as they entered Polish territory, and relations were cordial at first, but then the NKVD arrived, and began arresting anyone suspected of being involved in the Polish resistance. At the same time, Stalin announced the creation of a Soviet-backed Polish puppet government, known as the ‘Lublin Poles’. It was soon abundantly clear that he was fighting a political as well as a military war, and that he wished to bring Poland under the Soviet yoke. The AK was powerless against the might of the Red Army, but its leaders believed that they could still make a political statement by protesting against Stalin’s plans. They had fought in order to see the restoration of a free, liberal, democratic state led by the men who made up the government-in-exile in London; the vast majority of Poles longed for the same thing. They did not want to live under the Soviet oppression which Stalin was trying to impose on them. With the Red Army moving inexorably towards Warsaw, the decision was made to take a stand in the capital city, for the Poles to push the Germans out themselves, and to greet the Soviets as equals. Surely then the rest of the world would heed their call for independence, and put pressure on Stalin. The plan seemed so simple in those heady summer days.
The notion that the Germans were about to collapse was widespread in Warsaw in the final days of July 1944. For weeks Warsawians had watched as bedraggled German soldiers made their way through the city, wounded, filthy and dejected. When news of the plot to kill Hitler reached Warsaw it really did seem as if the Third Reich was about to implode. The AK believed that the time was right to rise up against the departing Germans and seize the capital just before the Soviets arrived. They could welcome the Red Army into their city as the rightful ‘hosts’, and score an enormous political victory over Stalin. That, at least, was the plan.
The second important event of that summer in relation to the uprising was the 20 July attempt to assassinate Hitler at the Wolfsschanze, because it elevated Himmler at the expense of the Wehrmacht, with terrible consequences for Warsaw. The Führer survived the attack, only to become increasingly paranoid and suspicious of his generals. Himmler took advantage of their fall from grace, and worked to increase his own power. After the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising Guderian requested that Warsaw be put under the jurisdiction of the 9th Army, but Himmler wanted the prize for himself. Hitler deferred to the Reichsführer SS. As Guderian put it, ‘Himmler had won’. The uprising would be put down not by regular troops, but by some of the most notorious of Himmler’s SS thugs, who had honed their skills in the killing fields of Byelorussia – Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Oskar Dirlewanger, Bronisław Kaminski and members of Einsatzgruppe B, who had been unceremoniously