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

property of the Soviet Union after the war. Roosevelt would do nothing to endanger his ‘special relationship’ with Stalin, while Churchill was too weak to influence the outcome, despite his pangs of conscience about Britain’s loyal ally. And so this freedom-loving and independent nation was condemned by geography, by power and by politics to the mercy of Hitler and Stalin. The novelist Maria Dąbrowska watched, torn, as the Germans attacked the Red Army in August 1944: ‘It is like 1941 all over again – all are going eastward. The Germans have apparently moved ten divisions to the Warsaw front. It is tragic to have to say that we hear of this with some relief, as the thought of a Bolshevik invasion is our utter nightmare.’ It is precisely the hopelessness of the situation that makes the uprising so controversial. The heroism of the fighters and the civilians is not in doubt. But it is clear that many grave mistakes were made.

      The greatest problem was that it was first and foremost a political and not a military operation. General Bór’s claim that he had to call for an uprising because Warsaw was in danger of becoming ‘a battlefield between Germans and Russians, and the city would be turned into rubble’ is not borne out by the evidence. Ever since Stalingrad, and indeed in all the battles for cities during the Bagration offensive, including Vitebsk, Orsha, Minsk, Kiev and Lwów, the Soviets did not attack the cities head on, but encircled them, trapping the Germans in giant ‘pockets’ and finishing them off later. There may have been heavy street fighting, as in Vitebsk, but for the most part the civilians and the infrastructure were spared. There is no reason to think that ‘Fortress Warsaw’ would have been any different, particularly as it was so weakly defended.

      The AK also misunderstood the Soviet plan of attack, believing that the Russians would take the east-bank suburb of Praga and then launch a frontal assault across the bridges into Warsaw proper, but this had never been Stavka’s intention. Rather than worrying about when the Soviets would enter Praga and begin crossing the Vistula, the AK should have waited for the moment when the northern and southern Soviet pincers to the west of the city snapped shut, cutting off the Germans trapped within.

      The AK, however, could not verify Stavka’s plans, because they had no contact with the Soviets. ‘We had to run the great risk of undertaking open action without any coordination with the Red Army command,’ Bór said.⁴⁹ Any links between the AK and the Soviets had ended in the murder or imprisonment of the Poles. It had become clear after Soviet treachery at Wilno, Lwów and Lublin that Stalin wanted nothing less than to annihilate the AK and to put his own puppet government in place. He would destroy anyone who stood in his way. It was a measure of the AK’s desperate plight that in July 1944 General Okulicki argued that if they did take over Warsaw before the Soviets entered the city, Stalin would have no choice but either to recognize AK authority in liberated Warsaw, or to liquidate the AK using military force. Okulicki’s view was that the Soviets might indeed murder the AK fighters, but that it would be impossible for Stalin to hide this crime from the international community. Such an act, he said, would shake the moral conscience of the world. What none of them seemed to realize was that, at the time, the world was just not interested. The Soviets had committed mass murder at Katyń, yet the Western Allies had deliberately perpetrated the lie that it had been a Nazi crime. The Nazis had murdered millions of Jews and others in the occupied territories, but despite the best efforts of Jan Karski, Szmul Zygelbojm and others to expose these crimes, and at the very least to bomb the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz, little was done. The response was always the same: the war must be won, and only then would Nazi crimes be stopped.