Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (38 page)

The importance of SOE and of the ‘dark and silent’ to the growth of the Underground cannot be exaggerated. By 1944, SOE had flown in an absolute majority of the military and civilian leadership. Although Boor was not among them, many of the men surrounding him were. Boor’s deputy, Bear Cub, a founding member of the ‘Victory Service’ and sometime prisoner in the Lubyanka, was flown in from Italy on 22 May 1944. Many of the jumpers took over regional commands in the Home Army – ‘Anchor’ on the Niemen, ‘Forester’ in Polesie, ‘Gloomy’ in the Holy Cross Mountains. Scores of others found themselves in the Warsaw Rising. The ‘dark and silent’ flew to Poland to fight the Germans. Many
died. But, in many instances, it wouldn’t be the Germans who killed them.

In 1943–44, the activities of the Resistance movement greatly expanded and diversified. They were facilitated on the one hand by the unified command structures which had been put into place, and on the other by the fact that the whole of the country, both west and east, was now occupied by the one Nazi enemy. The single, and singularly repugnant, adversary helped to give focus to a single-minded opposition. At the same time, the psychological horizons were slowly lifting. Before 1943, the Nazis had looked invincible. From 1943 onwards, they were in retreat. Every anti-Nazi resistance fighter on the Continent could feel that the hour of retribution was coming.

The twin branches of Poland’s Underground – civilian and military – had shown remarkable resilience. Directed by their Governmental superiors in London, they now possessed a full complement of ministries, bureaux, and specialized agencies. In some fields, they worked separately; in others, they worked together. Though they paid a ceaseless toll of blood and pain from Nazi repressions, they were proving irrepressible.

Thanks to the varied origins of its constituent parts, the Home Army was destined to retain much of its original character of an umbrella organization. But it increasingly contrived to form larger military detachments, which in size and style looked less like partisan bands and more like regular army formations. This was particularly true in the former Soviet Zone in eastern Poland, where regional and district units had to be reformed after 1941. The Home Army faced special problems in each region. In (Polish) Upper Silesia, for example, which had been reincorporated into the Reich, the AK had to contend with a hostile German population. In the provinces of Cracow and Kieltse, the combination of hilly country and sympathetic Polish neighbourhoods made for ideal conditions. In the Lublin province, where some forty separate Underground detachments were operating, both the right-wing NSZ and the Communist People’s Guard were reluctant to recognize the Home Army’s authority and the AK Command was sometimes obliged to intervene with lethal force. Further east, there were other complications. From mid-1943, large-scale Soviet partisan units were sent through the German lines. They regarded themselves as the sole legitimate force.
Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and even Jewish partisan groups kept themselves apart from Poles and Soviets alike.

The Home Army developed a surprisingly sophisticated system of arms and explosives production. A Technical Research Bureau made dozens of inventions, including two variants of the British Sten gun, howitzers, and even a home-designed armoured car. The Sappers’ Division, later the Clandestine Production Directorate, turned the inventions into real weapons. Warsaw hid three illegal grenade factories. The 1,500 or so home-produced radio receivers proved more reliable than British and American sets dropped by the SOE. But the real revelation was the
filipinka
– a mass-produced type of hand grenade packed with deadly power.

From January 1943 the Home Army’s Directorate of Diversionary Operations, the K-Div., was set up. Its director was Maj.Gen. ‘Nile’, an officer trained by the SOE and flown in by the RAF via Cairo (hence his pseudonym). Its aims were defined in a founding order:

In 1943–44, the units subordinated to the K-Div. grew and multiplied until it formed a formidable fighting force of trained men and women. Together with Boor’s HQ Guard Battalion Bashta, it constituted the core of the Home Army’s active elite. It possessed its own staff, and its own military formation, the Radoslav Grouping (named after its commander), and consisted of six major units, each with its own mysterious name. The ‘Beard 53’ Diversionary Brigade was made up of three sub-units, the Zoshka Battalion, the Women’s Battle Company ‘Discus’, and the ‘Poplar’ Company. The Parasol Battalion was one of four similarly independent formation, including ‘Watch 49’, ‘Broom’, and ‘Fist’. The ‘College A’ Company was a special duties unit attached to the K-Div.’s Warsaw District’s headquarters.

Diversionary action was a catch-all phrase for all manner of attacks which could throw the enemy off his guard and sow confusion. It included anything from springing prisoners from jail or hijacking German lorries, to arson, bank-robbery, and planting bombs in SS barracks.

Sabotage, for instance, took many forms. It ranged from Polish workers in German factories making dud shells and faulty gun muzzles to train derailment, bridge-blowing, and arson. In 1941–44, the Underground (perhaps optimistically) claimed 25,145 such incidents.

Reprisals were aimed at German personnel and most usually at Nazi officials. In Warsaw, a whole grisly gallery of SS and Gestapo men were liquidated. Otto Schultz, a sadistic guard from the Paviak, met his end on 6 May 1943, and Otto Braun, a specialist in street roundups, on 13 December. On 1 February 1944, an assassination squad from the ‘Pegasus’ unit of the Grey Ranks caught up with
SS-Brig.Fhr
. Franz Kutschera, Head of the Warsaw Police District. The cost was heavy: Nazi practice was to shoot 100 Poles for every assassination. So the AK took to following their prey on leave in Germany and killing them there. In all, 5,733 assassinations were supposedly planned. Just as the Gestapo kept a list of resistance leaders to be caught and eliminated, so too, the Resistance drew up its own ‘Head List’ of Nazi officials.

In September 1942, for instance, a Home Army execution squad eliminated a dangerous foe. A man variously thought to be called ‘Hammer’ or Schweitzer, but using the pseudonym of ‘Uncle’, had set up a pseudo-conspiratorial intelligence network that was passing information to the
Abwehr
. His organization masqueraded under the grandiose title of the Superintelligence Service of the Exiled Government. One of their dirtier tricks was to intercept notes that were being smuggled out of the Paviak and to hand them over to the Gestapo. Their leaders were found guilty in absentia by an Underground court, and were shot on the street by a squad led by ‘Hard Tommy’ from the AK’s counterintelligence department.
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In terms of planning and daring, the assassination of Franz Kutschera was undoubtedly in the same league as the better known killing of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague eighteen months earlier. The plan originated in the AK’s K-Div. Command. The eight assassins were chosen from 1st Platoon of the Pegasus organization. The leader was Cpl. ‘Flight’. The time was the morning of 1 February 1944. The place was the beautiful Uyazhdov Boulevard near the parkside junction of Chopin Street.

Kutschera’s steel-grey Opel Admiral turned into the boulevard past the former British Embassy at 9.06 a.m. It was followed by an open truck filled with soldiers. Armed SS men marched alongside. As it travelled slowly north, its arrival was signalled by a woman on the roadside who pulled up the hood of her coat and crossed the street. After perhaps 140m
(150 yards), a car roared around the corner of Pius XI Street, careered onto the wrong side of the road, and smashed head on into Kutschera’s convoy. Almost immediately, Flight ran down the right-hand pavement and emptied his Sten at point-blank range through the Opel’s open window. An accomplice arrived from the other side and repeated the performance. Kutschera was already dying. A volley of German machine-gun fire felled the two attackers, but a fierce hail of bullets and grenades from friends posted nearby kept the enemy at bay, while the wounded were picked up and the whole team scrambled into two other waiting cars. At 9.08 a.m. both cars escaped. One of them later ran into a German checkpoint on one of the Vistula bridges, and the occupants had to jump over the balustrade into the freezing river. The other made it to the Old Town, where it met a physician, ‘Dr Max’, but then toured the hospitals, searching desperately for a specialist surgeon who dared to tend Flight’s wounds. The operations were performed late at night. Both patients deteriorated. Their mothers were summoned before they died. Flight was given a death certificate naming tuberculosis of the liver, and he was buried in the city cemetery by a regular undertaker.

Meantime, a special investigative unit of SS and Gestapo moved in from Lublin. At Lidice, after Heydrich’s death, they shot 198 men. In Warsaw, after Kutschera’s death, they shot 300. They exhumed Flight’s body, having kept a watch on hospital deaths, and found by post-mortem that the death certificate was false. But they failed to catch the organizers. A fine of 1 million marks was imposed on the citizens. The curfew was extended by an hour. All non-German cars and motorcycles were banned indefinitely. Kutschera’s funeral cortège passed through streets that, by order, were totally empty. An action that had lasted 1 minute 40 seconds was remembered for the rest of the occupation. Hundreds of less-publicized episodes occurred.
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In the eyes of the Nazi hierarchy, the Underground fighters were mere ‘terrorists’. But as Kutschera had himself remarked: ‘There is no certain defence against people who are eager to sacrifice their own lives.’
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Underground justice was a matter partly for the clandestine judicial system of the Secret State and partly for the courts martial of the AK. Sessions were secretly convened. Qualified magistrates and judges presided. Witnesses were called. Sentences were passed and published. AK punishment and execution squads enforced them. Informers, ‘greasers’, and collaborators, as well as common criminals, were made to walk in
fear. Igo S., a Warsaw actor who accepted the post of director of the City Theatre from the Germans, met a sudden death. So, too, did hundreds of others, including people condemned for maltreating Jews. In all, Warsaw’s Underground courts passed 220 death sentences.
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As the Underground struggle intensified, incidents multiplied. Some collaborators were executed, whilst others were flogged or head-shaved. One of the larger actions, in March 1944, finished off the directors of a ‘Ukrainian Welfare Committee’, who were judged to be engaged in something more sinister than welfare. One of the last actions, codenamed Operation Hunt, consisted of a long series of grenade and petrol-bomb attacks on vehicles of the
Sipo
, and was undertaken in the second half of June 1944. (The Underground had noticed that all
Sipo
vehicles carried a registration number starting with OST-47.) In the opening attack of the series, a much hated SS-man,
Ostuf.
Herbert Junk, sometime Acting Governor of the Paviak, was killed, together with one of his attackers bearing the splendid pseudonym of ‘Nicholas II’. In revenge, the Gestapo announced that seventy-five ‘Communists’ had been shot.
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The ‘Communists’ were not Communists.

Of course, it would be wrong to suppose the Underground had no contacts whatsoever with the Gestapo. On the contrary, both sides were only too aware of the other’s activities; they were working the same patch; and, on occasion, they were obliged to cut a deal. In the autumn of 1943, for example, two men from the Home Army’s security corps brazenly stole an armour-plated Super-Mercedes belonging to a Nazi dignitary from the RSHA in Berlin, who had just arrived in Warsaw. The luckless car owner’s subordinates were more than eager to get it back, if only to save their own skins, so the AK decided that a suitable price would be the release of fifteen named prisoners from the Paviak. As reported, the telephone rang on the
Sipo
’s duty desk:

Did you receive our letter?

Yes . . .

Do your superiors accept our proposal?

Yes, but . . .

All right, tomorrow at 3 p.m., all on the list must be freed.

And the car? We’ll release the prisoners when we have the car. On my word as a German officer.

You release the prisoners . . . and after three days we tell you where the car is.

What’s the guarantee?

The word of a Polish officer . . .
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The exchange took place as agreed.

The Council for the Rescue of Jews, which was given the deliberately misleading codename of ‘Zhegota’, was created in the summer of 1942, when AK intelligence discovered the true destination of transports leaving the Ghetto. Direct intervention was virtually impossible, since the Ghetto and the transports were heavily guarded. So the emphasis was on protecting Jewish children, providing false papers, hiding them in safe houses, and passing them on to Church networks. Owing to the unusual size of Poland’s Jewish community, the Nazis managed to kill more Jews in occupied Poland than elsewhere. Yet it is also true, thanks in large part to Zhegota, that more Jews were rescued in Poland than anywhere else. The figure is usually put at around 100,000.
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The Home Army’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda was responsible at its height for a daily circulation of newspapers totalling 200,000 copies. It also published all manner of military, technical, historical, and educational manuals. The
Information Bulletin
(BI), which ran into 317 issues, was its standard-bearer. Yet some of the greatest pleasure (and success) derived from its collectors’ items such as
Der Soldat
,
Der Hammer
or
Der Klabautermann
, which sowed false news in the enemy ranks and which BIP’s ‘N’ section disguised as Wehrmacht publications. In 1943, a special subsection called ‘Antique’ went into action to expose the growing threat of (rival) Communist propaganda.
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