Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
So far, so good. The enduring weakness of the Nuremberg trials derived from the fact that they had not been constituted by an impartial or independent judicial authority. They were set up by a self-appointed
selection of the victorious Allied powers, whose representatives decided the procedures, the appointment of judges and counsel, the charges, the limits on the defendants’ rights, and indirectly the verdicts and sentences. As a result, they were not, and could never have prepared, a fair and open-minded examination of all the war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed during the Second World War. At one point,
Reichsmarshall
Göring complained about ‘Victors’ Justice’. He was echoed unintentionally by the Chief Prosecutor, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence QC, who silenced all talk about Allied conduct during the war: ‘We are here to judge major war criminals,’ he reminded the court, ‘not to try the conduct of the Allied powers.’ When assessing the trials, therefore, one must weigh what was achieved against what was excluded.
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[
MEXICO
, p. 561]
The Warsaw Rising, for example, would normally have been a prime topic for examination at Nuremberg. The razing of the capital city of an Allied power, the deliberate mass murder of 50–60,000 civilians, the negligent killing of perhaps 100,000 more through indiscriminate shelling and bombing, and the failure to apply the Geneva Conventions to Allied soldiers and prisoners, all provided the clearest of grounds for prosecution. Yet even the most superficial enquiry into the events of August to October 1944 would inevitably have raised questions about Soviet actions and would probably have become a raw bone of contention between the Soviet and the Western powers. So the Warsaw Rising never appeared on the Nuremberg agenda.
The point was not completely lost at the time. Several protests were lodged. A doughty Scottish writer, for instance, who had already published a dozen pamphlets about Poland, returned to the fray in 1945, when Allied intentions were becoming more apparent:
‘The betrayal and abandonment of Warsaw,’ he wrote, ‘is the single greatest crime that has been committed in the present war, and it is surely ironical that those who perpetrated this and other outrages upon the Polish people are now assiduously engaged in compiling a list of war criminals whom they intend to bring to justice.’
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Searching the Nuremberg transcripts, it soon becomes evident that the ordeal of Warsaw could only be mentioned in peripheral circumstances and rarely as a main item of discussion. Under examination, former Governor-General Frank demonstrated a sound understanding of the circumstances behind the Rising.
[The]
revolt broke out when the Soviet Russian Army had advanced to within about 30 kilometers [eighteen miles] of Warsaw on the eastern bank of the Vistula. It was a sort of combined operation; and, as it seems to me, also a national Polish action, as the Poles at the last moment wanted to carry out the liberation of their capital themselves and did not want to owe it to the Soviet Russians. They probably were thinking of how, in Paris, at the last moment the Resistance movement, even before the Allies had approached, had accomplished the liberation of the city.
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Most telling was the scene at Nuremberg on 7 November 1946 when the man who had crushed the Warsaw Rising,
SS-Ogruf.
Erich von dem Bach, made his entrance into the court. He was not a defendant, but a witness for the prosecution. One might have thought that the Soviets in particular would have insisted on trying the Nazi brute who, as the
Bevollmächtiger für den Bandenkampf in Osten
(Commander of Antipartisan warfare in the East), had also been responsible for numberless atrocities against Soviet civilians including Khatyn. But they did not. They had their reasons. They had no wish to give him the chance to compare his own methods with those of his Soviet adversaries. So they much preferred, one presumes, to turn him against his fellow Nazis.
Von dem Bach had evidently agonized over how to
play
Nuremberg, but he decided to cast himself in a favourable light and to pin responsibility on Himmler, the Wehrmacht, and the Army High Command. Despite his fearsome reputation, he was undoubtedly useful to the prosecutors, and he was described by the American attorney Francis Biddle, with extraordinary latitude, as ‘a mild and rather serious accountant.’
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Von dem Bach’s testimony was a damning indictment of the Wehrmacht. ‘The commanders in chief with whom I collaborated,’ he declared, ‘Field Marshals von Weichs, von Küchler, Bock, [and] Kluge, Col.Gen. Reinhard, and Gen. Kitzinger, were as well aware as I was of the purposes and methods of antipartisan warfare.’ This promoted Göring’s famous outburst – ‘That dirty treacherous swine! . . . the dirty son of a bitch! He was the bloodiest murderer in the whole goddamned set up! The dirty filthy
schweinhund
, selling his soul to save his stinking neck!’
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The exchanges between defence lawyers and von dem Bach grew heated and frequently outran the simultaneous translators. When he finally left the stand, and walked past the dock, Goring barked at him:
‘Schweinhund Verräter!!’
Von dem Bach stopped dead, flushed, and then continued to his seat. Göring was docked his tobacco ration and exercise privileges. After that, no prosecution witness was required to file past the accused.
CANADA
During the Warsaw Rising I was a messenger and, when needed, a nurse in Major ‘Horn’’s grouping, in the ‘Boar’ Battalion. They fought in the Old Town, in one of the most difficult areas of insurgent Warsaw. I had many duties, one of which during the bombing was to carry canisters of petrol from Vola. After the fall of the Old Town I went through the city sewers to the City Centre, where I served in the battalion command until capitulation. I left Warsaw in the ranks of the Home Army. I did not make it into captivity. Before we reached Ozharov I escaped along the way, hiding myself in a wheat field.
In January 1952, during one of the meetings held at Vavel Castle in Cracow, we were arrested. After a trial before the Voievodeship (County) Military Court, I was sentenced to four years in prison, which was later extended to eight years for membership of the Home Army. I did time in the Montelupi Jail in Cracow, in Graudenz, and in Fordon, where I finished my prison sentence, freed conditionally after three and a half years on the strength of an amnesty. My state of health, combined with political conspiracy in the People’s Poland, meant it was impossible for me to work in education.
In the Underground I had met Stanislas S., my fiancé, whom the Germans had imprisoned in the Paviak, and then three days before the Rising had taken to the concentration camp at Dachau. He died on 8 May 1945, that is the day that war ended. His cousin Stan K. proposed marriage to me. He was living in Toronto in Canada. I got married by proxy. Three years passed before the authorities of the PRL decided to let me leave Poland, on conditional release from prison.
When I left Poland, as the wife of a Canadian citizen, I reassured my remaining family that I was leaving for good but not for ever. My husband greeted me with an enormous bunch of red and white roses. My standard of living, however, turned out to be rather more modest than I had imagined. Although my husband had graduated from university in Switzerland, he was employed in a workshop repairing antiques. We lived in a small room in an attic, and I had brought a porcelain dinner-service for twenty-four and a mass of books. We travelled to our wedding by tram.
Slowly, I settled into the difficult life of a Polish emigrant in Canada. After my husband’s death I tried to return to Poland, but all my friends there advised me against it. A single mother with a disabled child had a very low earning capacity. I got married again, to a soldier of the 2nd Corps, who had come through service in Africa and had fought at Monte Cassino. I undertook work in the community with Home Army Soldiers, the Association of Polish Combatants, and the Union of the Eastern
Territories. With my husband I established a foundation whose main aim was to contest the lies about Polish history propagated by the PRL. Now its focus is promoting works by Polish writers, academics, and artists.
1
Nelli T–S.
Even so, there is a persistent rumour that von dem Bach supplied Göring with the cyanide pill which the
Reichsmarschall
used to kill himself. According to his own account, von dem Bach was in the habit of always greeting Göring at Nuremberg in an exaggerated and affected manner. The guards were used to the spectacle, and apparently suspected nothing when the two finally shook hands transferring the cyanide ampoule in the process. Suspicions were confirmed when von dem Bach surrendered a second ampoule for inspection, which was duly shown to be identical with the one found in Göring’s mouth.
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After the Nuremberg trials, von dem Bach was held in prison awaiting extradition to Poland. But the extradition never happened. Instead, he travelled to Warsaw in the winter of 1946–47 in order to appear again as a prosecution witness. The defendant on this occasion was his former colleague, Dr Ludwig Fischer, the wartime Governor of Warsaw. Von dem Bach’s immunity says everything about Soviet attitudes. Though he had publicly confessed to mass murder and had openly declared himself ‘an absolute Hitler man’, he was never formally accused.
In the final reckoning, relatively few of the Nazi murder-mongers who had operated in Warsaw met with the retribution that they had earned.
SS-Gruf.
Reinefarth, for example, escaped scot-free. After leaving Warsaw, he was appointed commander of the Fortress of Küstrin on the Oder. But in the chaos of the German collapse in March 1945 he was arrested for leaving his post. This incident no doubt helped his later claim to have been an anti-Nazi Resistance fighter. All attempts to have him extradited to Poland were vetoed by the Americans to whom he had surrendered and for whom he had acted as an adviser on Soviet military methods. So he was free to pursue a political career in West Germany. He never stood trial, and publicly denied that he had ever been a member of the SS.
Nonetheless, a few Nazis did meet their deserved end.
SS-Ostubaf.
Oskar Dirlewanger was one of them. After Warsaw, he had taken his
brigade to Slovakia and Hungary, and to the Oder front where he was wounded. Recuperating at Altshausen in Bavaria, he was eventually captured by French Occupation forces, recognized by Polish POWs, and beaten so hard that he died of a fractured skull. Rough Justice.
Some of the Nazis who had operated in Poland were returned there to face trial. Rudolf Hoess, the former Commandant of Auschwitz, was one of them. He was hanged at the scene of his crimes in April 1947. Ludwig Fischer, the Governor of Warsaw, was another. His trial ended in the death sentence. His successor, Jürgen Stroop, SS Chief in Warsaw during 1943, who had supervised the liquidation of the Ghetto, was hanged in Warsaw in September 1951. The last man to hold that infamous office, Paul Geibel, committed suicide in his Polish prison cell in the 1960s.
In comparison to their numbers during the war, however, and the unprecedented scale of their crimes, relatively few prominent Nazis were made to face justice from a Polish dock. And, when they were, they sometimes escaped very lightly. In March 1951, for instance, a Warsaw court tried Rudolf Dengel, who had been Mayor of Warsaw throughout the Occupation. He was charged with planning to destroy the capital and with reducing food rations to starvation levels. He was sentenced to fifteen years. He was treated by the Communist authorities with greater leniency than they treated the majority of the capital’s defenders. An observer from the British Embassy described the trial as ‘a piece of political theatre’. ‘Every opportunity was used to contrast the peaceful aims of People’s Poland and the GDR with the bestial policies of the Third Reich and (by implication) of the western “Imperialists” ’.
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Security was a Soviet and a Communist obsession. All outsiders were treated with malicious distrust. All insiders were handstrapped by police and bureaucratic controls. Even officers of the security services could land in their own camps and prisons for minor misdemeanours or misfortunes.
Western analysts have often attributed this mania to the fact that the USSR had been brutally invaded by the Third Reich. They were only repeating what Soviet officials had taught them to say. The explanation does not hold water. For the Soviets had been no less obsessed with security before the German invasion than after it. In any case, they had invaded their neighbours rather more often than they had been invaded themselves. Deep-seated paranoia was a central feature of the Soviet mindset; and it was a necessary adjunct to the reign of terror that had
been rising and falling ever since the Bolsheviks seized power. It had flourished during the Civil War of 1918–21, had reached unprecedented intensity during the purges of the late 1930s, and had merely been reactivated in full measure in the post-war years. It was bequeathed with relish to each of the satellite states. [
IRKA III
, p. 564]
The machinery for post-war repression in ‘People’s’ Poland’ was considerably more systematic than anything operating during the wartime Soviet takeover. It was the joint creation of the Soviet NKVD and of the new Polish Security Ministry working in tandem. It aimed to bring the entire population under police control and hence to eliminate all forms of unlicensed activity. Among other things, its techniques included carefully targeted nocturnal police sweeps, in which every single inhabitant of a given locality would be reviewed in the middle of the night, and checked for the accuracy of their papers and the suitability of their political connections. Mass arrests and recurrent interrogations became routine, as did the use of torture. Trials were usually held in secret. Defendants were often unaware both of the nature of the charges and of the laws on which the charges were supposedly based. Independent defence lawyers did not exist. Lengthy sentences of hard labour and of solitary confinement were handed out for imaginary or apparently trivial offences. Death sentences for purely political dissent were frequent. Veterans of the Home Army were treated to the same official hostility that was meted out to Nazis. Post-war prison life was designed not just to chastise but also to humiliate. ‘Politicals’, such as the Home Army veterans, were either held in solitary confinement or mixed in with the most dangerous categories of common criminals, who were encouraged to taunt and abuse them.
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[
IRKA IV
, p. 569]