Killing Hitler (21 page)

In December 1943 Kutschera was himself slated for elimination. As was customary, he was first sent a warning that he would be killed if he did not cease the atrocities. Then a second note was sent, reminding him that though he had escaped retribution at his previous postings, he would not do so in Poland.
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Soon an AK team began watching his residence and his office, recording his movements, noting the strength of his bodyguards and the various vehicles that he used. The assassination was entrusted to a team of twelve from the Parasol battalion, under the command of a twenty-year-old former scoutmaster, Bronislaw Pietraszkiewicz, code-named “Flight.” The team was divided into three cars, with three lookouts to signal the target’s arrival. They planned to carry out their attack on Kutschera’s own doorstep—outside Warsaw SS headquarters.

After an aborted attempt two days before, the assassins struck just after 9:00 on the morning of 1 February 1944.
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As Kutschera’s gray Opel limousine proceeded down a wide Warsaw boulevard, flanked and followed by SS guards, a car careened out of a side street and screeched to a halt, blocking its path. In the confusion, Flight hurled a Molotov cocktail and then ran alongside the Opel, firing his machine gun into the open window, killing the driver and mortally wounding his target. As a fierce firefight with the bodyguards ensued, he and an accomplice then dragged Kutschera from his vehicle and shot him in the head. After checking his body for vital documents, they made their escape in two waiting cars. Their attack had lasted less than two minutes.

Three days later, Kutschera’s funeral cortege was carried through the deserted streets of Warsaw, en route to the main station and a transfer to Berlin. That same day, Flight was fighting
for his life. Shot in the stomach during the attack, he had been taken to numerous hospitals in the vain search for a surgeon who would dare to treat a wanted man. Hunted by the Gestapo, he was finally operated on, but died on the afternoon of Kutschera’s departure. His action had cost him his life, but he had pulled off one of the most spectacular and high-profile assassinations of the war. He had demonstrated the truth of his target’s grim prediction: “There is no certain defence against people who are eager to sacrifice their own lives.”
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What defense, then, did the Germans attempt to mount against the Polish underground? The first thing to note is that they did not expect to face such determined opposition. Their occupation of Poland had a number of priorities, foremost among them the political emasculation of the Polish nation and the exploitation of Polish industry and agriculture. Any resistance to the realization of those aims was to be ruthlessly crushed, of course, but the creation of a functioning, integrated underground state, with military and civilian sectors, was simply beyond the Nazi imagination. After all, weren’t the Poles supposed to be subhuman Slavs?

Yet while the usual German reflex was to escalate the terror, a few officials recognized that their repressive and brutal methods were proving almost entirely counterproductive. They saw that just as their brutality intensified, so did the response of the underground. They were not motivated by concern for the well-being of the Poles; rather, they noted with alarm that the occupation of Poland was not bringing the economic benefits for Germany that had been foreseen at the outset. Despite his deserved reputation for cruelty, Governor Hans Frank was an early convert to the policy of ameliorating living conditions in occupied Poland. Already in 1940, less than six months into the job, he proclaimed that his primary task of destroying and exploiting the country had changed to the subtly different one of utilizing all of Poland’s “productive possibilities.”
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He would later warn that “you should not slaughter a cow you want to milk.”
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Frank soon began to advocate a softer line of concessions, toleration, and détente, and won many highly placed supporters, including
Goebbels.
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Himmler, however, was violently opposed to any change of course that might interrupt his plans for a racial reorganization of Central Europe. Where Frank sought to use a careful combination of carrot and stick, Himmler knew only stick. All plans for reform of the occupation regime were subsequently dropped.

So, by dint of their own ideologically driven myopia and the stubborn will of the Poles to resist, the Nazis had stumbled into a morass of their own making. By 1943, their security apparatus was already buckling under the strain. In Warsaw alone, it was investigating more than ten thousand Poles, and fewer than 20 percent of those had even been identified.
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For their own safety, its operatives lived in tightly controlled quarters, barricaded into the German colony behind sentries and barbed wire. Rarely did they venture unaccompanied into the city beyond. Alcoholism and stress-related illness were rife. Even the governor, Hans Frank, rarely left the comparative safety of Kraków. He visited Warsaw—the main bastion of the resistance—only four times after 1941, the last occasion being in September 1943.
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The posting to occupied Poland was dreaded by every official of the Third Reich. Many regarded it as an appointment from which they could scarcely expect to return alive.
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Poland, which was statistically the most dangerous part of occupied territory for the Germans, was regarded as “bandit country.” It was “the nest of vipers.”
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In the face of this perpetual threat, Hitler’s time in Poland was potentially fraught with danger. His first visits were made during the September Campaign of 1939. A fortified Führer headquarters was initially established on the German side of the frontier at Bad Polzin in Pomerania, where Hitler himself arrived by train in the early hours of 4 September. For the following month, he shifted his train headquarters numerous times and made no fewer than nine tours of the front. When he was stationary, security was tight, presumably against the remote threat of a surprise Polish attack. An outer perimeter was provided by infantry of the élite
Grossdeutschland
Division, who barricaded access roads and established
strongpoints. An inner perimeter was held by Hitler’s own security force, the RSD. The troops involved resembled a miniature army, with units of reconnaissance, signals, motorized infantry, anti-tank troops, anti-aircraft troops, and a supply section.
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When Hitler traveled to the front, security was no less tight. A bystander in rural Pomerania would have been stunned by his Führer’s stupendous cavalcade of vehicles. First, he would have seen motorcycle outriders, followed by two reconnaissance cars. Next came Hitler’s convoy, which consisted of two groups of convertible, six-wheeled Mercedes limousines, painted beige and riding on all-terrain tires. In the first group, Hitler sat in the back of one car, accompanied by his driver and a handful of aides and bodyguards. This was followed by two further cars of bodyguards, a car of the SS Escort, a car of RSD bodyguards, an adjutants’ car, and a car of military liaison staff. The second group of Mercedes vehicles consisted of cars containing perhaps Ribbentrop and Himmler (each with their staff and bodyguards), another with invited guests, a reserve vehicle, a luggage car, a field kitchen car, and a gasoline tanker. Bringing up the rear was a further group of motorcycle outriders, a platoon of signals, a platoon of anti-aircraft personnel (with guns), and an anti-tank unit.
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It was not unusual for this traveling circus to cover more than 250 kilometers in a day, and though clearly laden with weaponry, it would have been hard for a potential assassin to overlook.
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The security risk was greatest when Hitler approached his destination, however. His convoy would trundle past trucks of troops, groups of civilians, and lines of POWs with little apparent concern. Overexcited soldiers occasionally even had to be shooed off the running boards of Hitler’s car.
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Once at the local headquarters, Hitler was evidently considered to be at his most secure. Meetings with local commanders and even military briefings were often conducted in the open, surrounded by a mass of curious soldiers. There was no cordon of police or SS, and Hitler’s bodyguards, though present, did little to intervene. They would generally idle around, watch the proceedings, and talk among themselves.
On one occasion, Hitler was even mobbed by admirers, and it took some minutes before his aides could reach him.
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The strict security regime that was habitually instituted during Hitler’s public appearances in Germany was almost entirely absent.

But this was not to suggest that the only threat that Hitler faced was from disgruntled members of his own military. The Polish army, though in retreat, was still capable of springing a nasty surprise. On 4 September, near Topolno on the Vistula, Hitler’s convoy was halted by evidence of a very recent Polish ambush. Later that same day, the Polish air force bombed a target only 3 kilometers away. It was not known whether the Poles were even aware of Hitler’s presence in the region, but that night, his train was moved to a new location to escape their attentions. Another incident occurred near Koronowo, north of Bydgoszcz, when a German supply lorry crashed into the tail end of Hitler’s convoy. Its driver had been shot in the chest by a Polish sniper.
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In the following weeks, Hitler made numerous visits to the front, crisscrossing Poland in the process. Sometimes he traveled ahead by plane and then had to wait for his convoy to catch up to take him to the action. Often, plans were changed at short notice due to the weather or the situation in theater. This naturally placed tremendous strain on the security apparatus, which many considered had proved itself insufficient for the task.

But Hitler was also at least partly to blame for any shortcomings. He appears to have been so enthused by the Polish campaign that he was willing to forget or circumvent all the established security procedures. Convoys departed half formed, bodyguards were ignored, and crowds were not restrained. As the subject’s most renowned historian has concluded: “Almost every day during his visits to the Polish Front…Hitler got himself into situations in which his life was in great danger.”
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At the end of the Polish campaign, Hitler made his only visit to Warsaw, where a lavish victory parade was planned. Arriving by plane at the main Ok
e
cie airport, he was greeted on the runway by his victorious generals before being taken into the city center in an armed convoy. As he was driven through the streets, only recently cleared of rubble, he was enthusiastically cheered by his
soldiers. In response, he stood in the front seat of the Mercedes, acknowledging the adulation with his arm outstretched.

Unsurprisingly, the Warsaw visit was carried out under tight security. The center of the city had been effectively cleared. Its Polish population had been either forcibly evacuated or subjected to a strict lockdown, and only German military personnel were permitted into the immediate area of the parade. Hundreds of police patrols prowled the streets, and many roofs were adorned with machine-gun nests. In addition to all that, the Germans had demanded a number of prominent Polish hostages as security against any possible attack. In response, twelve senior municipal politicians, including the city’s former mayor, Stanislaw Starzyński, were taken prisoner.
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They would be held in the basement of the city hall for the duration of Hitler’s visit, unaware that a further four hundred ordinary civilians were being held hostage for the same purpose.

The parade was to take place on one of the main boulevards through the administrative district, Aleje Ujazdowskie. There, among the opulent villas and elegant former embassies, a low dais had been built, bedecked with swastikas, and a huge German war flag had been strung between the yellowing trees behind. As a military band blared out martial music, Hitler stood flanked by his generals and took the salute of the victorious 8th Army. For over two hours, he stood at attention in the bright autumn sunlight—an easy target for even the most amateur of snipers—as the massed ranks of infantry, cavalry, and artillery filed past.

Barely a kilometer to the north, meanwhile, a small group of Polish soldiers had established a stronghold deep within a ruined building. During the cleanup that had followed Warsaw’s surrender, a group of Polish sappers had been ordered to remove a barricade from the junction between New World Street (Nowy Świat) and Jerusalem Avenue (Aleje Jerosolimskie). In the process, they had succeeded in surreptitiously hiding 500 kilograms of TNT and assorted munitions beneath the road.
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The order for the operation had come from Theodore, who had met the commander of the nascent underground immediately after the Polish capitulation to plan diversionary attacks. Theodore had rightly
anticipated that Hitler would visit the defeated capital and had initially planned to bomb the victory parade itself, but heightened security presumably put paid to such an ambitious plan. Instead, he had chosen a busy junction between the administrative district and the Old Town as the site of his first “diversion.” The day before the parade, he had reported to his superiors that everything was ready—his men were in place and the detonators had been set.

At around 3 p.m., as the victory parade finally drew to a close, Hitler once again climbed into his six-wheeled Mercedes. After spurning the offer of lunching al fresco with his generals, he opted for a brief tour of the defeated city. He began with the Belvedere Palace, where he cast a scornful eye over the former residence of the Polish president. He then returned to his car and headed north toward the Old Town, passing the abandoned British embassy and finally entering New World Street. As his cavalcade pressed on, it often slowed to walking pace as it negotiated streets still strewn with the detritus of war and thronged with soldiers, many of whom had just attended the victory parade. Throughout, Hitler stood impassively in the passenger seat, arm outstretched. With the acclamation of his soldiers ringing in his ears, he passed over the junction with Jerusalem Avenue—over the spot where the explosives had been placed—and on to the Old Town. Later that afternoon, he returned by air to Berlin to prepare an important Reichstag speech for the following day.