Poland

TWENTY

War

A new chapter in the history of warfare opened as Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg against Poland. On 1 September some 1.5 million German troops invaded from three sides: East Prussia in the north, Germany in the west, and Slovakia in the south. They were supported by 2,700 tanks, of which the Polish army boasted barely three hundred, and 1,900 aircraft, which quickly wrested control of the skies from the 392 planes of the Polish air force. The Polish defences were pierced by eight German spearheads, while the Luftwaffe bombed roads, railways, bridges and cities. The German units raced ahead without pausing, outflanking those Polish units which stood their ground.

The Poles had approximately one million men under arms, but since mobilisation had been delayed at the request of Britain and France in an attempt to reach a last-minute solution to the crisis, a large proportion of them were nowhere near the front line, and most units went into action a third below strength. This, combined with an inflexible plan of defence, meant that the full potential of the Polish army, navy and air force could not be brought to bear. The chaos induced by the relentless bombing was aggravated by soldiers trying to reach their units and by the activities of a German fifth column. By 6 September the Polish command had lost control of the situation; by 10 September the Germans had overrun most of northern and western Poland; on 14 September Warsaw was encircled.

Once the first shock had worn off, Polish commanders reacted with determination. The Pomeranian and Poznanian army groups under General Tadeusz Kutrzeba held off the Germans in a twoday battle at Kutno. They then fell back on the Vistula and Bzura rivers, whence, reinforced by other units, they launched a counterattack which threw the Germans back and won a breathing space for other retreating Polish units. In order to avoid encirclement, the Polish command had ordered a withdrawal to the region of Lwów, where a new line of defence was being organised, pivoting on the frontiers with supposedly neutral Russia and friendly Romania. In the more rural expanses of eastern Poland, where tanks and heavy artillery would be of less value, the Polish army would be able to face the Germans on a more equal footing. But on 17 September Russian armies invaded from the east, and it was revealed that Romania had, under German pressure, renounced its military alliance with Poland. Continued defence of this corner of Poland was impossible. The government, the general staff and those units within reach of it crossed the Romanian border in order to continue the fight from abroad, taking with them Poland’s gold reserves. Warsaw, besieged since 14 September, capitulated two weeks later; the garrison on the Hel peninsula off Gdańsk held out till 2 October; General Kleeberg’s Polesie Defence Group surrendered at Kock on 5 October after a week of fighting on two fronts against Germans and Russians. Smaller units continued to fight in various parts of the country until the spring of 1940, when their remnants went underground.

The September campaign is usually portrayed as a courageous fiasco and characterised by the image of lancers charging tanks. It is difficult to understand why. In September 1939 no European army could hope to stand up to the Wehrmacht, with its crushing superiority in both tactics and firepower. It had been agreed with the British and French staffs that in the event of aggression, Poland was to pin it down for a period of two weeks, time enough to allow the French to throw ninety divisions, 2,500 tanks and 1,400 planes across the virtually undefended Rhine. But the French did not move, while the RAF confined itself to dropping leaflets on German cities. In the event, the Poles tied down the Germans for over three weeks, and would have managed to keep going longer had the Russians not invaded (which it is now known they would not have done if the French had attacked Germany). For all its inadequacy, the Polish army acquitted itself valiantly, taking a greater toll of German men and equipment than the Franco-British effort of 1940. The Germans lost roughly 45,000 men dead and wounded, three hundred planes and 993 tanks and armoured cars. But the cost to Poland was nearly 200,000 dead and wounded.

That figure covers only military casualties, and does not include the tens of thousands of civilians killed in bombing raids or mown down by marauding aircraft intent on spreading panic. Nor does it include the thousands of landowners, priests, teachers, doctors, policemen and others who, along with their families, were murdered by the advancing German army as a prelude to the ethnic cleansing of the part of western Poland that was to become the German province of Warthegau.

In October the country was divided between its captors. The larger Soviet zone was incorporated into the Soviet Union and over the next months about 1,700,000 of its inhabitants were transported to labour camps in Siberia or the far north of Russia. The Germans incorporated Pomerania, Silesia and Poznania into the Reich, while the remainder of their conquests was designated as the Generalgouvernement. This was a colony, ruled from the Royal Castle in Kraków by Hitler’s lawyer friend Hans Frank. He announced that the concept of Poland would be erased from the human mind, and that those Poles who were not exterminated would survive only as slaves within the new German Empire.

The process began at once. Here too, priests, landowners, teachers, lawyers and other persons of education or influence were summarily shot or sent to a concentration camp at Oświęcim, renamed Auschwitz, in a process that aimed to decapitate Polish society and leave a leaderless and compliant workforce.

People were shunted about in a vast programme of rearrangement whose logic is difficult to follow. Over the next five years about 750,000 Germans were imported into the areas that had been incorporated into the Reich: 400,000 Poles from the same areas were resettled in the Generalgouvernement, while a further 330,000 were shot. In all, some two million Poles were moved out of the Reich into the Generalgouvernement, while 2.8 million were taken from the Generalgouvernement to the Reich as slave labour. Supposedly Aryan-looking children were kidnapped, as many as 200,000 of them, to be brought up as Germans. Some 2,000 concentration camps of one sort or another were set up on Polish soil, in which people from all over Europe were incarcerated alongside Poles.

Poland’s Jewish population was singled out for special treatment. In small towns and villages, Jews were rounded up and shot by the Wehrmacht or special police units following in its wake, and in some cases burnt to death in their wooden synagogues. In larger cities, they were made to wear yellow stars on their clothes and herded into designated areas known as ghettos. In May 1940 the Jewish ghetto of ŁLódź was sealed, and the same happened in Warsaw and other cities. From 1942, the people trapped in these ghettos were transported to camps set up at Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór, Bełżec, Auschwitz-Birkenau and elsewhere, for extermination. In all, 2.7 million Polish citizens of Jewish origin were murdered.

Normal life became impossible. Schools were closed down, as were theatres, the press and other amenities, and all institutions that could not be made to serve the German war effort were abolished. Conditions under which people lived defy concise description. The occupation was not only unspeakably harsh, it was also unsettlingly haphazard, as a number of different German military, police and civilian agencies operated independently of each other, creating a climate of confusion and uncertainty that kept people in a state of permanent fear. This had a corrosive effect on society, and while there was no collaboration as such, the Germans could always find people ready to spy or denounce. Yet the overwhelming majority of the nation continued to resist, actively and passively, as though the defeat had only been a setback.

In the last days of September 1939 President Mościcki, who was interned after he crossed the Romanian frontier with what was left of his government, appointed Władysław Raczkiewicz, former President of the Senate, as his successor. On 30 September Raczkiewicz formed a government in Paris under the premiership of General Władysław Sikorski, who also became commander-inchief of the Polish armed forces. A National Council consisting of senior representatives of all the major parties was convened under the symbolic presidency of Ignacy Paderewski and the chairmanship of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of the People’s Party. This government was recognised by the Allies and proceeded to re-form the Polish armed forces with escapees filtering through from eastern Europe and émigré Polish volunteers from France and the United States.

By June 1940 these numbered 84,500 men in four infantry divisions and two brigades, an armoured brigade, an air force consisting of 9,000 men, and a navy of 1,400. A Polish brigade took part in the ill-fated battle for Narvik; two divisions, two brigades and 150 pilots fought in the French campaign of June 1940. Three-quarters of the land forces were lost in the fall of France, but the remnants followed the government to Britain, where they began to organise anew.

They were joined there by other forces that had survived the Polish campaign, such as the three destroyers and two submarines that had slipped out of the Baltic to join the Royal Navy, and by thousands of men and women who made their way there by various routes. By 1945 there would be 220,000 men in the Polish armed forces serving alongside the British. The Polish air force, which accounted for 7.5 per cent of all German aircraft destroyed in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, grew to ten fighter and four bomber squadrons which, until the arrival of the USAAF, represented 25 per cent of the Allied bomber force. The Polish Air Force flew a total of 102,486 sorties, lost 1,973 men, and shot down 745 German planes and 190 V-1 rockets. The Polish naval ensign flew on some sixty vessels, including two cruisers, nine destroyers and five submarines, which were involved in 665 actions at sea. The land forces took part in the defence of Britain, the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, the Arnhem operation, the invasion of France and the liberation of Holland.

Perhaps the greatest Polish contributions to the Allied war effort were less easily quantifiable. One was the huge volume of intelligence provided by agents scattered all over Europe by the fortunes of war, deportations and slave labour schemes, which placed them in vital positions throughout Germany. The other was the work done by the Polish army throughout the 1930s on monitoring the use by the Germans of the ‘Enigma’ encrypting machine and their construction of the ‘bombe’ that could be used to decipher the encrypted orders, which, when handed over to the British and developed at Bletchley Park, allowed the Allies to intercept and read all orders issuing from the German high command by the beginning of 1940.

The struggle also went on inside Poland. The day before the fall of Warsaw on 28 September, a group of senior officers established a resistance command which assumed authority over units operating throughout the country and built up its own under the name Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ). It was some time before this subsumed the 150-odd resistance groups that had sprung up spontaneously all over the country. The ZWZ was then transformed into the Home Army, Armia Krajowa (AK), directly subordinated to the commander-in-chief in London. By 1944 the AK numbered well over 300,000 men and women, which made it the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe, and the most active, losing 100,000 killed in action over the next four years.

Open resistance and assassinations of German personnel provoked such massive reprisals on the civilian population that they were abandoned in favour of more covert action. As well as derailing trains, blowing bridges and cutting communications, AK operations embraced the wholesale sabotage of German military materiel—engines, view-finding and navigation equipment for tanks, guns and planes—at source in the factories which produced them.

The life of the nation was lived in hiding. The government was represented by the Delegatura, an executive based in Warsaw with its own consultative committee drawn from all parties. The Delegatura was the political master of the AK and controlled everything in Poland from underground law courts to the flying universities and clandestine schools, much as the City Committee had done in 1863.

For a period of six years, education at every level was carried on secretly. Bombs were manufactured, plays were staged and books were published under the noses of the Germans, and an active clandestine press kept people informed. These activities were carried out with an efficiency and a wit that sometimes obscure the difficulties and dangers involved. Torture, concentration camp and death awaited anyone on whom German suspicion fell, and many thousands paid the price.

One area in which the German reign of terror was devastatingly successful was in dividing and estranging the various ethnic groups inhabiting Poland, and particularly in segregating Poles of Jewish descent and sealing them off from the rest of society prior to exterminating them. This was achieved mainly by regulations that did not obtain in any other country occupied by the Germans.

In Poland, anyone caught assisting or sheltering a Jew faced an automatic death penalty not just for himself, but for his entire family. Faced with this, even most philo-Semitic Poles were reluctant to get involved. The same penalty applied to anyone failing to report that someone else living in the same house was sheltering a Jew. This meant that someone who noticed that another occupant in his apartment block was hiding one was powerfully tempted to save himself and his family by reporting the fact rather than run the risk of death by waiting until some other inhabitant of the block did so. But there were other factors at work as well.

Not unlike the Jews themselves, many Poles responded to repeated and relentless failure and misfortune by developing an exclusive sense of grievance, and a paranoid, inward-looking sense of the uniqueness of their predicament, accompanied by an inability to view events and processes otherwise than in a strictly personalised manner. This allowed them to watch the Jewish tragedy unfold around them without seeing it, or indeed seeing it merely as an element in a scenario in which they, the Poles, were the chief victims. And there were plenty of anti-Semites who regarded the German extirpation of Jews from Polish society with indifference, or even as a favourable development.

At the same time, countless Poles did risk their lives to hide Jews and provide them with false papers. The clergy saved thousands of Jews, mostly children, by concealing them in schools or orphanages attached to monasteries and convents. In 1942 the AK set up a special commission of assistance, codenamed Żegota, which was responsible for saving the lives of some 10,000 Jews.

Such operations were made all the more difficult and hazardous by splits and conflicts within the resistance movement itself. Followers of the extreme right in politics had formed the National Armed Forces (NSZ), which remained independent of the AK, and which took a different line on this and other issues. An even greater source of difficulty for the AK and the Delegatura was the People’s Army (AL), affiliated to a recently founded Polish Workers’ Party and ultimately to Moscow.

The Polish Communist Party had never been a significant force on the political scene. In the mid-1930s its leadership was imprisoned, and the bulk of the activists sought refuge in Russia, where in 1938 Stalin liquidated the higher echelons and dispatched the rest to the Gulag. The only senior Polish communists to avoid this fate were those, like Władysław Gomułka and Marceli Nowotko, who were safe inside Polish jails.

In the spring of 1941, Stalin began seeking out those surviviing Polish communists. In December 1941 he instructed Nowotko to start a Polish workers’ party, which he did, in January 1942, but he was assassinated less than a year later. In 1943, Gomułka, who had been organising underground units in south-eastern Poland, became leader of the party, and it was under his leadership that the People’s Army built its own structures as an alternative to those of the Polish government, which Stalin meant to unseat.

After the fall of France in June 1940, Poland became Britain’s only effective ally and helped ward off the danger of a German invasion and keep the convoy routes open. But they had lost the war in Europe, and there was no prospect of Britain ever being in a position to help Poland regain her independence.

On 22 June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against Russia, and as the Soviet armies disintegrated under the impact, Stalin was forced into the Allied camp. He negotiated an alliance with Britain and, on 30 July, another with Poland, under the terms of which all Polish citizens imprisoned in Russia were to be released and formed up into a Polish Army which would fight alongside the Red Army.

This alliance was undermined by severe tensions: although Russia repudiated the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, it stopped short of recognising Poland’s pre-war frontier. Polish prisoners were released grudgingly and some were re-arrested. The new army, forming in Uzbekistan under the command of General Władysław Anders, was exposed to provocations and attempted infiltration by communists. As time passed, Anders grew uneasy about the fate of some of his colleagues. He had drawn up lists of officers he knew had been captured by the Soviets in 1939, but few of these came forward: as many as 20,000 were unaccounted for. Sikorski took the matter up with Stalin, and was fobbed off with a promise to investigate. Meanwhile, General Anders’ army was being harassed and even had its food rations withheld. The two years he had spent in Soviet prisons had taught him to fear the worst, and, against the wishes of Sikorski, who wanted to keep it on the eastern front, he decided to take his army and its horde of Polish waifs and strays, some 110,000 in all, out of the Soviet Union to Iran, where the British needed it.

On 11 April 1943 German radio announced that mass graves had been discovered in the forest of Katyn near Smolensk containing the bodies of 4,231 Polish officers, each with his hands tied behind his back and a bullet in his head. The first sample of names given (they all had their documents and uniforms) tallied with those on the list made out by Anders in 1941. The officers had been killed by the Russian NKVD in the spring of 1940, but the Russians accused the Germans of the massacre. The Polish government demanded an investigation by the International Red Cross, whereupon, on 26 April, Russia accused it of bad faith and collaboration with the Germans, and broke off diplomatic relations.

The inhabitants of Warsaw heard of the Katyn massacre one week before SS Brigadeführer Jurgen Stroop launched the operation to slaughter the remaining inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, who had staged a last-minute desperate resistance. The whole area was reduced to rubble over the next three weeks as the Jewish fighters defied the German onslaught. The ruins were still smouldering when, in June 1943, the commander of the AK, General Stefan Rowecki, was arrested in Warsaw by the Gestapo. On 5 July, the plane in which General Sikorski was travelling back to London from the Middle East, where he had been inspecting Anders’ Second Polish Corps, crashed on take-off from Gibraltar, killing all its passengers. This string of disasters highlighted the hopelessness of Poland’s position.

Until Hitler invaded Russia, Poland had been Britain’s only effective ally. When Russia joined the Allies in June 1941, it was relegated to third place in a coalition which was still at that stage dominated by Britain. With the entry into the war of the United States in December 1941, Poland took fourth place in an alliance increasingly dominated by America. After the Russian victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, Stalin’s position in the Allied camp became unassailable, and he used it to undermine the Polish government, denouncing it as a clique with no following in the country. At the same time he began recruiting his own Polish army out of those Poles he had failed to release two years previously.

Stalin declared the Polish-Russian frontier of 1939 unsatisfactory, arguing that it should be moved westward to correspond to the areas in which Poles constituted an overall majority, and adroitly seized on the ‘Curzon Line’, a ceasefire line pulled out of a hat by British diplomats in 1920. Terrified by the possibility, however remote, that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill gave their assent and tried to persuade the Polish government to accept this frontier. Sikorski was succeeded as prime minister by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and as commander-in-chief by General Kazimierz Sosnkowski.

Mikołajczyk wanted to negotiate directly, but Stalin became increasingly evasive; the Tehran Conference of November 1943 had convinced him that he need fear nothing from Churchill or Roosevelt. There was no good reason for him to tie his hands on an issue on which he now perceived he would have both entirely free. Time was on his side, not on that of the Poles. In January 1944 the Red Army crossed the 1939 Polish-Russian frontier in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht. Soon Stalin would have his divisions in Poland, while those of the Polish government were in Britain and Italy. He even had the 80,000 men of the First Polish Army commanded by General Zygmunt Berling, an ex-legionary who had been imprisoned in 1939 and persuaded to remain in Russia. Ironically, the Polish government’s one remaining asset in Poland, the AK, turned out to be a political liability. Its long-awaited show of force was reduced to a peripheral episode of pointless heroism which profited only Stalin.

The AK command had been preparing a rising in support of Allied operations. After the British and American advance through Italy into Austria, the Polish Second Army Corps of General Anders was to race ahead into Poland from the south, while a special independent parachute brigade waited in England to be dropped in to support the rising. But the Soviet armies advanced faster than those of the Allies. In the event, Poland would be liberated by the Red Army, while Anders battled from Monte Cassino to Ancona and Bologna, and the parachute brigade was destined to meet its effective end in the battle for Arnhem.

The underground authorities in Poland therefore had to face the fact that they would be liberated by allies who did not recognise them. As they prepared to conduct military operations against the Germans, they realised that they would simultaneously have to make a political stand against the Soviets. The AK’s amended plan, code named ‘Tempest’, was to conduct operations in the German rear in support of the advancing Soviet troops. AK units were to make contact with Red Army commanders and combine further operations. It was an attempt to bridge on the battlefield the chasm which had opened at the political level.

In April 1944 the AK’s 6,000-strong 27th Division helped the Red Army capture Lwów. In July the 5,000-strong local AK units similarly assisted in the battle for Wilno. In both cases, the Red Army and AK units cooperated, but two days after the celebratory bear-hugs and handshakes, the AK officers were arrested or shot, and their men pressed into Berling’s army. Discouraging as this was, the AK command clung to the hope that the Soviets might behave differently once they crossed the Curzon Line into territory which they formally recognised as Polish. These hopes were dashed when, after the joint liberation of Lublin at the end of July, the AK units taking part met with a similar fate.

In June Stalin had told Churchill that he would only consider negotiating with the Polish government if certain changes were made within it. Roosevelt suggested that he discuss these directly with Mikołajczyk. Under strong Allied pressure, Stalin agreed. Mikołajczyk flew to Moscow on 26 July, but by this time his position was weakened further. Stalin had collected a number of his client Poles into a ‘Union of Polish Patriots’, and on 20 July a group of these, under the leadership of an erstwhile member of the PPS, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, constituted themselves as the Polish Liberation Committee. A week later they issued a manifesto composed earlier in Moscow, and began acting as a provisional government in liberated areas, taking their seat at Lublin on 1 August.

The AK command had little room for manoeuvre. The Red Army crossed the Bug on 20 July, and on the following day news broke of the bomb plot against Hitler. On 23 July the German administration began to evacuate its offices in Warsaw, while columns of German settlers, stray soldiers and camp followers clogged roads leading west. On 27 July Soviet units crossed the Vistula to the south, and the sound of Russian guns could be heard in Warsaw. On 29 July Moscow Radio broadcast a message from Molotov to the inhabitants of Warsaw, calling on them to rise against the Germans. ‘There is not a moment to lose,’ it urged. The AK command were only too aware of this, and they were caught on the horns of an impossible dilemma.

An uprising in Warsaw was a terrifying prospect. The AK would probably be wiped out and the civilian population was bound to suffer. If they did not rise, the Soviets would brand them as Nazi sympathisers. They also knew that it would be hard to restrain their men, who had waited five years for the moment they could openly fight the Germans. Units of the communist-controlled People’s Army were preparing to go into action, and this would provoke a general free-for-all which nobody would be able to control.

The Delegatura consulted their superiors in London, who advised against a rising, warning that the Allies would be unable to support it in any way, but left the final decision up to them. The Delegatura left it to the military. After a meeting of senior officers, the commander of the AK, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, made his decision. With the advance units of the Red Army only twelve kilometres from Warsaw, and the thud of their guns rattling the windows, he gave the order to start on the following day.

At 5 p.m. on 1 August 1944 units of the AK went into action. Their initial aim was to clear the enemy from the city and seize arms. This might have been feasible in the volatile atmosphere of the last days of July, but by 1 August the Wehrmacht had re inforced its outposts throughout the city and was moving fresh Panzer divisions across the Vistula.

The AK units failed to take a number of their primary object ives, or to expel the Germans from a crucial east-west axis running between the Old Town and the city centre. Over the next couple of days they extended the area under their control, but failed to take the airport, the main railway station, or any of the Vistula bridges. By 6 August they had fought to a standstill, and from then on could only defend themselves. This they did for a total of sixtythree days.

The Germans mobilised a special force to deal with the rising under the command of General von dem Bach. It included the SS Viking Panzer division, an assortment of military police battalions, a brigade composed of German convicts, the SS Azerbaijan battalion and several units of Russian prisoners-of-war drafted into the ‘Russian National Liberation Army’ (RONA).

Over the next weeks the Korpsgruppe von dem Bach pushed the AK back, house by house, slaughtering the civilian inhabitants as they went. Following their capture of the Wola quarter, they indulged in a butchery of the civilian population which shocked even the German command. The Luftwaffe dive-bombed Polishheld areas, while long-range artillery pounded them. Conditions were indescribable. Short of ammunition, medical supplies, food and even water, the soldiers of the AK fought on with ingenuity (the German high command reported that the fighting was as hard as at Stalingrad, and casualty figures of 17,000 dead and only 9,000 wounded testify to the care taken with every bullet). They managed to capture several tanks and a quantity of other weapons, but they desperately needed air-drops of arms, ammunition and medical supplies and a Soviet advance against the Germans if they were going to regain the initiative.

An attempt to drop arms was made on the night of 4 August, but the price paid was enormous. The planes flew a round trip of 2,500 kilometres from northern Italy, and of the 196 sorties by British, Polish and South African crews over the next few days only forty-two made it to Warsaw. Churchill suggested a shuttle operation and requested landing facilities on Soviet airfields for the RAF and USAAF, but Stalin refused.

A couple of days after the outbreak of the rising, Moscow Radio denounced it as a conspiracy against the Soviet Union. Stalin told Mikołajczyk, who was still in Moscow, that ‘The Soviet command dissociates itself from the Warsaw adventure and cannot take any responsibility for it.’ The Soviet armies facing Warsaw ceased fighting and stood idle for the next six weeks.

On 20 August Churchill and Roosevelt sent a joint appeal couched in the strongest terms, to which Stalin replied that since the Poles had started the business they must bear the consequences, and described the AK as ‘a handful of power-seeking criminals’. He invoked a number of technical reasons why his armies did not go to the aid of Warsaw, but while there were certainly military difficulties involved, the real reason was political. It would have been madness for him to interfere while the Germans were liquidating the very elements that would be hostile to his purpose of turning Poland into a Soviet satellite.

After increasingly forceful demands from Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin eventually agreed to a shuttle operation. On 13 September his own air force appeared over Warsaw to drop supplies. Soviet forces at last occupied Praga, the east-bank suburb of Warsaw, and on 16 September Berling’s Polish troops attempted to cross the Vistula. On 18 September 107 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the USAAF carried out the first shuttle drop, but by then the Polishheld areas of the city had shrunk so far that most of the canisters fell into German hands.

The AK held the Old Town to the north, the city centre, and the large residential district of Mokotów to the south, as well as several smaller pockets. Communication between these was poor, while the large and well-armed units which had congregated in the countryside outside the city could not break through the ring of Germans surrounding their comrades within.

The Germans began by liquidating resistance in the western suburbs of Wola and Ochota before concentrating on reducing the stronghold of the Old Town. It was here that some of the fiercest fighting took place, at very close quarters. After four weeks of dogged resistance, the command of the group defending the Old Town decided to evacuate. On the night of 1 September the remnants of this force, over 4,000 men, climbed down into the city sewers, carrying as many of their wounded as they could. The long trek waist-deep in filth was not made any easier by the Germans pouring poison gas down manholes, but eventually most of the men emerged in the city centre.

This continued to hold out, but towards the end of September the other pockets of resistance were reduced one by one. There seemed to be little point in prolonging the agony, and on 2 October General Bór-Komorowski signed the capitulation. Churchill and Roosevelt had stressed that the soldiers of the AK were regular Allied troops, and the Germans treated them accordingly. The civilian population, however, were herded into cattle trucks and sent to concentration camps or forced labour in Germany.

They left behind 250,000 dead, buried in the ruins. As soon as they had gone, Hitler’s personal instructions went into effect: squads of SS demolition experts, Vernichtungskommando, moved in and proceeded to dynamite every building left standing. By the time the Red Army entered Warsaw in January 1945, there was nobody and nothing to liberate, except for stray dogs and rats. A huge desert of rubble remained as a monument to the city which suffered more than any other in the whole war.

In the last hours before the capitulation tens of thousands of people had slipped out, making for the safety of the countryside. Among them were several thousand soldiers of the AK, its new commander, General Leopold Okulicki, and the entire Delegatura. The fall of Warsaw was not to be the end of the struggle for the AK, which still had units throughout the country. Yet its role was effectively at an end.

Five years of meticulous planning, ingenuity and heroism had yielded impressive results in the field of intelligence-gathering, and accounted for some 150,000 German military personnel. But neither the Tempest operations nor the Warsaw Uprising gave the organisation a chance to show its full potential. And they had proved politically disastrous as well. Far from strengthening Mikołajczyk’s bargaining position, the Warsaw Uprising had turned him into a supplicant.

During talks which took place in Moscow in October, Stalin demanded that Mikołajczyk accept his proposed frontier in the east, in return for which Poland would be compensated with former German territory up to the river Oder. He also wanted Mikołajczyk to dissolve the Polish government and come to Poland to head a provisional government made up of men from the Lublin committee. Pressed by Churchill and Roosevelt, the Polish Prime Minister felt obliged, against his better judgement, to demonstrate his goodwill by accepting this compromise. In January 1945 General Okulicki dissolved the AK and released its soldiers from their oath of loyalty to the London government.

Stalin had no intention of sticking to this compromise. Despite strong objections from Churchill and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in February and at Potsdam in July, he went on to appoint an interim government consisting of twenty-one ministers of whom sixteen were his men, with Edward Osóbka-Morawski as premier and Mikołajczyk as his deputy. The Allies formally recognised this and withdrew recognition from the Polish government, the majority of whose ministers had rejected the compromise agreed to by Mikołajczyk. They protested at the Allies’ high-handed behaviour and continued to function in London in defiance of these arrangements. The majority of its soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians who found themselves in the west remained loyal to the government and refused to return to Poland. The wisdom of their decision would soon become apparent.

Behind the Red Army came Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, and with it the new Polish security services, the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB). They were concerned primarily with rooting out of Polish society every element deemed unsympathetic to the Soviet Union, and in the first place that meant former members of the AK.

In March, sixteen men, including General Okulicki and all the members of the former Delegatura, were invited by Stalin’s plenipotentiary in Poland, the NKVD General Ivanov, for talks at Pruszków outside Warsaw. There they were seized and flown to Moscow where they were put on trial for collaborating with the Nazis, and given sentences of up to ten years. Tens of thousands of AK members, former officers, political workers and landowners were interrogated, tortured, and often murdered: as many as 16,000 people are thought to have died in this way.

Although the AK had been dissolved, many of its members remained on their guard, while units of the right-wing NSZ and the newly founded Freedom and Independence (WiN) engaged in active self-defence. By 1946 this militant underground numbered as many as 80,000 men, who were, ironically, much better armed than the AK had ever been, thanks to the passage of the Russo-German front through the country. As the NKVD and UB intensified their activities, this self-defence grew into a guerrilla war which would cost the lives of some 30,000 Poles and 1,000 Soviet soldiers over the next two years.

By the middle of 1946 the new Citizens’Militia (MO) was twice as strong in numbers as the pre-war Polish police, and the internal security forces numbered as many again. While the Polish and Soviet troops dealt with the militant underground, these attended to the rest of the population. Although its prime objective was the annihilation of what was left of the landed gentry and the intelligentsia, there was nobody so insignificant that he or she did not qualify for the attentions of the UB, attentions which were both meticulous and brutal. Recently vacated German concentration camps were reactivated and filled up.

The new order was imposed ruthlessly. The decisions of the political men on the ground and those of their colleagues of the police could be highly arbitrary. Anything could be ‘nationalised’—not only estates, factories, smallholdings, livestock, pictures and other valuables, but the humblest personal possessions. In addition, units of the Red Army stationed all over Poland not only lived off the land, but engaged in regular plundering expeditions.

All this took place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion. Over six million Germans either fled or were evicted, mostly from parts of Germany which had been allocated to Poland under an agreement between Stalin and the Western Allies. Their place was being taken by Poles flooding in from every quarter, 2.2 million returning from slave labour and concentration camps in Germany, 1.5 million ousted from former Polish territory taken over by the Soviet Union.

It was only after more than a year of careful preparation and positioning that elections were held, in January 1947. The strongest contestant was Mikołajczyk’s Polish People’s Party (PSL). The second largest party was the new PPS. Its old leadership having remained in exile or in hiding, it was led by a pre-war activist and survivor of Auschwitz, Józef Cyrankiewicz. The party favoured by Stalin, the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), led by Władysław Gomułka, had only 65,000 members in December 1945, just over one-tenth of the membership of the PSL. In the event, however, the PSL would be awarded only 10.3 per cent of the vote.

One million people were disqualified from voting by bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, and thousands more were arrested on the day or beaten up on the way to the polling stations, which were heavily staffed with members of the security services; 128 activists of the PSL were murdered, 149 of its candidates were arrested, 174 were disqualified and only twenty-eight were elected, of whom fourteen were subsequently disqualified. Fearing for his life, Mikołajczyk escaped to the West.

A provisional constitution adopted in February 1947 established a Council of State with almost unlimited legislative and executive powers, which were exercised by the leadership of the PPR. Operations against the remnants of the underground were intensified, a campaign of harassment was launched against the Church and all pretence at conciliation and social democratic window-dressing was dropped.

In August 1948 Władysław Gomułka, secretary of the PPR and deputy premier, the principal advocate of ‘a Polish road to socialism’, was accused of ‘nationalist deviation’ and sacked from his post, which was filled by Bolesław Bierut, a staunch Stalinist. In December 1948 the remaining deputies of the PPS were forced to merge with the PPR in the new PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party), which henceforth became the Party. The remains of the PSL were amalgamated into the ZSL (United People’s Party), which was only nominally independent of the PZPR.

There followed, in 1950, a purge of ‘alien elements’ in the PPS and the PPR, and a witch-hunt in the army. Those who had served in Polish forces abroad and returned to offer their services to the new state were mostly shot. The Russian Marshal Rokossovsky was put in charge of the army, which was staffed throughout by Russian officers.

The purge was carried through to trade unions, local organisations and the street. Stalinist verbiage about ‘foreign agents’ and ‘enemy espionage’ invaded everything from a quarrel between two Party bosses to a police report on petty pilfering or a wayside robbery. A brief affair with a former member of the AK was pretext enough for a girl to be interrogated, tortured and imprisoned for years. The prisons were bursting, and new concentration camps at Mielęcin and Jaworzno filled up with some 30,000 workers who had dared to strike. Peasants were forced to join Soviet-style collective farms. In 1951 Gomułka and others who had fallen from grace were imprisoned.

By then, Poland had been hermetically sealed off from the outside world, and not just by the three hundred kilometres of barbed-wire entanglements and 1,200 watchtowers surrounding it. In February 1947 leaders of the ruling parties of the Sovietoccupied countries of Central Europe met and set up an ‘information bureau’, the Cominform, ostensibly a vehicle for friendly cooperation. Although it was supposedly an inter-party body, it was in effect an inter-government one, and an instrument through which Stalin could exert pressure. In February 1948 a coup in Prague turned Czechoslovakia into a Soviet dependency, and the same happened in Budapest later that year. The Berlin blockade in June and the transformation of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany into another Soviet satellite the following year finally drew the Iron Curtain across Europe. In 1952 a Soviet-style constitution, personally edited by Stalin, was imposed on the country, which was officially renamed the People’s Republic of Poland.