The first period of the German occupation had been characterised by enslavement, destitution, annexation, deportation, an indiscriminate application of terror and the establishment of ghettos for the Jews. Polish hopes that the victory of the western allies might provide an early escape from the German yoke had been dashed when France signed an armistice with Germany in June 1940. The German invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on 22 June 1941 with the entry of German forces into Soviet-occupied Poland, had an enormous impact. The German lines of communication lay across Poland and security became a vital issue for them. Existing German policies of the exploitation of Poland’s economic resources and its labour were carried to a new level. The policy of Germanising the east, begun with the annexation of Warthegau, Danzig-West Prussia and Polish Upper Silesia, now led to further ‘depolonising’ experiments. As German quotas for food and labour from the General Government rose, they were more vigorously enforced, and there was an increase in terror.
As German terror grew in Poland, so did resistance to German rule. In this period the resistance became more organised, with many groups that had sprung up during the first period of the occupation now grouped under the newly formed Armia Krajowa, the AK. The Underground Government, the Delegatura, extended its influence and scope. During these dark years the Poles faced a struggle for survival in the face of the racial war against them waged by the Germans. The depredations suffered by and the terror inflicted on the Poles would have been the worst event in the Second World War, except that they were overshadowed by an even greater catastrophe, the Holocaust.
The German preparations for Operation Barbarossa could not be concealed from the Poles. From the autumn of 1940, Polish and Jewish forced labour began building hospitals, barracks and storage facilities, and over 100 airfields and 50 dispersal strips. A Pole working on an airfield noted the German efforts to camouflage their preparations from prying Soviet planes:
When the Germans finished the runway they let the grass grow and grazed cattle on it. It looked more like a pasture than an airfield. White clover on the runway provided good grazing. The hangars were constructed by driving tree trunks into the ground. Hanging over this was wire or a green net overlaid with foliage. As leaves dried out they were replaced with fresh.1
Road signs for the use of German troops were erected on the roads leading east, and one produced much hilarity among the Poles: in the sign for a dangerous bend – Gefährliche Kurve – the second word meant ‘whore’ in Polish.2 Above all, the Germans could not their conceal troop movements:
By day and night, troops were passing through Kraków, equipped with the latest weapons, gleaming uniforms, marvellous horses and huge, shapeless tanks. The whole cavalcade – gigantic, limitless in numbers and scale – rolled on and on, as though it would never end. The procession lasted all day and all night, through the next day and on into the night. One had the impression that it would go on for ever. It streamed out from the railway station, along the Planty Promenade, then disappeared down the Karmelicka and beyond – moving east.3
On the first Sunday of June 1941, the Smorczewski family, living in German-occupied Poland close to the German-Soviet demarcation line, went to church as normal. Ralph Smorczewski described what happened next:
It was not until after Mass, when we emerged into the church cemetery, that we all became aware of some strange goings-on in our park. The continuous roar of numerous heavy engines and the grinding clatter of chains reverberated from the orchard, the lime tree alley and from the park beyond. On entering the orchard through a wooden gate, a horrific sight hit our eyes. The park was full of army vehicles, some moving about, others stationary with their engines still revving. Hurrying home, my eyes travelled in disbelief over tanks, armoured cars, motorcycles with side cars and other strange looking contraptions, that filled every available space between the trees and amongst the shrubbery.
Soon the Panzer unit departed, ‘leaving behind churned up earth, squashed shrubs and broken tree branches’.4
Historians of Operation Barbarossa have mostly overlooked the fact that during the first week of the German invasion the battles between the German and Soviet forces were taking place on pre-war Polish territory.5 Białystok, Grodno, Brześć and Stanisławów, as well as many other places where the Soviet planes were destroyed on the ground, were all formerly Polish airfields. The fortress of Brześć, where the Poles had put up a determined defence against the Germans in September 1939, was now garrisoned by the Soviets and proved as difficult to crack a second time for the Germans despite the Soviet garrison being badly under-strength and ill-equipped. In Lwów there was general panic among the Soviets as the Germans bombed the city, and the Polish and Ukrainian population briefly delighted in the fear displayed by their Soviet oppressors. At the end of June there was a great tank battle in the Łuck–Brody–Równe–Dubno area, which continued for several days until the retreat of adjacent armies forced the Soviets to withdraw across the pre-war frontier. Soviet historians have proudly shown that they did not retreat in total disarray but managed to salvage some of the infrastructure such as locomotives and train carriages and wagons. It should be added, however, that this property was Polish not Soviet, so it merely compounded the misappropriation and dismantling of Poland that had been such a feature of the Soviet occupation.6
In the eastern provinces of Poland, now annexed to the Soviet Union, the population had been subjected to Soviet-inspired terror, economic exploitation and deportation. The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was greeted with often ill-concealed glee by many Poles. Countess Lanckorońska wrote of the common view:
We firmly believed that the Germans would beat the Muscovites, after which the Germans, already weakened, would be finished off by the Allies. Then, both our enemies having fallen, Poland would rise between them, morally powerful in the unity and collective harmony imparted to us by this terrible struggle.7
The commander of the Polish resistance, General Stefan Grot-Rowecki, informed London that the Poles viewed the invasion favourably because of this hope that the two enemies would destroy each other.8 Among the non-Jewish population the arrival of the Germans was greeted with a degree of suspicion but also with some relief, as the Soviet terror had affected virtually every sector of the population, and the NKVD had massacred their prisoners in the hours before they fled eastwards. A German officer recorded that when his regiment reached Dubno: ‘We could not sleep because there was an awful smell. My regiment was close to a Russian prison and soon we detected the source of the smell. Before leaving the city the Soviet authority had killed all the people in the prison.’9 In Lwów all the prisoners in the Brygidki jail were massacred: a German soldier and his friends who wanted to visit it did not do so because they ‘did not have any gas masks with us so it was impossible to enter the rooms in the cellar or the cells’.10 The Germans invited the Poles into these prisons to search for their relatives.11 In the countryside the situation was peaceful once the Germans had passed through: ‘There was no police, no authority of any kind. The Poles protected their village, the Ukrainians theirs.’12
The Ukrainians greeted the German invasion with the same enthusiasm that they had shown at the Soviet invasion in 1939 and for the same reason. Again they hoped that they would be granted their independence; but the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists acted prematurely when, in Lwów at 8 p.m. on 30 June 1941, Yaroslav Stetsko proclaimed the independence of western Ukraine.13 Ukrainians flocked to help the Germans, providing much of the manpower needed to shoot the Jews, joined German paramilitary formations and wore German uniforms. The independent Ukrainian state was short-lived because, as the governor of the General Government, Hans Frank, declared:
First of all we should not let the Ukrainians of our District of Galicia believe that we were ready to recognise any independent Ukrainian State within the territories destined for the Greater German Reich … I see a solution of the Ukrainian problem in this way, that they should, similar to the Poles, remain at our disposal as a working power in the future.14
Stetsko and other Ukrainian nationalists, including Stepan Bandera, were arrested by the Germans and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It was only much later in the war that the Germans encouraged Ukrainian nationalism for their own purposes.
In the early days of the occupation, the German policy appeared to be to allow the Poles to remain in charge of the local administration while the Germans occupied themselves with a ‘cleansing action’ against ‘the Bolsheviks and the Jews’, but by the autumn the Germans decided to impose their full authority over their newly captured Polish provinces. East Galicia and the province of Białystok were added to the General Government; the provinces of Wilno, Nowogródek and Polesie were placed in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, governed by Heinrich Lohse; and the province of Wołyń became part of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, governed by Erich Koch. Polish administrators were now replaced by Belorussians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. The latter two were particularly hostile to their former Polish rulers, with some extremist Lithuanian nationalists openly calling for the creation of Polish ghettos, for Poles to be forced to wear identification badges and for them to have lower food rations than the Lithuanians.15 The Ukrainian attitude towards the Poles was far worse, and in 1943 it would explode into an orgy of violence, which will be covered in Chapter 12.
During the twin occupations of Poland there had been limited communications between the two zones. As a result ‘the people of Lwów knew little about Germany and asked a lot about conditions in the west, of which they knew nothing at all’. Because East Galicia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1918, the population expected a similar type of relatively benign rule to be reimposed, but they were soon to be disillusioned. Soon schoolchildren sang a new rhyme:
| Żydzi mają nędze, | The Jews have the destitution, |
| Polacy pieniądze, | The Poles have the money, |
| Ukrainicy policji, | The Ukrainians have the police, |
| Niemcy Galicji. | The Germans have Galicia. |
There were mass arrests of the intelligentsia, already decimated by Soviet murders and deportations. For example, the professors of Lwów’s Jan Kazimierz University and Polytechnic were arrested and shot on the orders of SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger. East Galicia was turned into the same educational desert that existed in the rest of the General Government: secondary schools and higher education colleges were closed and their teachers arrested and shot. Theatres, museums and other places of culture were closed and the best of their art taken to Germany. To the indignation of the local population, the Soviet-imposed kolkhozy were not abolished. Indeed, the Reich Agriculture Minister Herbert Backe said that if the Soviets had not imposed them, then the Germans would have had to, because their existence eased the transfer of agricultural property to Germans.17 Starvation was rife in Lwów: ‘There were no shops and the total destruction of economic life brought about by the Bolsheviks was all the more terrible in its consequences because the Germans would neither allow anything to be brought into the city, nor import anything themselves.’18
Stanisławów, in the south-east corner of Poland, had a different experience to start with because it was initially occupied by troops from the 2nd Hungarian Army. The Hungarian occupation was benign with a strong humanitarian aspect, and the Hungarians were enormously popular with the Poles. Platoons of Hungarian soldiers would go to Mass in the local churches where they would sing the Polish national song Boże, coś Polskę. This had been runner-up in the competition for the Polish national anthem in 1918 and had been later translated into Hungarian as a hymn. The Poles sang in Polish and the Hungarians in Hungarian in perfect amity. The Hungarians did, however, warn the Poles that the situation would soon change. The Olszański family was told: ‘Stanisławów will be made part of the General Government, as Lwów already is, so soon the Hungarians will leave and the Germans will come: so go to Hungary now if you can.’19 Then the situation changed dramatically as, fresh from the murder of the Lwów professors, Krüger made the city his personal fiefdom. Local Ukrainians supplied him with a list of members of the intelligentsia, whom the Gestapo then rounded up and shot.20
Life in the General Government for the majority of Polish citizens became one long struggle for survival. The failure of the Wehrmacht to defeat the Soviets quickly meant that the Ukraine, the food basket that the Germans expected to feed the Reich, could not be exploited. Consequently, the General Government was expected to fill the shortfall. Food rationing in the cities was so severe that it was only just above starvation level: the Jews received lower rations and really did starve to death in their ghettos and labour camps. The Germans issued a list of foodstuffs forbidden to Poles, which included veal, pork, all fish, onions and berries.21 In 1942, when Backe demanded 150,000 tons of grain, a six-fold increase in food exports from the General Government, Frank declared: ‘The new levies will be fulfilled exclusively at the expense of the foreign [Polish] population. It must be done cold-bloodedly and without pity.’22 As a result rations in Warsaw dropped from 552 calories in March 1942 to 468 in April,23 but even this was not enough, so Himmler ordered that in August 1942 Warsaw should be sealed off from the rest of the General Government to prevent the peasants from selling their produce to the starving city-dwellers.24 Frank declared a state of emergency from 1 August to 30 November 1942 to ‘secure the collection of crops’, and German terror in the countryside increased as peasants were shot for not fulfilling their quota.25 Frank even managed to add a further insult when ‘through loudspeakers placed on every street corner, [he] thanked the Polish population for “offering their sugar to the heroic German Army” …’26 The level of rations was so low that it proved counterproductive to the German war effort. The head of German arms production in the General Government, General Schindler, suggested in summer 1942 that ration cards should be limited only to those Poles working in the German interests. Frank’s secretary of state, Dr Bühler, confirmed in April 1943:
I can state at this stage that the Polish worker in the General Government is being looked after worse than the foreign workers in Germany, than the worker from the East in the Reich provinces, than the Polish and also the Russian prisoners of war, to say nothing of the consumers’ scale of rationing granted to the Czech population in the Protectorate, and to the Polish population in the incorporated Eastern areas. In spite of this the same output is demanded from the Polish population as from that in other regions.27
The Poles turned to the black market to survive. Schindler noted that the German armaments industry had to employ at least 20 per cent more workers than necessary because so many of them spent days away from work searching for food. In general the countryside was much better off than the cities, and the peasants would still run the gauntlet of German gendarmes to smuggle food into town and sell it on the black market. Stefan Korboński noted of the peasants: ‘They moved like pillars, carrying and transporting by rail or carts tons of foodstuffs in little bags sewn into their underskirts and blouses. Never before have I seen such over-sized busts as in Poland at this time.’28 Even the Germans were in on the black market. Zbigniew Bokiewicz was a boy scout and heard of a black market operating in Warsaw’s freight yards where ‘both the German and Polish railwaymen opened wagons of goods at the freight yards, loaded the contents onto trucks, and sold the entire contents as they stood, without letting their purchasers know what they contained’. German drivers would even deliver the goods to storage places.29 From 1 September 1943, the level of rations in the General Government was increased, which was possible not because the Ukraine had begun to yield its expected riches but because by this time the majority of Polish Jews had been exterminated.30
Jobs were hard to find and few of them paid a living wage. One historian has noted the great increase in the numbers of people working in local administration from 122,700 at the beginning of 1941 to 206,300 in the middle of 1943 and cites this as an example of Polish collaboration with the Germans.31 In fact, it is unknown how many people actually worked in the local administration, because the Underground Government became experts at forging documents to show that the holder worked in an office under German management and was therefore excluded from forced labour. A German economist visited the General Government and reported to Frank that on weekdays in Germany the streets of the cities were empty because everyone was at work but, in contrast, the streets of the General Government were filled with young people, all of whom could show documents proving that they worked for a German-controlled enterprise.32 By 1943 the Germans had seen through the subterfuge and began to ignore the documents.
Many people lacked the financial resources to live off the black market. The Germans established the Central Welfare Council (Rada Glówna Opiekuńcza, RGO) to coordinate the relief agencies acting for the Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. Under this umbrella, the Main Welfare Council (Naczelna Rada Opiekuńcza), run by Count Adam Roniker, cared for the Poles, although the Polish Red Cross remained independent. The work of the Jewish council under the RGO, the Jewish Self-help Society (Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna), ended with the deportation and extermination of the Jews. These welfare agencies distributed aid received from abroad and helped the poor, children, forced labourers and prisoners.33 They operated throughout Poland except in the Gestapo-run prison in Stanisławów, where Krüger forbade them access.34
Poles and Polish Jews were not the only people suffering. Life for the majority of Soviet prisoners of war marched into the General Government by their German conquerors was short. Zygmunt Klukowski saw columns of them pass through Szczebrzeszyn:
They all looked like skeletons, just shadows of human beings, barely moving. I have never in my life seen anything like this. Men were falling in the street; the stronger ones were carrying others, holding them up by their arms. They looked like starved animals, not like people. They were fighting for scraps of apples in the gutter, not paying attention to the Germans who would beat them with rubber sticks. Some crossed themselves and knelt, begging for food. Soldiers from the convoy beat them without mercy. They not only beat prisoners but also people who stood by and tried to pass along some food.
He believed that ‘the entire Polish population, not only the Jews, were very sympathetic to the Russian prisoners’.35 Massive POW camps were established at Dęblin, Chełm, Siedlce and Zamość for around 500,000 Soviet POWs. Between the end of October 1941 and April 1942 over 85 per cent of them died; Polish peasants attempted to feed them but the Germans shot them and destroyed their villages. The resistance sent reports to London detailing the German treatment of the Soviet POWs.36
Wanda Draczyńska summarised the situation in the General Government: ‘During the German occupation, there was never a moment when we did not feel threatened. Every time we left home, we never knew whether we would ever see it again.’37 The principal reason for this was the ever-present threat of the łapanka, or round-up for forced labour. An unnamed observer noted:
The wild and ruthless manhunt as exercised everywhere in towns and country, in streets, squares, stations, even in churches, at night in houses, has badly shaken the feeling of security of the inhabitants. Everybody is exposed to the danger, to be seized anywhere and at any time by members of the police, suddenly and unexpectedly, and to be brought into an assembly camp. None of his relatives knows what has happened to him, and only months later one or the other gets news of his fate by a postcard.38
Even some sunbathers by the Vistula were seized with not even a chance to gather together their clothes. In the countryside the Germans, assisted by the Polish Blue Police (Policja Granatowa), would surround a village and burn it if a sufficient number of labourers did not report for forced labour. At least villagers could hide in the forests to escape the Germans, but this option was not open to city-dwellers. By 1943 there were already nearly 1,000,000 Poles working in the Reich and the labour reserves of the General Government were virtually exhausted. Nevertheless, with the application of even more ruthlessness and by ignoring exemption documents, Frank managed to fill the demands of Fritz Saukel, the German director of labour, for 150,000 Poles in 1943 and 100,000 in 1944.39 In March 1943, the Germans held a small celebration in Kraków to acknowledge the despatch of the millionth worker to the Reich.40
The Poles dreaded being transported there to work because of the rumours of the conditions there. Whereas workers from western Europe enjoyed similar working conditions and rations to the Germans: ‘By contrast, the situation of workers from the East … was characterised by poor diet, low wages, inadequate housing and clothing, excessively long hours, deficient medical care, cheating by German supervisors, abuse and maltreatments, and high mortality.’41 Draconian regulations had been in force for the Polish workers since 1940, with severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, and the punishment for any infraction was incarceration in a concentration camp or death. Some Germans were brave enough to risk Nazi wrath by still treating the Untermenschen, the Poles, well. Katherine Graczyk recalled her relationship with one family:
On Christmas Eve, I had dinner with them. The windows were covered with tarps. The farmer had to make sure nobody was outside. It was against the law for the Germans to eat with Polish slave labour workers, but they ate Christmas Eve dinner with me anyway. They gave me a Christmas present, too. It was just a rubber apron. That’s all they could afford. I appreciated it and I understood the risks they took. They could have gone to prison for such acts of kindness.42
At least 130,000 Polish workers died in Germany from maltreatment before conditions started to improve in 1943, when the Germans now began to treat their foreign workers better because they needed the manpower for their armaments factories since the war was turning against them. The death rate was lower than in previous years but still twice that of the German population.43 Olga Fjodorowna recalled that she and her fellow workers had been reduced to supplementing their diet with ‘grasses and leaves … but they gave us cramps and pains in the heart’. When she was liberated in 1945 she weighed only 68 pounds.44 Those too sick to work were sent back home and a report on one transport in September 1942 noted:
There were dead passengers on the returning train. Women on that train gave birth to children that were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick with tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach. The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was … thrown onto the embankment.45
On their return to Poland these people were cared for by the RGO.
Many Poles were sent to camps in the Greater German Reich: Dachau, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Ravensbrück.46 Few survived the war. At Ravensbrück, Polish inmates were mainly women who had been sent to work in Germany and had transgressed some draconian regulation. There were also members of the resistance, mainly couriers, who were the most vulnerable members because they had to remain in the same location and were therefore more likely to be caught by the Gestapo.47 Wanda Półtawska, a young courier imprisoned in Ravensbrück, and other Polish women were selected for the medical experiments led by Professor Karl Gebhardt. These women became known in the camp as ‘rabbits’ and were subjected to prolonged and agonising experiments involving the injection of bacterial cultures into their bones or muscles and the testing of gas bombs. At least seven Polish women died after operations to remove leg bones, to be used for severely wounded German soldiers. Despite the horrific conditions in the camps, education was continued and many young women, including the surviving ‘rabbits’, gained their school-leaving certificate, the Matura, after passing examinations held by the teachers also imprisoned in the camps.48
Generalplan Ost was first discussed at the conference of Nazi officials which convened under the chairmanship of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich at Wannsee in January 1942. The principal purpose of this conference was to discuss the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. But Generalplan Ost was more than a plan for the extermination of the Jews. The second version of the plan, produced in July 1942, envisaged nothing less than the transport of 31,000,000 non-Germans from the General Government and Nazi-occupied western portions of the Soviet Union to Siberia. Himmler explained his policy in the journal Das Schwarze Korps in summer 1942: ‘Our duty in the East is not Germanisation in the former sense of the term, that is, imposing German language and laws upon the population, but to ensure that only people of pure German blood inhabit the East.’49 This would take place over a thirty-year period during which the people of these areas would be subjected to a policy of deliberate starvation, so that at least 80 per cent would perish. The territory they vacated would be filled by the introduction of 10,000,000 Germans who would farm the region. The Germans began by clearing the region earmarked for German colonisation of its indigenous Jewish population. The terror accompanying this process, which will be covered fully in Chapter 10, led the Poles to conclude, as Stefan Grot-Rowecki, commander of the reorganised resistance, the AK, reported to London in November 1942: ‘after the completion of this action [of destroying the Jews] the Germans will begin to liquidate the Poles in the same fashion’.50
The details of Generalplan Ost had not been finalised when Himmler ordered the SS and Police Leader of Lublin district, SS-Brigadeführer Otto Globocnik, to begin a trial evacuation of the entire Polish population of the Zamość region. Globocnik was known for his hatred of Poles, ‘and for his zeal in carrying out his duties, even in excess of the ones imposed by the Nazi regime’.51 From November 1942 to March 1943 the Germans cleared the Poles from 116 villages, a total of around 41,000 inhabitants. They were given hardly any notice before their expulsion and allowed to take only what belongings they could carry. A second wave of deportations was begun in spring 1943 with a further 80,000 Poles expelled from 171 villages. In all about 31 per cent of Poles in the Lublin region were deported. Himmler had anticipated importing 50,000 Volksdeutsche into the region but could find only 10,000 potential settlers, many of whom could not speak German and had no farming experience. Polish Ukrainians were distributed around the region to protect the Volksdeutsche.52
The AK ordered the villagers to destroy their properties before leaving, and many either moved in with relatives elsewhere in the General Government or fled to the forests seeking the protection of the AK or partisan units. Indeed, the Germans complained that about 25,000 Poles had fled rather than be resettled. The AK and the partisans attacked the new German settlers, as Frank informed his government in January 1943:
While the racial Germans had not really been molested previously, several attacks on settlers and cases of arson had occurred since the new settlement. In view of the resettlement in the Zamość county, a large part of the police and gendarmerie which was at the disposal of the district, was being withdrawn from the fight against the bandits. The effect on the neighbouring districts was, furthermore, very bad, and there was occasion for great doubt regarding the spring cultivation.53
By May 1943 Frank feared that the ‘newly settled areas [were] … in a state of open rebellion’, so that in August 1943, when a delegation from the RGO met him, he ‘explained that several low-ranking German officials made big mistakes by enforcing evacuations and that some would be removed from their posts’, including Globocnik.54 The Germans then abandoned the policy of evacuations, but attacks continued on the German settlers and, by April 1944, a substantial number had abandoned the Polish properties they had been given and sought security in a camp in Łódź.55
The evacuated Poles were taken to transit camps where, living in appalling conditions, they were segregated into the four categories of the Volksliste. Those in the first two categories (1 and 2) were considered candidates for Germanisation according to ancestry or racial characteristics and were sent to Łódź for further examination. Those in the two lowest categories (3 and 4) were deemed unsuitable for Germanisation and were despatched to labour camps. Those seen as politically dangerous were sent to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek, where many were gassed on arrival. Men and women aged over 60 were sent to ‘retirement villages’, formerly populated by Jews, along with others not considered fit for work.56
A particular tragedy befell the children from the Lublin region and, indeed, throughout occupied Poland. Frank said: ‘When we see a blue-eyed child we are surprised that she is speaking Polish … I admit that in Poland one can find German racial traits among the people …’ In June 1941, Himmler echoed this:
I would consider it proper if young children of Polish families with specially good racial characteristics were collected and educated in special children’s homes which must not be too large. The seizure of these children would have to be explained by danger to their health … Genealogical trees and documents of those children who develop satisfactorily should be procured. After one year, such children should be placed as foster children with childless families of good race.57
Under the aegis of the Lebensborn programme, the Germans screened Polish children after kidnapping them from Polish orphanages, foster families and even off the street. These children were then sent to children’s homes in Poznań, Kalisz, Pruszków, Bruczków or Ludwików and screened further. Those who failed the tests were sent to labour camps in Germany. The records of Auschwitz show the arrival of 39 boys from Zamość in February 1943, all of whom were immediately killed by phenol injections to the heart. Of the approximately 200,000 Polish children kidnapped by the Germans, only between 15 and 20 per cent were returned to Poland after the war.58
Poland was unique among all the German-occupied countries in having both a Government-in-Exile in London and an Underground Government in the country itself, the Delegatura in Warsaw. The first delegate, Cyryl Ratajski, established 20 government departments, closely related to the pre-war government and civil service, and a system of local delegates. He resigned due to poor health in the summer of 1942 and died soon afterwards. His replacement, Jan Piekałkiewicz, was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1943, and Jan Stanisław Jankowski took over (and survived the German occupation). Jan Nowak, a courier between Poland and Britain, described Jankowski: ‘a man of middle height, balding, wearing glasses … a strong personality, a determined individual, very resolute’.59 The Underground Government’s aims were to maintain the morale of the population through the provision of education and culture; to encourage civil resistance; to undertake propaganda activities; and to prepare for the future. The underground secondary-school education system was established almost from the outset of the occupation, and Warsaw University also reopened in secret. After the German occupation of eastern Poland, the Jan Kazimierz University and Polytechnic in Lwów and the Stefan Batory University in Wilno began operating, and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków also reopened during 1942. In all about 1,000 students were educated in the secret universities. The Underground Government touched all areas of culture: theatre companies put on productions and art exhibitions were staged.60 German-sponsored cultural events were avoided; for example, part of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra played at the Lardelli Restaurant in Warsaw under the conductor Adolf Dolzycki, who had ‘remembered’ that he had some German ancestry and signed the Volksliste. His performances were therefore shunned by all patriotic Poles.61
In December 1942, the Delegatura established the Directorate of Civil Resistance under Stefan Korboński.62 Its duties were varied but primarily consisted of giving advice to the whole Polish population on how it could resist German rule. For example, people were told to ignore all German decrees and contact with the Germans as far as possible. The advice given to professionals included requesting doctors to be prepared to issue false medical certificates so that Poles could avoid forced labour, and asking judges not to send cases from their courts to the German ones. Employers were asked to retain as many staff as possible, again to undermine German efforts to recruit Poles for forced labour in the Reich or into the construction service, the Baudienst.63 Korboński’s efforts at fostering passive resistance were effective. When Jan Nowak was stopped in the street by a Gestapo agent on his way from a clandestine meeting, he was asked whom he had been visiting: ‘Looking over the German’s arm, I could see a small brass plate on the door with the name of a woman dentist. Without hesitation I gave her name and the number of her apartment.’ The German rang the bell and asked whether a patient by the name of Jeziorański, Nowak’s real name, had just left and the dentist confirmed that he had: ‘The unknown woman, whom I had never seen and never would see, had not hesitated for a second. She understood in an instant that someone’s life was at stake.’64
The Bureau for Information and Propaganda was particularly effective in keeping the Polish population informed of events and policies. The two main publications with the greatest circulation were Polska Żyje (Poland Lives) and the Biuletyn Informacyjny (Information Bulletin), which at its height had a print run of 47,000. Complimentary copies were sent to the German governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer. In the Polish archives there are copies of 1,174 different magazines. The Bureau also produced military, technical and educational manuals.65 The Delegatura ran Operation ‘N’, which produced journals for the Germans with titles such as Der Soldat and Der Hammer, imitating their style but spreading black propaganda. Copies were distributed all over Poland and even reached the Reich and the Eastern Front.66 The Poles scored a victory over the Germans when, at short notice, they produced a proclamation announcing that 1 May 1942 was to be a holiday on full pay; even the Germans were taken in to start with and the factories remained shut that day despite frantic German public announcements ordering the workers to the factories.67 Those Poles who still had access to radios could listen to the radio station ŚWIT,* which was located outside London but pretended to broadcast from within Poland. Every day Korboński would transmit information to London and ŚWIT would then broadcast it back to Poland. This rapid turnaround meant that the news broadcast was current and lent credence to the belief that it was coming from within occupied Poland.68 It also reassured the Poles that their problems were understood.
In late 1941, the Germans conscripted Poles in class 3 of the Volksliste: those with some German ancestry who had previously been regarded as Poles. Dominik Stoltman was one such conscript and wrote later: ‘Our only consolation was the news from Polish Radio London telling us that they were aware of the situation in Poland. We were also told that once any volunteer reached the front, they were to cross over. We would then have a chance to join the Polish army to fight our common enemy.’69 Poles conscripted were encouraged to desert and a stamp shop in Warsaw was the central location for this operation: ‘When the coast was clear, the deserters would go into the office at the rear, where their identities would be changed – new clothes, documents, hairstyles – and then go out the back door.’70 Escaped British POWs were also offered assistance. Initially the hiding of them was undertaken by an impromptu organisation run by Mrs Markowski and Mr Olszewski, but in December 1941 Rowecki received orders from London to organise their concealment and repatriation. The aim was to send the British to Switzerland, and the Polish military attaché in Berne was ordered to render assistance. Unfortunately the escape organisation was penetrated by the Gestapo and many members arrested. British POWs who were recaptured were sent to Colditz or other POW camps. Some British POWs joined the AK: an airman, John Ward, would render great service to the AK through his broadcasts back to London during the Warsaw Uprising.71
The Polish underground also imitated the style of German decrees satirically. During the winter of 1942, the Germans replaced the plaque on the statue of Copernicus which said that he was a Pole with one that said that he was a German. The Poles took down that plaque and, when the Germans noticed, Fischer issued a proclamation, printed on posters distributed around Warsaw:
Recently, criminal elements removed the tablet from the Copernicus monument for political reasons. As a reprisal, I order the removal of the Kiliński monument. At the same time, I give full warning that, should similar acts be perpetrated, I shall order the suspension of all food rations for the Polish population of Warsaw for the term of one week.
Kiliński’s statue was taken to the vaults of the National Museum; the Poles painted, in tar on the light-coloured walls of the museum: ‘People of Warsaw, I am here’, signed ‘Kiliński’. A week later a poster appeared which imitated Fischer’s in format, style and font: ‘Recently, criminal elements removed the Kiliński monument for political reasons. As a reprisal, I order the prolongation of winter on the eastern front for the term of two months.’ It was signed ‘Nicolaus Copernicus’, and the winter of 1942–3 did last longer than usual.72 When the Germans broke the news of the Katyń murders in April 1943, they put up posters inviting a committee to inspect the graves. The Bureau of Information produced a poster that started off with this declaration but then continued:
In this connection, the General Government has ordered that a parallel excursion be organised to the concentration camp at Auschwitz for a committee of all ethnic groups living in Poland. The excursion is to prove how humanitarian, in comparison with the methods employed by the Bolsheviks, are the devices used to carry out the mass extermination of the Polish people …
The posters were so convincing that some German officials pasted them up.73 A spoof pamphlet circulated with useful phrases for the resistance including: ‘Halt! Hands up, face to the ground! Were you a member of the Party, SA or SS? Whoever lies will be shot. We will deal with you as the Germans dealt with us. Hands behind the head, face the wall. Take a shovel and dig a grave!’74
The issue of Polish collaboration with the Germans is complex. Jan Gross has suggested that collaboration should be restricted to the political sphere, but Stefan Korboński, as a senior member of the Underground Government, offered a far less restricted definition: ‘voluntary cooperation with the enemy to the detriment of country or fellow citizens’.75 The Polish Government had ordered that the Poles should have as little contact with the German authorities as possible, but this was to prove to be unrealistic. The RGO, for example, was in an extremely difficult position. It was responsible for the welfare of the poor and the shelter of the Poles deported from the annexed regions and ran welfare facilities throughout the General Government. It received finance both from the German occupation authorities and from the Polish Government in London. Therefore, one can assume that its activities should not be construed as collaboration. Yet the German authorities also insisted that the RGO send representatives to stand alongside German authorities at German-sponsored meetings, at which new harsh demands would be placed on the Poles. This demand obviously compromised the RGO and Rowecki for one was unhappy about it.76 Another example of questionable collaboration was the position of the Polish Red Cross when the graves at Katyń were made public. The Polish Government appears to have taken the view that the Polish Red Cross could be trusted not to collaborate with German propaganda and would undertake independent research on the graves. Accordingly a small Polish technical commission worked on the exhumations at Katyń in the spring and early summer of 1943.77
The Underground Government established a system of underground courts to try those Poles accused of collaboration. The most notorious were the Polish Blue Police, who were ‘regarded as beyond the pale by the Polish community’. The Germans had reorganised the Polish police at the start of the occupation and the policemen had to take an oath of allegiance to the new regime. Although many refused to do so and lost their jobs, the overwhelming majority took the oath.78 The newly appointed senior officers were German. The size of the police force increased during the war: from 11,500 in 1942 to about 16,000 in 1943. The police were allowed to carry side arms but, unlike those in the German-occupied countries of western Europe, were not promoted to high ranks. The police existed primarily for the maintenance of law and order, which included checking on train passengers and their luggage, conducting house searches and attempting to stop the black market.79 They would often attempt to blackmail their victims. The AK kept lists of suspect police officers: ‘These contained, apart from proved misconduct, evidence of their standard of living which ascertained whether a dark blue was profiteering from blackmail or extortion.’80 The principal victims of the Polish Blue Police were the Jews, and this issue will be explored further in Chapter 10. About half the Blue Police collaborated with the AK.81
The underground courts tried a variety of crimes. For example, writers and actors who worked with the Germans: the famous film actor Igo Seym worked for German propaganda and was shot; two writers, Czesław Ancerewicz and Józef Mackiewicz, were condemned to death for collaboration but only the former was executed. Over-zealousness in carrying out German decrees was also punished, such as the mayor who, in February 1942, arrested some peasants for possessing bread, on the grounds that they must have acquired it illegally since the mills were closed.82 Betrayal of members of the AK was taken extremely seriously: one farmer became a Gestapo informer because he was an alcoholic and needed money, and he blackmailed 56 farmers who helped the AK before the AK itself caught up with him and put him on trial.83 Approximately 10,000 Poles received sentences from the underground courts, but only 200 death sentences were passed and carried out. Minor offences were usually punished by flogging or, in the case of women having sexual relations with Germans, by head shaving. Many people were acquitted or had their cases deferred until the end of the war.84
Brigadeführer SS Dr Eberhard Schöngarth stated in April 1943: ‘Such an oppression as is being borne by the Polish people has never been borne by any other nation.’85 The mass labour round-ups, the draconian quotas for foodstuffs, poor rations and the extermination of the Jews all added up to a regime of absolute terror. The sheer scale can be seen through one example: between October 1939 and July 1944 about 100,000 Poles, both Christians and Jews, were interrogated in one prison alone, Pawiak prison in Warsaw, and of these 17,000 were executed and 60,000 were sent to concentration camps. Most executions took place in Palmiry forest on the outskirts of Warsaw but, after the Germans had demolished the ghetto in 1943, around 9,500 people, mostly ethnic Poles, were shot in the ruins.86 In all the prisons in the General Government, torture and beatings were routine features of interrogation. K. T. Czelny was imprisoned in Rabka because he and his father had offered medical treatment to Jews from the nearby ghetto:
It was an orgy of sadism and unspeakable cruelty, cynically planned and executed. Their methods ranged from attempts at mild persuasion to brutal beatings and ingenious torture, such as handcuffing the prisoner’s hands behind his back and hanging him, by means of a hefty rope threaded through the handcuffs, on the inner door of the interrogation room. After a short while, the excruciating pain in the joints brought unconsciousness. The method used to bring us back was to push a lighted cigarette against either the belly or the genitals.87
In Kielce the prison was lorded over by the Gestapo officer Franz Wittek, who all those facing him remember with terror. Marian Skowerski was suspected of being a member of the AK (which he was), and was kept in a cell with twenty-five other men. Each day Wittek would come and stare every man in the eye: then he would decide who was to be taken out and shot, who would be interrogated and tortured further, and who would be released. Skowerski remembered that on the day when he decided that there was no longer any point in being frightened, he was released.88 In Lwów, the priest Czesław Tuzinkiewicz was summoned to Gestapo headquarters to attest that a parishioner was a good Catholic, and while waiting he witnessed lines of prisoners held against a wall and whipped or beaten about the head if they made the slightest move.89
In January 1943, the Polish foreign minister, Edward Raczyński, wrote in a note to the governments of the United Nations: ‘Detailed information has been forthcoming in the course of the last weeks regarding a new wave of mass arrests and public executions in numerous parts of the country.’90 For example, 106 people were hanged publicly in Szopieniec, and in Warsaw 70 people were executed in one street after a warehouse had been set on fire. The German policy of collective reprisals for any act of sabotage or resistance to their authority now increased in scale and was more public. One witness described the process:
We all knew the big lorry and its special crew; in front there stood a German in a steel helmet, in his hands a big horn. Every few minutes he would blow it in the same fixed manner. On side-benches in the lorry were seated twelve Germans armed to the teeth. Behind this vehicle was another, smaller one, containing the victims condemned to death. The sound of the horn filled us all with terror. We knew that people were being driven to their deaths. The lorries would stop in the streets with the densest traffic, the hostages would be dragged out to be mown down by machine-gunfire. After the execution the Germans would drive the vehicles back, the horn would sound again and on the pavement would remain the bloody corpses of the victims of German bestiality.91
The Germans taped the mouths of the victims because they were angered by their shouts of ‘Long Live Poland!’ as they prepared to die. The Polish population not only witnessed street executions but also heard tales of life in the concentration camps of Auschwitz I and Majdanek, when handfuls of prisoners were released back into the community.92 Within the General Government, the Christian Poles in various camps totalled 150,000 in Auschwitz I, 100,000 in Majdanek and 23,000 in Płaszów.93
Life outside Warsaw and the large cities was generally easier because peasants could escape into the forests. They became adept at concealing their produce and many actually became richer because of the black market. Nevertheless, over 650 villages were destroyed by the Germans and, like the city-dwellers, the peasants lost thousands of people to forced labour round-ups.94 Over the course of the occupation, however, the rural areas began to suffer greatly as increased AK action and the presence of Soviet partisans brought draconian German reprisals.
As the German terror increased so did the resistance. On 14 February 1942, Sikorski had reorganised the Polish resistance, changing its name from the ZWZ to AK, under the command of General Stefan Rowecki, code name ‘Grot’. His chief of staff was General ‘Gregorz’ Tadeusz Pełczyński. The new AK had two policies: to extend the reach of its activities into eastern Poland, and to bring all resistance groups under its command. Neither policy was simple to put fully into practice. While the AK did extend its operations into eastern Poland and into the Ukraine, it ran into hostility from Soviet partisans and was at risk of betrayal by Ukrainians, Belorussians and Lithuanians loyal to the Germans. In late 1942, the Germans arrested a number of AK leaders in the eastern provinces and the organisation there had to be rebuilt. For example, in November 1942 Leon Kochański was fortunate to escape arrest, unlike many members of his staff. He then withdrew from underground activity for four months as the organisation was rebuilt and changed his code name.95 Renewed attempts to penetrate the provinces absorbed into the Reich also met with limited success because of frequent discoveries and betrayal by Volksdeutsche. After the arrests of several regional leaders, it was decided to run operations directly from Warsaw. Interestingly enough, the chief of operations in Łódź had the remarkable cover provided by being a Volksdeutscher and a member of the Nazi Party, Jan Lipsz ‘Anatol’.96
On 30 June 1943, disaster hit the AK, when Rowecki was arrested by the Gestapo. He was betrayed by three AK members, Ludwik ‘Hanka’ Kalkstein, Eugeniusz ‘Genes’ Świerczewski and Blanka ‘Sroka’ Kaczorowska, who were in fact informants for the Gestapo.97 He was taken to Berlin for interrogation. The Polish Government appealed to the British for help. Raczyński approached Eden and Churchill hoping that, at best, Rowecki might be exchanged for the German generals Jürgen von Arnim and Wilhelm von Thoma, or at least be accorded the status of a POW. Churchill was initially in favour but held out little hope that the Germans would take the offer seriously. Eden, however, told the War Cabinet that the legal advisers in the Foreign Office had informed him that under international law, Rowecki was a franc-tireur and therefore not eligible to be treated as a POW.98 Rowecki was replaced as leader of the AK by General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski (‘Bór’). Rowecki was shot in Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944.
The AK’s strategy of uniting all resistance groups under its command had mixed success. Although many of the smaller units had been ready to accept Rowecki’s authority, some of the larger and more politically motivated took longer to convince or did not amalgamate at all. In November 1942, the military wing of the National Party (Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa) accepted incorporation and in July 1943, the military forces of the Peasant Party (Bataliony Chłopskie, BCH) were also integrated. The latter were often reluctant to work under the AK because they viewed it as Panskie Wojsko – a gentleman’s army still closely allied to the Sanacja regime. Witold Sągajłło was informed by the local commander of the BCH that there could be no cooperation with him because his staff were all aristocrats and landowners, but Sągajłło took him to meet his staff, where the peasant commander learnt that the AK staff in the area were all second-generation peasants. Sągajłło also took the man around the district, travelling 60 miles in three days, to meet the AK soldiers, whereupon the exhausted peasant leader agreed to let his men be commanded by the AK.99 The military units of the Communist Party, the People’s Army (Armia Ludowa, AL), were more closely aligned with the Soviet partisans and remained independent of the AK, although the two armies would sometimes cooperate. Some National Party members did not accept the authority of the AK or the Underground Government, and they formed their own breakaway group, the National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny), which had its own army, the National Armed Units (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ), which fought independently from the AK and was known for its anti-semitism. In April 1944, Bór-Komorowski informed London that the reality was that the AK ‘was a conglomeration of commanders and detachments, whose attitudes to one another are frequently undisguisedly hostile, and who are held together in a badly frayed thread of formal discipline that may snap at the start of operations’.100
The principal focus of the AK was to prepare for a general armed uprising to take place at the most opportune moment when Germany’s collapse was evident. During the course of 1942, the emphasis of the resistance was on organisation, sabotage, diversionary operations and preparations for this general uprising. On 9 November 1942, Rowecki issued an order on the policy:
As to the operation of annihilating the Jews, [carried out] by the occupier, there are signs of disquiet among the Polish public, lest after this operation is completed, the Germans will begin the liquidation of the Poles, in exactly the same manner.
I order self-control and action to calm the public. However, if the Germans do indeed make any attempt of this sort, they will meet with active resistance on our part, without consideration for the fact that the time for our uprising has not yet come. The units under my command will enter armed battle to defend the life of our people. In this battle we will move over from defence to offence by cutting all the enemy channels of transport to the eastern front.101
During 1941 and 1942, the AK was responsible for attacks on bridges and railways as far east as Minsk, while Lord Selborne, the head of SOE (Special Operations Executive), reported that during 1943 the AK had derailed more than 20 trains, damaged 180 locomotives and killed more than 1,000 Germans.102 There was an ominous indication of the future to these operations: although the western allies were keen to encourage AK activity in support of the Soviet Union, the Soviet reaction was rather different. The AK drew up plans for the simultaneous disruption of all railway lines through Poland to the Eastern Front, along which 85 per cent of all German supplies and manpower were carried. These were transmitted to London, approved by Sikorski and discussed at a meeting between the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Tadeusz Romer, and Stalin. The AK needed the Soviets to state a time when the operation would fit in with their plans but Stalin declined even to give a response.103
The AK organised sabotage cells within factories engaged in war production. The shortage of specialists forced the Germans to employ Poles, although the management remained in German hands. Secret groups worked within 37 such factories, sabotaging production where possible but also, very importantly, diverting raw materials, component parts and even finished articles into the AK war chest. Predominantly, this meant facilitating the purchase of ingredients needed for the manufacture of explosives, such as saltpetre and potassium chlorate, by creating false invoices or by ordering large supplies from Germany and diverting the surplus. Sometimes factories producing items for the civilian market also ran a secret operation manufacturing armaments. For example, a factory making padlocks and locks also made tommy guns, a factory making cans for polish also made grenades, and flamethrowers were made in a factory producing fire extinguishers.104
There was a substantial resistance organisation within the concentration camps, especially at Auschwitz I. It should be stressed that this resistance existed only in this concentration and labour camp, and had little ability to act in the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The resistance was led by Witold Pilecki, who allowed himself to be arrested in the hope of being sent to Auschwitz, and once there he organised the Union of Military Organisation (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW). ZOW attempted to alleviate the prisoners’ harsh conditions by securing supplies of medicine and food, and by attacking the most brutal kapos (prisoner-supervisors), spies and SS men. Their principal weapon was the use of typhus-infected lice, the supply of which was ample. These would then be placed on the offenders:
Several SS men infected with typhus died in spite of the fact that they had received much better medical attention than prisoners … Somehow the SS guards realised that the most cruel of them were the ones who were dying … There was a general improvement in the treatment of prisoners by the SS guards.105
The SS became afraid of manhandling the prisoners. Sadistic kapos were also targeted by having stolen gold and foreign currency smuggled into their barracks, which led to discovery by the SS and the gassing of the ‘guilty’ kapo. As a result: ‘The behaviour of all kapos in the main camp became almost civilised by the end of 1942.’106 Informers had their records switched in the hospital so that they were often killed by the Germans as being too sick to work. ZOW also organised around 600 escapes, of which a third were successful. In May 1942, Stefan Bielecki and Wincenty Gawron escaped and reached Warsaw, where they provided the first eyewitness accounts of what was happening in the whole Auschwitz complex. At the end of April 1943, Pilecki himself escaped because he believed that his reports from the camp about the possibilities of an uprising were not being taken seriously by the AK command. On reaching Warsaw, he learnt that the AK command had concluded ‘that the forces at their disposal were too few and too poorly armed, that the underground organisation inside the camp was almost helpless and the SS garrison too numerous and well-equipped’, which was probably only too true.* In April 1944, ZOW helped two Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, to escape and their detailed 32-page report on the extermination of the Jews was first broadcast on the BBC on 15 June 1944.107
The resistance extended to the Polish forced labourers in Germany. In 1942 the German police arrested the leader of this resistance, Leonhard Kendzierski, in Stuttgart and under torture he revealed the names of his colleagues. In April 1944, an AK courier travelled to Cologne with orders for the resistance to organise the forced labourers for action when Germany collapsed. In the meantime they were instructed on methods of industrial sabotage, using such subtle techniques that the sabotaged armaments would pass German inspection. By the second half of 1944, as allied armies closed in on the Reich, the foreign labourers became bolder and there were numerous attacks on German police officers and soldiers and on Nazi Party members.108
The AK also took action against the bandits who were preying on the peasants who lived near the forests. These forests were full of people struggling to survive. There were Jews who had fled the ghettos to avoid deportation to the extermination camps: ‘We were a terrorised group of young people turned into orphans overnight. Finding each other in this wild, uncaring environment, we realised that history had placed upon us the task of avenging the blood of our people.’109 Some of these Jews would join the communist resistance, the Gwarda Ludowa-Armia Ludowa (GL-AL), a few the AK. After June 1941, there were Soviet soldiers, deserters and escaped POWs, who formed undisciplined bands of men until the arrival of Soviet partisan bands which incorporated them. There were also young Poles who had fled to the forests to avoid being sent as forced labour to the Reich, not all of whom wanted to join the AK and submit to its discipline. All these disparate elements preyed on the local population for food, clothing and money.
Banditry was particularly widespread in the provinces of Lublin, Warsaw and Kraków. Most of these gangs were small and poorly armed but in the area of Lublin province around the village of Piłatka the ‘Kiełbasowcy’ gang, which consisted of over 60 bandits armed with 40 sub-machine guns and 2 heavy machine guns, terrorised the local peasantry. One victim recalled a visit by the gang:
They tore up floors, searched the grain storage bins, tore open down quilts and found everything everywhere. They took clothing, shoes, even children’s shoes, food, pigs, but most of all they wanted money and vodka. If they didn’t find anything they would beat the farmers mercilessly. They were terrible to girls and women.110
Banditry was also a problem in the eastern provinces. Father Czesław Tuzinkiewicz, a parish priest in Białochorszcze on the outskirts of Lwów, recalled a visit when the bandits entered a house full of defenceless women but unknown to them a member of the AK was hiding there. He attacked the bandits with an axe, beheading one. The next morning the body lay on the ground but, to prevent identification, the remaining bandits had taken away the severed head of their comrade.111
On 31 August 1943, Bór-Komorowski issued Order 116 against banditry to his area, regional and district commanders:
I instruct all Regional and District Commanders to take action against plundering or subversive-bandit elements where it is necessary.
Each action must be decisive and must aim at suppressing lawlessness. Action should be taken only against groups especially troublesome for the local population and the Command of the Armed Forces in the Homeland; above all against those who murder, rape and rob.
Action should be taken with the aim of liquidating gang leaders and agitators, and not concentrating on the liquidation of entire gangs.112
This order has been misinterpreted by some Jewish historians as an order for the AK to eliminate the Jews hiding in the forests by labelling them as bandits, as the Germans did.113 But Jews were not mentioned in the order at all and only tangentially in Organisation Report 220 to the Polish Government in which Komorowski explained his policy.114 The Jewish Bund in Poland acknowledged the problem of banditry among some Jews hiding in the forests in a 1943 report to the Bund in London:
In the forests: certain groups of those who escaped from the ghetto pogroms fled into the forest, by different ways and means, either armed or unarmed, and they continue to live in the woods. Most of them, seeking to survive, have come to form wildcat groups which are looting the countryside, and only a few of them have joined partisan groups operating in the respective regions.115
In August 1943, the AK killed 76 Jewish bandits. Further evidence that Komorowski was not calling for the AK to murder the Jews specifically comes in his second order on banditry, issued on 4 November 1943:
Fight the gangs without regard to the nationality of the criminals or their political or military allegiance; and, therefore, all robber gangs, including those who pretend to carry out military actions, and gangs of this type in our own ranks, should be fought mercilessly, using all possible methods, including the death penalty.116
The AK was thereby exhorted to eliminate banditry regardless of the members’ ethnic grouping. Some AK commanders argued against the order on the grounds that it had been issued too late: ‘Any possibility of getting rid of the bandits had been lost nearly a year before when I was refused permission to set up an independent field force able to deal with this problem. Now, I said, any attempt to get rid of these people would be interpreted as a hostile political action towards the Russians, incompatible with the accepted attitude of the Polish Government towards Russia.’ The response from Warsaw was to carry out the order. Most of the bandits caught were tried by the underground military courts and, if found guilty, executed. The AK executed approximately 920 bandits in the period from September 1943 to July 1944.117
Before any uprising could take place, the AK needed to undertake the recruitment of soldiers, train them and ensure an adequate supply of equipment. The AK established training schools for its soldiers, NCOs and officers. Zbigniew Bokiewicz took an officers’ course in Warsaw: ‘Exercises and drills were carried out in private apartments using broom handles in place of rifles.’ One of the instructors was a member of the Blue Police.118 In Lublin, Ralph Smorczewski also received training as an officer: ‘This was split into groups of no more than six, which met every few days at addresses chosen by the participants themselves and were never to be repeated twice in succession … Members of the group never knew each other’s names, all had pseudonyms.’119 Again they could not train with real rifles. In the rural districts the AK could train better: it was particularly active in the Świętokrzyski mountains near Kielce, in the districts of Radom, Kielce and Lublin, in the forests near Zamość, in provinces of Podole, Wołyń, Białystok and Polesie, and in the districts of Wilno and Nowogródek.120 Wacław Milewski trained in the Świętokryski mountains:
On Friday after work, we all set out on the long march to the mountains. About dusk, we reached a village where our weapons were hidden, and we then marched throughout the night, arriving at the summit of the Holy Cross Mountains at dawn. There full-scale training took place. We participated in drills of all kinds and even shot our weapons in a rifle range. On Sunday the entire unit went to Mass. We stood in ranks in front of the church and generally behaved as though there was no German army in Poland. As far as I remember, the Germans never seemed to make their presence felt.121
The troops marched back on Sunday evening and on Monday returned to work as normal.
Training was often provided by Polish officers and men parachuted into Poland from Britain. These Cichociemni – ‘unseen and silent’ – were trained in Britain by SOE. The first drop of two agents, Captain Józef ‘Zbik’ Zabielski and Major Stanisław ‘Kostka’ Krzymowski, took place on the night of 15–16 February 1941. Around 600 Cichociemni were trained but only 316 were parachuted into Poland by the end of 1944, because of the difficulties of air transport. Witold Sągajłło’s AK group received two Cichociemni near Ozarow in the Świętokryskie district and was shocked by their lack of training: ‘The briefing of the two officers was appalling. Before being sent to Warsaw they had to be coached on how to behave. Yardley perfumes and English cigarettes had to be confiscated, clothing checked for labels, etc.’ Most, however, were better prepared and their skills would be put to great use when Operation Burza was launched in 1944, the Polish uprising to assist the Soviet advance into Poland.122
The difficulties in supplying arms and other supplies to the AK were enormous. Until the Allies landed in Italy, there were two only possible air routes to Poland. The first was over the North Sea, Denmark and the altic before crossing the coast between Danzig and Kolberg (Kołobrzeg), a distance of 800 miles to Pomerania and 1,000 miles to Warsaw district; the second route, over Sweden, was 120–160 miles longer. The only plane with a sufficient range and suitable for airdrops was the Halifax, which, when fitted with extra fuel tanks, had a range of under 2,175 miles. This left little room for navigational errors and reduced the payload from 4,200 lbs to 2,400 lbs. Indeed, on the first operation, on the night of 7 November 1941, the plane ran out of fuel on its return journey and was forced to land in Sweden, where the plane and its crew were interned. Such lengthy flights could only be undertaken during the winter months when the nights were long, but the weather was also worse then and often forced the cancellation of flights. In all there were only about 20 nights a year possible for flights to Poland during 1942 and 1943.123 This meant that the Polish 138 Special Duties Squadron was not solely devoted to flights to Poland but was also expected to drop supplies to resistance movements in other countries. Between February 1941 and October 1943, the AK had expected SOE to provide them with 210 flights bringing 300 tons of war materiel. Instead there were only 72 flights dropping 65 tons.124 Matters improved slightly when in October 1943 the Special Duties Squadron, now renumbered 1586, began operating from Brindisi in Italy and was supplied with 3 American B-24 Liberators to augment its 3 Halifaxes. Between April and July 1944, there were 174 successful sorties to Poland and 114 men and 219 tons of supplies were dropped.125 The supplies provided were far too little to equip the 4,000 platoons of the AK. Arms were also dug up from where they had been buried after the September 1939 campaign, although many were too rusty to be used again. The Germans and their Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries could sometimes be blackmailed or persuaded into selling arms to the AK.126
The tragedy of the AK’s strategy was that it was allowed the freedom to develop its plans for a general uprising, following the instructions from the Polish Government, but was in total ignorance regarding the lack of political willpower and ability by the western allies to devote sufficient resources to ensure an adequate supply of armaments to the AK. The Polish Government approached the British requesting, if not actually demanding, more supply flights to Poland and the allocation of suitable aircraft to the Polish special duties squadron. When the British failed to respond, Sikorski turned to the Americans, raising the matter of the allocation of B-24 Liberators during his meetings with Roosevelt. Sikorski ignored warnings from the CIGS, General Alanbrooke, that the ‘physical problem of transporting materials for secret armies in Eastern Europe is insuperable’. In late June 1943, the Polish Government made another appeal to the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington. General Sosnkowski informed Alanbrooke that ‘six hundred trips by air until April 1944 will be necessary for the most indispensable needs of the Secret Army in Poland’. Sosnkowski, Sikorski and his successor, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, were all aware that the western allies would not undertake such supplies, and they appear to have thought that the reason for refusal was political. Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the Combined Chiefs felt that Poland fell within the Soviet sphere of operations and this affected their willingness to authorise an increase in the number of flights. But even if the political goodwill had existed there would still have been the insoluble problem that sufficient air resources did not.127
The AK initially followed a deliberate policy of shying away from direct confrontation with the Germans, because of the impact of German reprisals on the innocent Polish population. But as German terror increased during 1943, the AK turned to more aggressive forms of resistance and launched a policy of assassinations. Jan Nowak summarised the reasons:
Because of the constant escalation of repression, terror lost its power to terrorise. People simply stopped being afraid because they had nothing much to lose. The mass extermination of the Jews and the liquidation of the ghetto seemed to be the turning point. The rest of the population began to realise that their turn would come next.128
The SS and Police Leader for Radom reported a jump in the number of violent attacks on German officials from 105 in April 1942 to over 1,000 in May 1943. In April 1943, an assassination attempt was made on Chief of Police and SS in the General Government, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger. In May 1943, Globocnik advised Frank not to visit Lublin, because no guarantee could be made for his security, and in February 1944, there was an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Frank when a bomb was detonated under the train carrying him from Kraków to Lwów. In February 1944, the Gestapo chief in Warsaw, SS Brigadeführer Franz Kutschera, was shot dead in broad daylight in Warsaw. The response of the Germans was to increase their terrorisation of the Poles. After the assassination of Kutschera, Hitler ordered that a quota of hostages should be taken from every town in the General Government and hanged in public. Sągajłło described the events in one town: ‘The next day, a battalion of SS with armoured cars and personnel carriers entered Ostrowiec and during the night thirty-five people were taken at random from their homes and thrown into the town prison.’ Mass arrests were made in Warsaw, Radom and Lublin, and, in April 1944, Frank’s government was informed that a total of 5,475 people had been arrested on political grounds. More worryingly for the Germans and tragically for the AK, the Germans had also seized over 20,000 weapons, 75,000 bombs, 32,000 pounds of explosives and a great amount of other explosive material.129
The delay in the change of strategy had serious consequences for the Polish Government in London and its representatives in Poland, the AK and the Underground Government. Poles determined to oppose the Germans by any means possible became tempted by the activities of the partisans and the communist-inspired AL. Bór-Komorowski understood this:
German terror was one of the main reasons why partisan fighting was steadily on the increase in those years. Young people threatened with arrest, rescued prisoners, and terrorised peasants fled into the forests. Individuals who could not stand the nervous strain of continual terror and persecution and hoped to live a fuller life in open warfare or those who wished to revenge their next of kin, tortured and murdered – all these reinforced our partisan forces.130
In the years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Soviet partisan bands had developed and increased their activities in the General Government, posing a significant threat to the authority of the AK and bringing down harsh reprisals on the Polish population. As will be described more fully in Chapter 12, the presence of Soviet partisans, Jewish partisans, the AL, the AK and the NSZ in the forests of Poland led to armed clashes between different units and created a climate of uncertainty just as the Soviet armies began to approach the pre-war Polish frontier. As one resistance fighter described the situation: ‘It was difficult to find out which villages we could trust. Some villages supported the AK, some the left-wing AL. There were also partisan groups, such as the BCH (Bataliony Chłopskie), formed by farmers, some of whom were left wing, some right.’131
The Underground Government was also not as unified as some of its supporters would have liked to claim. The alliance of the four parties – the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS), the Peasant Alliance (Stronnictwo Ludowe, SL), the National Alliance (Stronnictwo Narodowe, SN) and the Labour Alliance (Stronnictwo Pracy, SP) – who formed the Underground Government was very fragile. They saw each other as rivals and their preoccupation with the need to define ‘their own identity for the contest which would take place after the war was a powerful determining factor in actions taken during the course of the war’.132 The most powerful challenge to the authority of the Polish Government and Underground Government would, however, come from outside for, after the break in diplomatic relations with the Polish Government, the Soviets had begun to sponsor the political and military activities of the communist Poles in the Soviet Union. On the diplomatic front too, the Polish Government was losing the battle for its voice to be heard and for its opinions to be considered seriously by the British and American governments. At the end of 1943, the German armies were in clear retreat and the arrival of the Soviet armies on the pre-war Polish frontier would open a new and terrible chapter for the Poles. German terror policies showed no signs of abating. As Frank remarked in January 1944: ‘As far as I am concerned the Poles and Ukrainians and their like may be chopped into small pieces. Let it be, what should be.’133