believe that Germany had lost the will to fight, and thus that a bold blow might drive them from Warsaw. On 22 July the Soviets gave another prod to the Polish resistance by unveiling, in Lublin, their own provisional government for Poland. The laboratory of Nazi exterminatory policies now became the center of a future communist puppet government. Stalin was claiming the authority to determine who would form the Polish government. If the Home Army did nothing, his clients would be installed in Warsaw, and Poland would shift directly from Nazi to Soviet occupation. As in 1939, so in 1944, the fact that the Poles had Western allies meant little or nothing. It was clear by July 1944, with the Red Army already occupying more than half of prewar Poland, that the country would be liberated by Soviet force of arms. In late July the Americans were a month away from Paris (where they would support a French uprising); there was no chance that US forces would liberate any of Poland. Any political resistance to Soviet plans would have to come from the Poles themselves.47
On 25 July 1944, the Polish government granted the Home Army in Warsaw the authority to begin an uprising in the capital at a time of its choosing. Warsaw itself had originally been excluded from the planning for Operation Tempest; the Warsaw district of the Home Army had sent many of its arms to the east of the country, where they were now lost to the Soviets. The logic of an immediate uprising in Warsaw was not easy for everyone to follow. The command structure of the Polish Army fighting on the western front, under General Wladyslaw Anders, was excluded from the discussions. Given German anti-partisan tactics, an uprising looked like suicide to many. The Germans had been killing Poles in massive reprisals throughout the war; if an uprising failed, reasoned some commanders in Warsaw, the entire civilian population would suffer. The argument in favor of the uprising was that the rebellion could not fail: whether or not the Poles defeated the Germans, the Red Army was moving fast and would arrive in Warsaw in a few days. On this logic, which prevailed, the only question seemed to be whether Poles would first make an effort to liberate their own capital.48
The Poles were caught between an approaching Red Army and occupying German forces. They could not defeat the Germans on their own, so they had to hope that the Soviet advance would prompt a German retreat and that there would be some interval between the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal and the Red Army’s arrival. Their hope was that the interval would not be too brief, so that they could establish themselves as the Polish government before the Soviets arrived.
In fact, the interval was too long.
Polish soldiers in uniforms and armbands began their assault on German positions in the afternoon of 1 August 1944. The vast majority were from the Home Army; smaller units of the far-right National Armed Forces and the communist People’s Army also joined the fight. On this first day of the Warsaw Uprising, the Home Army secured a great deal of the downtown and Old Town of the city, but failed to capture most of the essential military targets. The Germans had made few preparations, but were not caught completely by surprise. It had been hard to disguise the mobilization going on within the city itself. German forces had gone on alert at 4:30, half an hour before the uprising began. The Poles chose to attack in daylight on a long summer afternoon, and for that reason took many casualties. The inexperienced and lightly armed troops had an especially difficult time with guarded and fortified objectives. Nevertheless, the mood among the fighters and in the city itself was euphoric.49
When and where Polish power replaced German power in those early days of August 1944, surviving Jews emerged from their places of shelter among Poles. Many asked to be allowed to fight. As Michal Zylberberg recalled: “A Jewish perspective ruled out passivity. Poles had taken up arms against the mortal enemy. Our obligation as victims and as fellow citizens was to help them.” Other combatants in the Warsaw Uprising were veterans of the ghetto uprising of 1943. Most of these Jews joined the Home Army; others found the People’s Army, or even the anti-Semitic National Armed Forces. Some Jews (or Poles of Jewish origin) were already enlisted in the Home Army and the People’s Army. Almost certainly, more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943.50
In early August, as the Home Army failed to take the important German positions in Warsaw, its soldiers did register one victory. Officers gathered volunteers for a dangerous attack upon a heavily guarded position. On 5 August, Home Army soldiers entered the ruins of the ghetto, attacked Concentration Camp Warsaw, defeated the ninety SS-men who guarded it, and liberated its remaining 348 prisoners, most of them foreign Jews. One of the Home Army soldiers in this operation was Stanislaw Aronson, who had himself been deported from the ghetto to Treblinka. Another recalled a Jew who greeted them with tears on his cheeks; yet another, the plea of a Jew for a weapon and a uniform, so that he could fight. Many of the liberated Jewish slave laborers did join the Home Army, fighting in their striped camp uniforms and wooden shoes, with “complete indifference to life or death,” as one Home Army soldier recalled.51
Now Himmler again saw an opportunity, as he had during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to demonstrate his strength and to win a symbolic victory. Despite Polish expectations, the Red Army had ceased its rapid advance. With the Wehrmacht stubbornly holding its positions at the Vistula River, just east of downtown Warsaw, the uprising would be a matter for the SS and the German police. These were Himmler’s institutions, and Himmler wished to make this his uprising, to show Hitler one more time that he was the ruthless master of the situation.52
Unlike the Ghetto Uprising, however, this campaign would require reinforcements. Following the German withdrawal from Belarus, experienced anti-partisan units were available. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the chief of German anti-partisan formations and a veteran of the partisan warfare in Belarus, was given overall command in Warsaw. Other veterans of the anti-partisan warfare in Belarus were also summoned. The SS Commando Dirlewanger was dispatched from northeastern Poland, the Kaminskii unit from southwestern Poland. They were reinforced by a police unit sent from Poznan and a few hundred foreign fighters, mostly Azerbaijanis who had defected from the Red Army. About half of the people who fought in Warsaw in German uniforms did not speak German. This probably made the action that followed no more bloody, but it did make it more confusing, even for the Germans themselves.53
Kaminskii and his Russians were given personal permission from Himmler to loot, and they accepted this part of their assignment with gusto. They entered Ochota, a southwesterly neighborhood of Warsaw, on 9 August 1944. Over the course of the next ten days, they concentrated on theft, but also killed several thousand Polish civilians. As one of Kaminskii’s officers recalled, “Mass executions of civilians without investigation were the order of the day.” The soldiers also became known for systematic rape. They burned down the hospital of the Marie Curie Institute, killing everyone inside, but scrupulously raped the nurses ahead of time. As one of Kaminskii’s men characterized the Ochota campaign, “they raped nuns and plundered and stole anything they could get their hands on.” German commanders complained that Kaminskii and his men were concerned only with “robbing, drinking, and raping women.” Bach had Kaminskii apprehended and executed: not for the killing or the sexual violence but for his habit of stealing for himself rather than for the coffers of the Reich.54
The comportment of the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger was even worse. Its men were now a motley group of criminals, foreigners, and SS-men released from punishment camps. Dirlewanger was indiscipline itself; even Himmler had to order him twice to go to Warsaw. The unit was fresh from its Belarusian campaigns, where it had killed tens of thousands of civilians in the countryside and the towns. Now it would kill more civilians in a large city. The most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Belarus now became the most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Poland. The Dirlewanger unit was the bulk of a combat group under the command of Heinz Reinefarth, the SS and Police Chief for the Warthegau, the largest district of occupied Poland annexed to Germany.55
Reinefarth received an extraordinary three-part order from Himmler: all Polish combatants were to be shot; all Polish noncombatants, including women and children, were also to be shot; and the city itself was to be razed to the ground. The police formations and the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger carried out these orders to the letter on 5 and 6 August 1944, shooting some forty thousand civilians in the course of those two days alone. They had a military objective: they were to march through the west-central Wola neighborhood and relieve German headquarters in the Saxon Gardens. They lifted the Home Army’s barricades on Wola Street by marching Poles in front of them and forcing them to do the work, using women and children as human shields in the meantime, and raping some of the women. As they moved west they destroyed each and every building, one by one, using gasoline and hand grenades. Wola Street ran just south of the terrain that had been the ghetto, and indeed through some of its most southerly extremes, so their work of destruction brought an adjoining neighborhood to
