Army command as with a defeated adversary in late September. By the terms of the surrender of 2 October 1944, Home Army officers and soldiers, men and women alike, were to receive the rights accorded to prisoners of war by international law. For the same reasons, Bach opposed Himmler’s preferred conclusion of the uprising, the total destruction of the city.
It is very unlikely that Bach could have found many allies in Warsaw, for the same reason that he found few in Belarus: the actions of Dirlewanger’s men and other German anti-partisan formations had been too unforgettably bloody. The German reaction was so unbelievably destructive that Polish fighters had no alternative but to await Soviet liberation. As one Home Army soldier put it in his poetry: “We await you, red plague / To deliver us from the black death.” Like Bach, the Wehrmacht opposed Himmler’s policy. German troops were holding the Red Army at the Vistula River, and hoped to use Warsaw as a fortress, or at least its buildings as shelters. None of this mattered. Bach was transferred; the army was ignored; Himmler had his way; and a European capital was destroyed. On the day before the Soviets arrived, the Germans torched the last library.65
No other European capital suffered such a fate: destroyed physically, and bereft of about half of its population. Perhaps 150,000 Polish noncombatants were killed by the Germans in August and September 1944 alone, during the Warsaw Uprising. A similar number of non-Jewish Poles from Warsaw had already been killed in concentration camps, at execution sites in the ghetto, by German bombing, or in combat. Warsaw Jews died in higher absolute numbers and in much higher proportions. The percentage of Jews from Warsaw who died, more than ninety percent, exceeds that of non-Jews, which was about thirty percent. Only the fate of cities further east, such as Minsk or Leningrad, bore comparison to that of Warsaw. All in all, about half of the inhabitants of the city perished in a city whose prewar population was about 1.3 million.66
The distinction between Poles and Jews was for some victims artificial. Ludwik Landau, for example, might have been killed by the Germans because he was a Home Army officer and an effective propagandist for an independent Poland. As it happens, he was killed as a Jew. Some fates were permanently entangled. The Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum secretly created archives in the ghetto, on the basis of which a future history of Jews in wartime Warsaw would be possible. He was taken to a concentration camp after the defeat of the Ghetto Uprising, but was then rescued with the help of a Home Army officer. He was sheltered in Warsaw by Poles, until a Pole gave him away to the Germans. Then he and the Poles who had given him refuge were shot in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. The Home Army hunted down and killed the Pole who had betrayed them.67
Nevertheless, when the uprising was over and German power replaced Polish, the plight of the Jews was again distinct. After the destruction of the city, they had, quite literally, no place to hide. They did their best to disappear within the columns of exiled civilians or, in some cases, to find and join Soviet forces. Before the Warsaw Uprising, there were probably still some sixteen thousand Jews hiding with Poles beyond the walls of the former ghetto. Afterward, perhaps twelve thousand were still alive.68
The Germans had won the second battle for Warsaw, but the political victory fell to the Soviets. The Germans had applied the same tactics they had used in Belarus, ordered by much the same chain of command: Himmler-Bach-Dirlewanger. This time, anti-partisan warfare worked: not because the patriots of the Home Army were less determined than the Belarusian partisans but because they were more isolated. The Soviet Union supported communist partisans whom it could control, and opposed noncommunist fighters whom it could not. Polish troops were fighting against the Germans, but also for their own liberty. This was their doom. Stalin was happy to support the much smaller People’s Army, a communist force that also fought in the uprising. Had it been the People’s Army rather than the Home Army that had led the uprising, his attitude might have been entirely different.
Yet that would have been an entirely different Poland. The People’s Army did have some popular support, but far less than that enjoyed by the Home Army. Polish politics had shifted to the left during the war, as was the case throughout occupied Europe. Yet communism was not popular. Poles had experienced Soviet communism during the war itself, in the eastern half of the country. No sovereign Poland would become communist. The Warsaw Uprising, destroying as it did many of the brightest and the bravest of a generation, did indeed make further resistance much more difficult. But the Warsaw Uprising also, as some of its more clearsighted (and coldblooded) commanders expected, brought Stalin’s ruthlessness to the attention of the Americans and British. The American diplomat George Kennan was right: Stalin’s cynical treatment of the Home Army was a slap in the face to his British and American allies. In this sense the Warsaw Uprising was the beginning of the confrontation that was to come when the Second World War was over.
While the Red Army hesitated just east of the Vistula River from early August 1944 through mid-January 1945, the Germans were killing the Jews to its west. During those five months, the Red Army was less than a hundred kilometers from Lodz, by this point the largest concentration of Jews left in occupied Poland, and less than a hundred kilometers from Auschwitz, where Polish and European Jews were still being gassed. The Red Army’s halt at the Vistula doomed not only the Polish fighters and the civilians of Warsaw but also the Jews of Lodz. Their numbers had been much reduced by a series of deportations to Chelmno between December 1941 and September 1942. But in 1943 and 1944 the number of Jews had been relatively stable: some ninety thousand Jewish laborers and their families. The German civilian authorities, who sometimes preferred death through labor, had a longer hold here than elsewhere. Lodz Jews were building weapons, so the Wehrmacht also preferred that they survive.
Most of the remaining Lodz Jews died in the interval between the beginning of Operation Bagration and the final Soviet advance over the Vistula. The day after Operation Bagration, on 23 June 1944, the civilian authorities in Lodz yielded to Himmler and the SS, and allowed the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. For a brief period the gassing facility at Chelmno was reopened, and some 7,196 Jews from Lodz were asphyxiated there between 23 June and 14 July. Then the facility at Chelmno was finally closed. The Jews of Lodz, meanwhile, knew that the Red Army was close by. They believed that if they could just remain in the ghetto for a few more days or weeks, they would survive. On 1 August, the day that the Warsaw Uprising began, the Lodz Judenrat was informed that all Jews would be “evacuated.” The German mayor of the city even tried to persuade Jews that they should hasten to board the trains before the Red Army arrived, because the Soviet soldiers would take revenge on people who had spent the war making weapons for the Germans. As the Warsaw Uprising raged, and the Red Army waited, some sixty- seven thousand Jews of Lodz were deported to Auschwitz in August 1944. Most of them were gassed upon arrival.69
When Soviet soldiers finally crossed the Vistula and advanced into the ruins of Warsaw on 17 January 1945, they found very few buildings still standing. The site of Concentration Camp Warsaw, however, was still available. The Soviet NKVD took over its facilities, and used them for familiar purposes. Home Army soldiers were interrogated and shot there by the Soviets in 1945, as they had been by the Germans in 1944.70
On 19 January 1945, two days after reaching Warsaw, Soviet soldiers were already in Lodz. On 27 January they reached Auschwitz. From there it would take them a little more than three months for them to reach Berlin. As the Red Army moved forward, SS camp guards were driving Jews from Auschwitz to labor camps in Germany. In these hurried and brutal marches, thousands more Jews lost their lives. These marches, which left surviving Jews in Germany itself, were the last of the Nazi atrocities. The Belarusian Front of the Red Army began to shell Berlin on 20 April 1945, Hitler’s birthday; by early May it had met the Ukrainian Front in the German capital. Berlin fell, and the war was over. Hitler had ordered subordinates to apply a scorched earth policy to Germany itself, but he was not obeyed. Although much young German life was wasted in the defense of Berlin, Hitler could effect no further policies of mass killing.71
In these last few months of war, from January to May 1945, the inmates of the German concentration camps died in very large numbers. Perhaps three hundred thousand people died in German camps during this period, from hunger and neglect. The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler. As the Jews and Poles of Warsaw knew, and as Vasily Grossman and the Red Army
