"Avoid Polish girls, or they will drag you into an ambush, where you will lose your weapons and even your life." This is how the German authorities warned their soldiers coming on vacation to occupied Warsaw. They did not take these warnings seriously. And Polish prostitutes already knew how take advantage of it.
The best proof of this was, for example, the scene that took place in front of the head of the special department of the staff of the Home Army Headquarters, Emil Kumor "Krzys". Here one morning he saw a navy blue policeman trying to arrest a lady of light morals. The woman didn't want to be put behind bars for anything.
Finally, in anger, she screamed at the top of her throat to the officer:
Lord, what did you do for Poland during the years of occupation, because at least I infected more than 20 swabs. How many guns did I steal and put them where they needed to be! And what can you, Mr. Power, be proud of? I will die by the fence somewhere, but my conscience is clear.
There were many dangers for the Wehrmacht soldiers in Warsaw (source:Bundesarchiv; lic. CC ASA 3.0).
Unfortunately, this argumentation in no way appealed to the policeman on duty with the Germans. Despite the protests, he dragged a prostitute to the police station. Kumor had no doubts:her fate was doomed. The Germans acted uncompromisingly in such cases and treated venereal women at least like conspirators captured with a gun in hand .
How to infect a German with syphilis? Bring him a sick prostitute
No wonder, because sexually transmitted diseases were the real bane of the Wehrmacht. Some soldiers even bragged about the number of infections they experienced, which excluded them from the fight, at least for a while.
The fact of knowingly infecting Germans by prostitutes in occupied Poland - on their own initiative or in cooperation with the Polish underground - is also confirmed in Jan Karski's "Secret State". The legendary courier of Fighting Poland bluntly wrote in his book:
we used pimps several times to arrange meetings of German officers with prostitutes who we knew were infected with venereal diseases .
The legendary courier of Fighting Poland, Jan Karski, bluntly wrote about how the Polish underground used sexually ill prostitutes to infect Germans with syphilis and gonorrhea (source:Polish History Museum, courtesy of the Hoover Institute Archives in California).
Elsewhere, the author cites the story of a conspirator who personally introduced Germans to escort ladies suffering from syphilis and gonorrhea. In this way, he took revenge on the Nazis for the wrongs suffered by him and his family, who were expelled from the territories incorporated into the Reich.
Soldier, take care of your holster!
Prostitutes turned out to be key allies of the Polish underground also when there was a need to obtain weapons. Some, like the one from the memoirs of "Krzys", deliberately robbed their German clients of pistols and revolvers themselves.
This article is an excerpt from a chapter that I wrote for the "Wielka Księga Armii Krajowej" (Znak Horyzont 2015). You will also find texts by other journalists of "Historical Curiosities".
Others often did not even realize that they were helping to rearm the Home Army, serving resourceful members of the conspiracy to distract unsuspecting victims.
We can find out exactly what it looked like by reading the testimony of Henryk Cieśluk "Kuse", who, as a teenage boy, dealt with, inter alia, acquiring weapons so valuable for the Home Army. Years later, he recalled:
At Fort Bema, in Saperach, in the Kampinos Forest and at the airport, there were very large numbers of Germans. These Germans wandered the streets drunk and the prostitutes behind them. They paid them because they were looking for a "panenka". When a German was drunk, he would go and ask where the »panenki« were.
Cracow ladies of ease in the photo from the 1930s. Who knows, maybe one of them helped the Polish underground during the German occupation? (source:public domain; color:RK).
I once brought him a »panenka« and he saw it and said:'Oh, madam, madam, I don't want her, a new one'. Of course, when they found nothing in the street, there was a river behind Fort Bem, and behind the St. Joseph Church, there were such dikes and these dikes entered the river. There was a mountain, there were benches, the grass was there, you could come there, rest .
When a strongly inserted German finally found himself in the arms of his daughter Corinth, became an easy target for "Kuse" and his older brother Janek - a real expert in drawing handguns from holsters. In this way, prostitutes, not always consciously, contributed to the fight against the occupant.