On the hot days of August and September 1944, no one in Warsaw could feel safe. The released pack of German sadists and their collaborators received one order:destroy everything and everyone. The Polish capital was drowned in a sea of blood and fire.
The insurgent Warsaw was to become a warning for Banditen from other countries. But not only. The plan to raze a large European city to the ground has always occupied the demented mind of Adolf Hitler . The list included Paris, Minsk, Leningrad, Moscow and of course Warsaw.
An order for Warsaw
As early as 1939, according to Pabst's concept, the capital of Poland was to turn from the cultural and intellectual center of this part of Europe to a provincial city. The outbreak of the uprising was therefore an excellent opportunity to finally resolve the Warsaw issue.
On August 1, Hitler and Himmler announced the "Order for Warsaw". Heinrich Himmler decided not only to suppress the explosion by all possible means, but also to punish the insurgents in an exemplary manner - writes Phillip Marti in the book "The Reinefarth Case". It was decided that all residents, regardless of age and sex, were to be murdered , and the capital of Poland - completely demolished.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The bandit slayer was appointed to put down the uprising Erich von dem Bach. No wonder. The man who was responsible for the murders of Jews and the brutal pacifications of Belarusian villages seemed an ideal candidate from the point of view of the Nazis.
Under his orders there were exceptionally mean bandits. General Heinz Reinefarth was brought in, who will later complain that does not know what to do with civilians because he has less ammunition than detainees .
Hitler and Himmler agreed - Warsaw is about to turn into a sea of ruins with streets full of corpses of men, women and children (source:Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0 de).
Two formations joined the troops arriving from the Land of Warta together with Reinefarth on August 4, whose reputation, even for the Nazi war of destruction, could not be worse States Phillip Marti in The Reinefarth Case.
One of them was the brigade composed of poachers, criminals and psychopaths under the command of Oskar Dirlewanger . He himself served a sentence for the rape of a minor, and one of his hobbies was shooting his own soldiers in the back. His habits also included hanging a person of his choice every quarter - very often his subordinate. Close friendship with Himmler made Dirlewanger completely unpunished.
Oskar Dirlewanger (author:Anton Ahrens, license:Bundesarchiv, license:CC BY-SA 3.0 de) and Bronisław Kamiński (author:Wehmeyer, source:Bundesarchiv, license:CC BY-SA 3.0 de). The cruelty of their subordinates was a universal terror.
Bronisław Kamiński, commander of the collaborative Russian People's Liberation Army (RONA), was also appointed to pacify Ochota. Erich von dem Bach said about him that women and alcohol were the content of his life (...). The notion of property was alien to him, he hated no nation as much as Poles which he only mentioned with insulting words.
Interestingly and terrifying at the same time, both Kamiński and Bach had Polish roots. However, they preferred not to flaunt it too much. Until…
This is the Will of the Dirlewanger
Already on the first day of the uprising, civilians were executed. The real killing frenzy came on August 5, however. At 7 a.m., Reinefarth's troops invaded Wola. They immediately started the brutal murder of the Varsovians. House after house was burned, throwing grenades into the cellars and pouring incendiary powder inside .
Frightened residents ran straight to the machine guns standing in front of the building. Hitler's orders were carried out with precise accuracy. The bullets did not pass pregnant women, newborns and the elderly.
However, Reinefarth was not pleased. The extermination action lasted too long, so his wetboys did not move forward fast enough. That is why it was decided to lead Varsovians in large groups to squares and factory yards, where mass murders were carried out. The civilians in groups were murdered with a shot to the back of the head. To make sure that they were all dead, grenades were thrown into the heaps of corpses.
Dirlewanger's group was the most disgusting. Composed of mentally distorted murderers, it has committed the worst crimes. Always drunk, they robbed the victims first and then smote them with rifle butts.
For saving ammo and for more fun. Their sadism did not spare the children either. Some treated shooting a child's head as a form of sports competition. One of the witnesses admitted that he saw Dirlewanger personally grab the child from the woman and threw it into the fire.
Human corpses lay on the streets of the insurgent Warsaw ... The photo shows insurgents murdered in one of the courtyards (author:Alfred Mensebach, source:public domain).
They were raped whenever possible . Sometimes several men raped the same woman one after another without even putting down their weapons. Dirlewanger's men burst into one of the cellars. One took the woman. She was pretty and didn't scream. He raped her, pressing her head against the table with one hand and holding the bayonet in the other. Then he cut open her blouse. And then he cut open her body from stomach to throat.
One of the torturers was known to stuffed a grenade into the vaginas of raped women . His companions were overjoyed when it exploded.
After only two days, Wola became a real cemetery. There were dead bodies in every alley. It was impossible to walk through some places without stepping on the burnt corpse . Some eyes were burned out, the bodies of others were an almost open wound. Thirty to forty thousand inhabitants of the district were murdered on August 5-6 alone.
They raped, robbed, murdered with particular cruelty ... SS men of Dirlewanger at ul. Chłodna in Warsaw (author:Leher, source:Bundesarchiv, license:CC BY-SA 3.0 de).
Ochota of Kaminski soldiers
Kaminski's brigade, composed of deserters of the Red Army, did not seem particularly respectful at first glance.
They looked more like circus performers, not the military:they wore jackets of various colors and sizes, from under which there were shirts of various colors, often hats of Warsaw postmen (probably worn due to the shiny elements they were decorated with), rifles on strings, several watches on their hands.
This penchant for trinket has become one of the hallmarks of the RONA division. They were, in fact, a group of half-wild and ragged-offs for which the door handle or the water flowing from the tap was an example of unimaginable luxury. That is why they stole whatever they could - treating the achievements of the inhabitants of Warsaw as a reward from the Germans for their faithful service on the Eastern Front. No wonder then that the first thing they did after entering Ochota was looting two partially burned buildings and drinking heavily.
Kaminski's wetboys were seen as a wild horde that steals and rapes everything that comes its way ... The photo shows the regiment commander Major Ivan Frolov with RONA officers and a ROA soldier (right) (source:public domain).
Urged by Reinefarth, they started mass executions of mainly young men suspected of supporting the insurgents. However, they were still interested in getting loot. They broke women's fingers to get their rings . They ripped off earrings together with bits of ears.
The worst were the nights when among the crowded people in Zieleniak they searched for women to be raped. For them, it did not matter whether they were drawing a small child or a grandmother in their eighty years of age. Young girls who were most at risk, raped even a dozen or so men, often in front of their relatives. Mostly - as they put it - borrowed the girl never came back to the family.
For the Nazi degenerates, the sex and age of the victims did not matter in the slightest. The photo shows Polish civilians murdered in an execution at ul. Marszałkowska 111 (source:public domain).
Eleven-year-old Lech Kulicki recalled how he saw the ronowców sitting at the table, and under them a girl huddled in her hands. Women were found dead with their breasts severed or with bottles tucked between their legs . Pregnant women were also not spared. Even they were raped. One of the witnesses testified that he saw a newly born child stabbed with a bayonet. Others were smashed against the fence. Everything in front of mothers.
No chance of rescue
In time, pragmatism overcame fanaticism. Bach decided that instead of murdering the Varsovians, it was better to put them to work for the Reich. That is why a camp was established in Pruszków, where the saved civilians were deported. But not all of them. Children, the elderly, the sick, the wounded, pregnant women, men suspected of participating in the uprising, and Jews - all of them were barred from leaving the city.
The selection was made by the head of the Gestapo in Warsaw, Alfred Spilker, who, together with his soldiers, searched the crowds of refugees to Pruszków. It was enough to wear horse riding shoes to be accused of active participation in the uprising and, consequently, to be shot . Also, coffee beans found in a pocket - allegedly stolen from a German warehouse - were a death sentence.
This article has more than one page. Please select another one below to continue reading.Pfeiffer's tannery became the site of the execution of five thousand people deemed useless or undesirable.
Some of them were pulled by the hair and then the SS men shot them in the neck. The next group had to climb onto a pile of corpses or were dragged there and shot. And so on and on, until the pile was full and all the Poles were killed. I saw nine or ten layers of cadavers in one pile , women were shot with young children
The defenseless victims in insurgent hospitals were dealt with extremely brutally. The photo shows the remains of the wounded in the hospital at ul. Długa 7 (author:Leonard Sempoliński, source:public domain).
Despite assurances that AK soldiers would be treated in accordance with international law, they were still murdered. They had a particularly brutal course in insurgent hospitals. As one of the witnesses says:
Germans and Ukrainians started kicking and beating the wounded lying on the ground like cattle by calling them motherfuckers and Polish bandits. (...) The poor people lying on the ground smashed their heads with their boots, roaring horribly, kicking and pounding wherever they could. The blood and brains of the unfortunate ones were splashing in all directions.
No chance of justice
Every street in Warsaw was stained with blood, and the city, according to Hitler's wishes, was destroyed. However, the capital's greatest executioners have not been brought to justice.
In Nuremberg, Bach not only remembered his Polish roots, but wanted to be seen as the savior of Warsaw, who stopped the slaughter of civilians. Hermann Göring, hearing these words, called him a treacherous pig.
Thanks to the testimony against his superiors, the US did not agree to Bach's extradition to Poland. In this way, he avoided punishment for the crimes against the inhabitants of Warsaw. After the war, he spent most of his life under house arrest or behind bars. In 1972 he died in a hospital prison.
After the war, Reinefarth made a career in German politics, sitting as the mayor of Westerland and a member of the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag . He received a general pension from the German authorities. He died in 1979.
The Nuremberg Tribunal did not bring justice to all Nazi executioners. Many of them, despite the enormity of the crime, lived to an old age in comfort and prosperity (author:Ray D'Addario, source:public domain).
Dirlewanger was arrested in the French zone of occupation in June 1945. In the same month, he died. The circumstances of the death are not entirely clear. It is possible that he was beaten to death by two Poles who recognized him as their executioner.
In August 1944, Kamiński was sentenced to death by a Nazi military court. Thus, the unhelpful and insubordinate commander was disposed of.
We do not know what happened to Spilker to this day.
Bibliography:
- Davis Norman., Uprising'44 , trans. E. Tabakowska, Krakow 2004.
- Hanson Joanna, Superhuman Tested , Warsaw 2004.
- Ingrao Christian, Black Hunters. Dirlewanger Brigade , trans. W. Gilewski, Wołowiec 2011.
- Marti Philipp, The Reinefarth case , Warsaw 2016.
- Richie Alexandra, Warsaw 1944. A tragic uprising , trans. Z. Kunert, Warsaw 2014.
- Ujazdowska Lidia, The Holocaust of Ochota , Warsaw 2005.