Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

The Nazi armed forces invaded Poland before dawn on 1 September 1939. Having carried out their first Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’), the Germans annexed a large part of its territory to the Reich. There remained a small region that the Germans declared to be a ‘General Government’.

Sovereignty over this territory is held by the Führer of the Greater German Reich and exercised on his behalf by the Governor General.

About a year later, Governor General Hans Frank said,

If I came to the Führer and told him, ‘My Führer, I have to report that I have again exterminated 150,000 Poles,’ he would say, ‘Fine, if that was necessary.’ The Führer stressed yet again that the Poles should have only one lord, the German: two lords, one next to the other, cannot and should not exist; accordingly, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia must be exterminated. That sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.

The General Government is a Polish reserve, a large Polish work camp… If the Poles rise to a higher level of development, they will cease to be the workforce that we need.

‘It is our duty to eradicate the population; that is part of our mission to protect the German population,’ Hitler instructed his accomplices. ‘We will have to develop the technology for eradicating the population. If I am asked what I mean by eradicating the population, I shall reply that I mean the extermination of entire racial categories. That is exactly what I am preparing to implement. To put it bluntly, that is my mission.’

In the path of our troops lay the hell, revealed to the world at this time, of the Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and other death camps. The soldiers broke down the gates and cut the cable providing power for the electrified barbed wire. What was exposed through the gates of the concentration camps seemed beyond human comprehension. Hundreds of thousands of people murdered, asphyxiated or tortured to death. Those still breathing had been left to die of starvation or from their physical and moral torments.

Near Poznań we stayed in an empty house. In a polished frame on a bedside table was a photograph of a boy with his arms folded, frozen in motionless delight. His father, Paul von Heydenreich, a Baltic German, read the New Testament and Schiller’s plays. In a large desk was a copy of a document which, after bursting into this well appointed home in October 1939 with an escort of German policemen, Heydenreich presented to its owner. In it the owner read that, in accordance with an order of the German Burgomeister, he, the Polish architect Boleslaw Matuszewski, owner of the house at No. 4, former Mickiewicz Street, must without delay leave the house together with his family. He was permitted to take with him two changes of underwear and a raincoat. He had twenty-five minutes to pack… Heil Führer! (I copied the document into my diary).

We had now long been advancing through the part of Poland the Nazis had annexed to their Reich and attempted to Germanize forcibly. After a crossing of the Rivers Warta and Notec, General Vasiliy Chuikov’s troops surrounded Poznań. The approaches to the outskirts were blocked by a powerful defensive ring of forts, which withstood attack. They had to be besieged and taken by storm.

Here, in Poznań, on 4 October 1943, Himmler had declared,

How well the Russians live, how well the Czechs live is of no interest to me. What there is among these peoples of good blood of our sort, we shall take to ourselves and, if need be, select children and bring them up ourselves. Whether other peoples live in prosperity or die of hunger interests me only to the extent that our culture needs them as slaves. This is of no interest to me in any other sense.

Poznań was one of the first Polish cities to be captured by the Germans. In 1939, hot on the heels of the German divisions, thousands of German businessmen and Nazi Party officials came running to assimilate the ‘Province of Wartheland’. The Poles were expelled from all even halfdecent apartments. They no longer had any factories, department stores, schools or personal belongings. Their streets were renamed, their language banned, their monuments vandalized and churches desecrated.

Focke-Wulf workshops were moved from Bremen into the fortresses. Poles were deported to provide forced labour in Germany. The Jewish population was shot on the outskirts of the city. Such was the triumph here of the spirit of National Socialism.

Stalingrad assault detachments experienced in street fighting battled in Poznań for every street, building and stairwell. The artillery helped, but every time the outcome was decided by assaults that sometimes came to hand-to-hand fighting. The sky above the city was aglow, lit by the flames as, losing block after block, the Germans burned and blew up buildings in the centre. Now all they still held was the citadel of Poznań, an ancient stronghold designed to withstand attack for a long time. It towers over the city and occupies a large area, two square kilometres as I recall. The ground on the approaches to the citadel was lined with trenches, behind which were the fortress’ embankment and massive wall.

On the day I arrived, the greater part of the city was already in our hands but fighting was continuing in the north-eastern outskirts. The Germans were retreating, after dogged skirmishes, into the protection of the citadel they still held.

From its commanding height, and with a still powerful enemy ensconced in it, the fortress was a threat to the city. Shells periodically exploded as artillery fired from the fortress, but there was no stopping the great, solemn procession of the Polish population, who had come out in large numbers to commemorate the victims of the occupation. They were carrying wreaths to lay at a symbolic mass grave within the cathedral grounds. How touching it was to see among the ranks of the marchers children in school blazers they had so outgrown they looked quite strange, but which their parents had kept as a sign of patriotism and despite the strict orders of the German regime that every reminder of the old Poland should be destroyed. The Poznań tradespeople, butchers and tailors, bakers and furriers, came out to greet the Red Army with the banners of their guilds, which they had secretly preserved at the risk of their lives.

The stream of people stretched the length of the street, all the way from the railway station. Over five years ago, when the Germans overran Poznań and annexed it to the Reich, Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologist of their racism, arrived from Berlin, got off the train and promptly gave a speech. ‘Posen ist der Exerzierplatz des Nazionalsozialismus.’ Poznań is the training ground of National Socialism. What that meant was closing Polish schools, banning the Polish language and publications in Polish, and banning the performance of Polish music or songs, not only in public but even at home. The Poles were to be crushed by every manner of humiliation, like not being allowed to sit in the front tramcar, only in the one drawn behind it. I saw a notice to that effect on one tramcar.

On the day I am describing, amateur bands came out of hiding, and the Polish tunes they played in the streets were met with gratitude and much jubilation. Joy at being liberated mingled with sorrow at so many losses, in a united spirit of thanksgiving.

Bombardment of the city from the fortress had almost ceased. Evidently our forces had managed to suppress the guns or the enemy were running low on shells. The army assigned units to storm the citadel and then moved further westwards. Troops of our 1st Byelorussian Front had crossed the German border on 29 January.

No order came, however, to storm the citadel. It really was all but impregnable and the cost would have been too high. The situation of the troops holed up in the besieged fortress was in any case hopeless: capitulation was only a matter of time.