Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

The first priority for the German authorities in Poland was to ensure that the Polish elite—religious leaders, teachers, military officers, intellectuals, and even Boy Scouts—was effectively neutralized. To this end, the random killings of the early phase of occupation became more targeted and more overtly political in motivation. In the so-called Valley of Death near Bydgoszcz, for instance, in October 1939, over 1,200 priests, doctors, and others were killed by firing squads of the Einsatzgruppen and local ethnic German militias. In total, actions such as these would account for as many as 50,000 Polish deaths in that first autumn and winter of the German occupation.

November 1939 saw Sonderaktion Krakau (Special Action Kraków), when Nazi cynicism matched Nazi barbarism. At midday on the sixth of that month, the entire staff of the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Kraków, one of the oldest universities in the world, was summoned to a meeting with the new Gestapo chief for the city, Bruno Müller, to learn about the Nazis’ plans for education. Rather than hear a lecture, however, the 184 assembled professors were summarily arrested and taken for interrogation, after which they were sent, en masse, to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. Although most of them would be released the following spring after international protests—not least from Benito Mussolini and the Vatican—some sixteen of the Jagiellonian professors would not survive their ordeal. The university itself was closed, meanwhile, as were all of Poland’s secondary and higher educational establishments, for the duration of the Nazi occupation. As far as Berlin was concerned, the Poles would require no more than the most rudimentary learning.

In the spring and summer of 1940, the Germans began another wave of repression in their zone of occupied Poland to remove so-called leadership elements from what remained of Polish society. The resulting AB Aktion , or “Extraordinary Pacification Action,” followed what would become a familiar pattern. Prisoners were removed from their cells in local jails; a charge, verdict, and sentence were read out; and they were taken by truck to nearby woods, where they were executed with a shot to the head or machine-gunned into waiting pits. In this way, 358 prisoners from Pawiak prison in Warsaw were killed in Palmiry Forest in June 1940; 400 were killed near Częstochowa in July; and 450 people were murdered near Lublin on the night of August 15, 1940. It is thought that, in total, the AB Aktion cost around 6,000 lives.

Whereas the Germans employed brute force and the dictatorial hierarchy prescribed by the Führerprinzip , or “leader principle,” in the Soviet zone the new administration adorned itself with the illusion of democratic legitimacy. A month after the Red Army’s arrival, the Soviets staged rigged elections (with a closed list of candidates) for new assemblies in the two annexed territories of Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. A week or so later, those new assemblies petitioned the Supreme Soviet in Moscow with a request to join the Soviet Union, which was duly granted in mid-November 1939. Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia were then annexed to the existing Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Byelorussia respectively, and the newly elected national assemblies were dissolved. Within two months, the Polish provinces of the eastern borderlands, or Kresy , had been seamlessly absorbed into the USSR.

From that point on, Soviet norms applied throughout. Private property was abolished, businesses were nationalized, and all former citizens of Poland had to register as Soviet citizens. The Polish zloty was withdrawn from circulation in mid-November, with no conversion to Soviet rubles permitted. These measures impoverished many among the old middle and upper classes overnight, divesting them of their property and rendering their savings worthless. Sovietization naturally had profound effects; not only was economic and social life for the majority turned on its head, but many now found themselves liable to retrospective arrest for anti-Soviet activities, such as having fought in the Polish-Soviet War two decades earlier. Membership in the former bourgeoisie or the intelligentsia suddenly became a potentially life-threatening condition.

In fact, a remarkable symmetry emerged between the occupation policies adopted by the Nazis and the Soviets, with both sides using very similar methods for dealing with their respective conquered populations. Just as the Germans were effectively decapitating Polish society in the west, the Soviets were doing the same in their area of occupation: measures adopted against the racial enemy in one half of Poland were virtually indistinguishable from those applied to the class enemy in the other. In the Soviet zone, numerous prominent personalities, military and political, were arrested in a conscious effort to remove opinion formers and commentators who might adversely affect the smooth transition to Soviet rule. Others were detained more speculatively, considered suspect after a chance conversation, perhaps, or picked up off the street. A favorite NKVD tactic was to arrest two people talking together in public and then interrogate them separately, asking specifically what they had been discussing prior to their arrest. Any discrepancies between the two accounts indicated that they were clearly hiding something, and the interrogation would continue. Most would be arrested for some minor transgression, real or imagined, which could be construed as oppositional; service to the prewar Polish regime, for instance, was enough for an individual to be branded a supporter of fascism. Of course, the irony that Stalin himself was supporting fascism via his pact with Hitler was not allowed to intrude.

Some of those detained had actually committed an offense. Czesław Wojciechowski was nineteen years old when he was arrested for distributing anti-Soviet leaflets in the northern town of Augustów. Sentenced to eight years in the Gulag labor camps of the Soviet interior, he was taken away in the clothes in which he was captured and never saw his family again. He was one of an estimated 100,000 Poles seized by the NKVD in occupied Poland for criminal offenses, half of whom were sent to the Gulag. For those sent to local jails, conditions were little better. Aleksander Wat was sent to the overcrowded main prison in Lwów in January 1940. None of the prisoners there had been incarcerated for more than three months; yet the conditions were so poor that all of them looked like old men. “I couldn’t tell the difference between 40-year-old and 70-year-old men,” Wat recalled. Little wonder that the grim joke soon began to circulate in Poland that the initials NKVD (or NKWD in Polish) stood for “Nie wiadomo kiedy wrócę do domu” (Impossible to tell when I will return home).

Perhaps the most infamous example of this process of “decapitating” Polish society takes the name of one of the sites where unfortunate prisoners were murdered: Katyn. After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, the NKVD arrested around 400,000 Polish prisoners of war, policemen, prison officers, and others. Through a process of interrogations and political screening, this number was then whittled down, with many enlisted men being released and others being assigned to labor battalions. By the end of 1939, this left around 15,000 men, predominantly army officers, interned in the Soviet prison camps at Starobelsk, Kozelsk, and Ostashkov, where they were subjected to lengthy nocturnal interrogations to ascertain their attitude toward the Soviet Union and communism. The prisoners assumed that they were merely being screened prior to their release, but the situation was far more serious than that: their very lives were at stake. As Poles, officers, aristocrats, and Catholics, most of them were damned many times over in Soviet eyes; accordingly fewer than four hundred of them were deemed to be “of use” and were spared execution. One of these was Zygmunt Berling, later commander of the 1st Polish Army that would fight alongside the Red Army all the way to Berlin. For good measure, around 7,000 other Poles—priests, policemen, landowners, and intellectuals—from other camps were added to the execution list. Then, on March 5, 1940—the very same week that the AB Aktion was ordered in Berlin—the instruction was given in Moscow to apply “the supreme punishment: shooting.”