Alexandra Richie - Warsaw 1944 - Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City

The sheer idiocy of German racial policy from a purely strategic point of view was never more clear than in Byelorussia and Ukraine. When they first arrived in the summer of 1941, the Germans were seen as liberators. Local people lined the dusty village tracks offering them bread and salt and boiled eggs, and winding flowers around the barrels of the advancing tanks. ‘Women often came out of their houses with an icon held before their breast, crying, “We are still Christians. Free us from Stalin who has destroyed our churches.”’ The inhabitants were relieved to be rid of Stalin, of the NKVD, of engineered famine and forced collectivization. Life under the Germans simply had to be better. Hans Fritzsche, who worked in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, was able to drive through villages near Kiev and Kharkov in German military uniform, ‘alone, unguarded … I slept peacefully in farmhouses and was fed by the population … Yet three-fourths of a year later, that whole country through which I had travelled was full of partisans – villages were burned, people shot, hostages taken, and general terror ensued.’ 6Ukrainian Archbishop Count Andrij Scheptycky wrote to Pope Pius XII on 29 August 1942: ‘When the German army first appeared to liberate us from the Bolshevik yoke, we experienced at first a feeling of some relief. But that lasted no more than one or two months. Step by step, the Germans introduced their regime of terrible cruelty and corruption … It simply appears that a band of madmen, or of rabid dogs, have descended upon the poor population.’ 7It is a testament to the brutality and barbarity of the Nazis’ policy that they were able to turn entire populations against them in such a short time. But this racial element could not be tempered; it was the very basis of the Nazi ideology.

Hitler was obsessed by the idea of ‘ Lebensraum ’, and the need to conquer huge territories in the east for the resettlement of the German people. In ‘ Generalplan Ost ’ Himmler described how the conquered lands were to be ‘Germanized’. The local inhabitants were to be either killed, transported to western Siberia, or kept as slaves. The Jewish population was to be completely annihilated – or, in Nazi terminology, given ‘special treatment’ – and the Slavic population was, according to von dem Bach at the Nuremberg Trials, to be reduced by around thirty million human beings. The conquered land was to be settled by Germans in new, romantic, medieval-style villages and towns, with officials set up in local palaces and ex-soldiers and deserving families given their own farmsteads in which to live out the pastoral idyll of Nazi mythology. There was no room for human empathy or compassion towards the victims of this massive undertaking.

Both Hitler and Himmler believed that cruelty and domination was a better way to control the east than any kind of benign rule: collective punishment and mass murder would intimidate the local populations, and the instilling of terror would make the conquered people malleable and submissive.

In a secret speech of 30 March 1941, recorded in his diary by Army Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder, Hitler told his officers to forget old notions of honour and decency in the east. ‘The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion,’ he said. ‘This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness.’ In the terrible ‘Commissar Order’ of 6 June 1941, Hitler stated that Jews, Soviet officials and Red Army political commissars were to be executed on sight. Enemy civilians would not be protected by law, guerrillas were to be ‘relentlessly liquidated’, and all attacks by ‘enemy civilians’ were to be suppressed at once by the military ‘using the most extreme methods’. The Barbarossa Decree outlined by Hitler during a meeting with military officials on 30 March 1941, and officially issued by Field Marshal Keitel, had called for a war of extermination of the political and intellectual elites of Russia. All normal codes of war were to be forgotten when it came to the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe. German officers were entitled to order the execution without trial or any formalities of any person suspected of ‘having a hostile attitude’ towards the Germans, ‘collective responsibility’ could be applied to the residents of an area where an attack had occurred, and German soldiers were to be ‘exempted from criminal responsibility’ even if their acts contravened German law. It was, in effect, a licence to commit murder. A Wehrmacht officer wrote: ‘Today we had to take all of [the males] from the village that were left behind last time … You can imagine the wailing of the women as even the children were taken from them … Three houses in a village were set on fire by us, and a woman burned to death as a result. So it will be uniformly along the front in all the villages … It was a fantastic sight for the eye to behold, as far as you could see, only burning villages.’ 8Of all those involved in creating the terrible ‘landscape of horror and death’, one of Hitler’s most willing and enthusiastic disciples was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.

‘Skunk!’ Hermann Göring would scream from the dock, to the surprise of all in the courtroom at Nuremberg. ‘Swine!’ Göring would erupt in a fury after listening to the testimony of his erstwhile colleague von dem Bach, who had turned witness for the prosecution. ‘He is the bloodiest murderer in the whole damn setup!’ Göring screamed again, waving his fist. Von dem Bach said nothing. ‘He is selling his soul to save his stinking neck,’ Göring went on, getting louder and louder. Jodl, equally angry, chimed in: ‘Ask the witness if he knows that Hitler held him up to us as a model partisan-fighter. Ask the dirty pig that!’ As von dem Bach stepped down, it seemed as if Göring was about to have a heart attack. His face was red and he could barely breathe. ‘ Schweinhund! ’ he screamed. ‘ Verräter! ’ 9

Göring, though not one to talk, had a point. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski became a master at rounding up civilians and killing them, and later, when labour was needed back at home, at sending selected people off as forced labour in the Reich. Byelorussia taught him how to control large civilian populations, a lesson he would put to devastating use in Warsaw. It is testimony to his ability to lie, to deceive and to appear respectable that he managed to convince the Allies to allow him to act as a witness at Nuremberg. This saved his life, although he had earned a place in the dock alongside Göring, Frank, Kaltenbrunner and the rest.

The chubby, jovial, bespectacled Erich von Zelewski, with his impish smile and dimpled chin, was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania in 1899. His mother was of Polish descent, a fact von dem Bach tried to hide in the Nazi years, and his father, Otto von Zelewski, was from a poor Junker family. His father died young, and the uncle who was meant to bring the boy up was in turn killed in the First World War; the young man himself joined up in 1915, becoming one of the youngest recruits in the German army. When the war ended he spent some years fighting against Polish nationalists in Silesia, and distanced himself from his Polish roots by changing his name in 1925 to the more Germanic-sounding ‘von dem Bach-Zelewski’. He would, tellingly, change his name twice more: in 1940, when as one of Himmler’s favourites he rid himself of the hated ‘Zelewski’ altogether; and again in 1946 in Nuremberg, when in his attempts to paint himself as a pro-Polish activist and the ‘saviour’ of Warsaw, his name returned to von dem Bach-Zelewski.

Changing his name to suit the circumstances was typical of von dem Bach. He was a pathological liar, adept at ingratiating himself with those in power, whether Himmler or the prosecutors after the war. Walter Schellenberg, head of SS military intelligence, said of him, ‘He has the kind of personality that can’t differentiate between the truth and lies. He gets himself so much into the whole thing he can’t differentiate … Originally it was not the truth, but he so convinces himself – he’s ready to die for it.’ 10