Arrest of General Rowecki

On the morning of 30 June 1943 the German security police surrounded a tenement at 14 Spiska Street in Warsaw’s Ochota district. In flat no. 10 on the first floor Gestapo officers detained a man whom they had sought for three years more than anyone else in occupied Poland: the commander-in-chief of the Home Army, Brig. Gen. Stefan Rowecki “Grot”. The operation was led by SS-Untersturmführer Erich Merten of the Warsaw Gestapo. The general was taken to security police headquarters on Szucha Avenue (PL), and soon afterwards flown to Berlin. The Home Army lost the commander who had been building the Polish military conspiracy since the autumn of 1939 and who had headed it since its creation under that name in February 1942.

14 Spiska Street

The flat on Spiska Street was rented under a fictitious name by the general’s brother, the lawyer Stanisław Rowecki, legal adviser to the Headquarters; it served conspiratorial purposes. According to various accounts the arrest took place between 9.30 and 10 a.m., shortly before an all-day briefing of the Home Army Headquarters (PL), scheduled for 10 o’clock at 5 Barska Street. A report by AK counterintelligence, later drawn up by Stanisław Leszczyński “Vigil”, collected witnesses’ accounts: the Germans blocked the surrounding streets, entered all the flats in the building and lined those present up against a wall in the courtyard. The accounts differ in detail – one speaks of five buses, another of nine cars; some witnesses saw machine guns on the roofs.

Rowecki had long been the Germans’ “enemy number one”. He stood first on their list of the most active leaders of the Polish underground, and in the building on Szucha Avenue hung his portrait, which officers and agents operating in Warsaw were supposed to know. The general himself was no supporter of strict conspiratorial discipline: he agreed to be accompanied by AK intelligence cover only for official meetings, moved around the city without protection, and counted on his good knowledge of Warsaw, his altered appearance and his excellently forged documents to protect him.

Commander of an underground army

At the time of his arrest Rowecki was 47 and had headed the Polish military conspiracy for almost three years – first as commander-in-chief of the Union of Armed Struggle, and from February 1942 as commander of the Home Army. It was he who carried out the merging of the underground: in November 1942 the National Military Organisation of the National Party subordinated itself to the Headquarters, and talks were under way with the peasant movement on incorporating the Peasant Battalions. From December 1942 he was also Delegate of the Minister of National Defence in the Homeland, responsible among other things for the budget of the armed forces in the Homeland and for representing them before the Government Delegate. In January 1943 the Directorate of Diversion (Kedyw) was created under Col. August Emil Fieldorf “Nil”, and in the spring young soldiers of the Grey Ranks carried out the celebrated Action at the Arsenal.

In November 1942 Rowecki recognised the Jewish Combat Organisation and ordered contact to be established with it. The AK handed it its first weapons in December, and after the January fighting in the ghetto the general agreed to a further, larger delivery. Under his command a plan was also prepared for a general uprising at the moment of Germany’s collapse. Rowecki opposed cooperation with the communists of the Polish Workers’ Party and looked with growing anxiety at what the entry of the Red Army onto Polish soil might bring. The AK commander knew the whole structure of the underground, its plans, its contacts with London and the people in key positions. His arrest was one of the greatest successes of the German police in occupied Poland.

Who betrayed “Grot”

The arrest of Rowecki is linked to a group of Gestapo agents supervised by Merten. Its core consisted of people from AK intelligence. Ludwik Kalkstein (PL), a young officer of offensive intelligence, agreed after his arrest and months of interrogation to work for the Germans. He drew into the collaboration his future wife Blanka Kaczorowska (PL), who also worked in intelligence, and his brother-in-law, the journalist and theatre critic Eugeniusz Świerczewski (PL) “Gens”, husband of his sister, the actress Nina. Świerczewski agreed to cooperate when the Gestapo arrested his wife, in return for a promise of her release. According to the IPN this group brought about, in 1942–1943, the arrest of over 500 commanders and collaborators of AK intelligence, which in Warsaw was for a time broken up.

Of the three, Świerczewski alone knew the general personally: in 1920 Maj. Rowecki, head of intelligence of the 4th Army, had applied for his promotion to lieutenant. According to the most often repeated version, based on Kalkstein’s post-war testimony, in the last days of June Świerczewski recognised Rowecki in the street in the Solec area, followed him to Spiska Street and telephoned the Gestapo, most likely from the nearest telephone box.

The circumstances of the betrayal remain disputed, however. The historian Witold Pronobis, a relative of the general, argues for Świerczewski’s guilt. Andrzej Chmielarz and Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert, authors of the book “Spiska 14”, incline to the thesis that the arrest was largely a matter of chance. They point out that the Gestapo did not search the general’s flat, and that had the general been under surveillance the Germans would also have arrested the people he met that morning – the liaison woman Elżbieta Zboińska-Prądzyńska “Ela”, from whom he was to receive 100,000 złoty for the Government Delegate Jan Stanisław Jankowski, and the five officers from the briefing on Barska Street. Other hypotheses circulated too: of betrayal for money, of the general having been investigated by the Abwehr, and finally – according to the historian Tadeusz Kisielewski – of the involvement of Polish agents of Soviet intelligence, who wanted to remove an opponent of cooperation with the USSR. As the IPN stresses, no documents confirm any of these theories.

June 1943

The arrest came at the worst possible moment. In April the Germans had announced the discovery of the graves at Katyn, and Moscow had used the Polish government’s request for an investigation by the International Red Cross to break off relations with it. In June the AK also suffered other heavy losses – the Gestapo broke up, among others, its special-tasks unit Osa-Kosa 30 (PL). A few days before his arrest Rowecki sent London a report which he signed – for the first and probably the only time during the war – with his real name.

The consequence was clear. From 1 July the duties of commander-in-chief were taken over by Rowecki’s previous deputy, Gen. Tadeusz Komorowski “Bór”. He was formally confirmed in the post in the second half of July. The appointment aroused reservations among some of the senior officers of the Headquarters. The change in the command had far-reaching consequences: it was Komorowski who on 20 November 1943 issued the order for Operation Tempest, and in the summer of 1944 the order to begin the fight for Warsaw. The head of Headquarters counterintelligence, meanwhile, was ordered to gather all information about the circumstances of the arrest; his report is today one of the main sources for the history of that day. A few days after the arrest of “Grot” the Polish underground also lost its prime minister and Commander-in-Chief: on 4 July Gen. Władysław Sikorski was killed in an air crash near Gibraltar.

Sachsenhausen and sentences on the traitors

In Berlin Rowecki firmly rejected a proposal to cooperate with the Germans, including taking part in an action against the USSR. In mid-July 1943 he was placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in a special prison block (Zellenbau) for important prisoners; after an order from Berlin he was cut off from contact with other inmates. In March 1944 the Commander-in-Chief promoted him to major general. After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising the general was murdered on the orders of Heinrich Himmler. The IPN investigation, discontinued in 2007 because the perpetrators had died, established that it happened between 2 and 7 August 1944, probably in the camp crematorium. His burial place has not been found.

AK counterintelligence exposed Kalkstein and Świerczewski in December 1943. According to one version, on 25 March 1944 a Special Military Court sentenced the three traitors to death. On 20 June 1944 soldiers of the Security and Counterintelligence Department of the Headquarters interrogated Świerczewski in the cellar of a house at 74 Krochmalna Street; he is said to have admitted giving up Rowecki, after which he was hanged. The sentence on Kaczorowska, who was pregnant, was not carried out, and Kalkstein took refuge in the German district and joined the SS. The two were tried only in the People’s Republic: Kaczorowska was sentenced in 1953 and Kalkstein in 1954 to life imprisonment, but the sentences were reduced and both were released. In 1980 a plaque commemorating the arrest of “Grot” was unveiled on the tenement at 14 Spiska Street.