Assassination of Franz Kutschera

On Tuesday 1 February 1944, a few minutes past nine in the morning, in Aleje Ujazdowskie in Warsaw, not far from the junction with Chopin Street, a group of young Home Army soldiers stopped a car on its way to the SS and police headquarters. From a distance of a few paces they shot the man sitting in it, SS-Brigadeführer Franz Kutschera (PL), the SS and Police Leader for the Warsaw District, responsible for the wave of street executions that had swept over the city since the autumn of 1943. The whole action lasted about a hundred seconds. It was carried out by the 1st Platoon of the Kedyw special unit of Home Army headquarters, “Pegaz” (later the “Parasol” battalion), commanded by Bronisław Pietraszewicz, “Lot”. It was the most important successful assassination by the Polish underground of a senior official of German terror, but it was paid for with the lives of four participants and bloody reprisals against the people of Warsaw.

The hangman of Warsaw

Franz Kutschera was born in 1904 in Oberwaltersdorf in Lower Austria (some sources give 1896). At the end of the First World War he served in the Austro-Hungarian navy; in the early 1930s he joined the NSDAP and the SS, and after the Anschluss he sat in the Reichstag and for a time led the party in Carinthia as acting Gauleiter. In May 1943 he became SS and Police Leader in the Mogilev district, behind the eastern front. On 25 September 1943 Heinrich Himmler appointed him SS and Police Leader for the Warsaw District, replacing Jürgen Stroop, who had crushed the ghetto uprising in the spring. He took up the post in October.

His arrival coincided with a new phase of terror. Under an October 1943 decree of Governor-General Hans Frank on combating attacks on the “German work of reconstruction”, the Germans could sentence people to death by summary procedure for the slightest offence, and for every German killed or every underground action shoot “an appropriate number” of Poles. Round-ups intensified in Warsaw, and those detained were shot publicly in the streets, in places where underground actions had previously taken place. According to figures cited in the literature, from mid-October 1943 to mid-February 1944 the Germans officially murdered 1,763 people in street executions (PL); together with secret executions in the ruins of the ghetto the number of victims may have been around 5,000. The posters with the names of those shot were signed “SS and Police Leader for the Warsaw District”, with no name. For a long time the underground did not even know who was behind that title.

The sentence and reconnaissance

The Directorate of Underground Resistance (PL) passed a death sentence on Kutschera. Its execution was entrusted to the head of Kedyw at Home Army headquarters, Colonel August Emil Fieldorf, “Nil”, who passed the task to a special unit that the Cichociemni officer Captain Adam Borys (PL), “Pług”, had organised in the summer of 1943 from Scouts of the Grey Ranks. The unit was initially called “Agat” (from “anti-Gestapo”); after one of its officers was arrested in early January 1944 it was renamed “Pegaz” (“against the Gestapo”), and in the spring “Parasol”. It already had successful assassinations of Gestapo men behind it, including, in September 1943, that of the commandant of Pawiak prison, Franz Bürkl.

Kutschera first had to be identified. This was done by the unit’s intelligence section, led by Aleksander Kunicki (PL), “Rayski”. From the end of December 1943 they watched a car that left a villa in Aleja Róż in the morning and drove to the SS and police headquarters at 23 Aleje Ujazdowskie. The surveillance was carried out mainly by young liaison girls, including the 14-year-old Elżbieta Dziębowska, “Dewajtis”, and Maria Stypułkowska-Chojecka, “Kama”. The identity of the villa’s occupant was confirmed at the German registration office, and then from a photograph taken by Home Army intelligence. The reconnaissance lasted about forty days.

The plan and the first attempt

On 21 January 1944 the order was received by the commander of the 1st Platoon of “Pegaz”, Bronisław Pietraszewicz (PL), “Lot”, who was then 21. An attack on the villa or on the police buildings was judged too risky. A short stretch of Aleje Ujazdowskie, along which Kutschera drove every morning from home to the office, was chosen. The twelve-strong group was divided into teams: assassins, cover, drivers of three cars, and signalling.

The first attempt, on 28 January, came to nothing: the soldiers stood at their posts from 8.40, but Kutschera’s car did not arrive and at about 9.30 “Lot” called the action off. That same evening two members of the group ran into a German patrol in Krucza Street; one of them was seriously wounded. The team was made up again and the action repeated four days later.

A hundred seconds in Aleje Ujazdowskie

On 1 February Kutschera left home as usual at about nine. When his Opel turned into Aleje Ujazdowskie, “Kama” gave the signal. A car driven by Michał Issajewicz, “Miś”, cut across his path and blocked him at Pius XI Street (today Piękna). “Lot” ran up to the car and fired a Sten gun at the general from a distance of about a metre; Zdzisław Poradzki, “Kruszynka”, and “Miś” finished him off. They took his pistol and briefcase.

The shots alerted Germans in nearby buildings, including the SS headquarters. A firefight with the covering party ensued, in which Henryk Humięcki, “Olbrzym”, shot a German soldier. “Lot”, shot in the stomach, as well as Marian Senger, “Cichy”, “Miś” and “Olbrzym” were wounded. The group drove away in the cars. Kazimierz Sott, “Sokół”, and Zbigniew Gęsicki, “Juno”, took the seriously wounded “Lot” and “Cichy” to the Transfiguration Hospital in Praga, and then turned back towards the Kierbedź Bridge. The bridge was already blocked by the Germans. After a fight both jumped into the Vistula; they were killed by bullets or drowned in the icy river.

The toll

According to studies cited by the Polish Wikipedia, the Germans lost five killed that day (Kutschera, his driver, two men in front of the SS headquarters and a policeman on the bridge) and nine wounded; dzieje.pl writes more cautiously of probably four Germans killed besides Kutschera himself. On the Polish side four participants died. “Sokół” and “Juno” died in the Vistula. The wounded “Lot” and “Cichy” were taken out of the hospital in Praga by underground soldiers that same afternoon, before the Gestapo could take them over (the hospital had reported the gunshot wounds to the police), and hidden in other clinics. The operation at the hospital, during which two “Navy-blue” policemen were disarmed and the telephone lines cut, was led by Jerzy Zborowski, “Jeremi”. One of the clinics refused to admit the wounded; they spent the night in a private clinic in Chmielna Street. “Lot” was then taken to the Wolski Hospital, where, despite two blood transfusions, he could not be saved. The Germans later arrested the woman doctor and the hospital staff who had treated him; they were released only after a ransom was paid. “Lot” died on 4 February, “Cichy” (according to the Polish Wikipedia) on 6 February; the sources agree that both died a few days after the assassination.

Kutschera was buried with military honours on 4 February in the military cemetery at Powązki; he was succeeded by Paul Otto Geibel. For his part in the action “Lot” was posthumously awarded the Virtuti Militari cross, and ten participants the Cross of Valour.

Reprisals

The Germans responded immediately. On 2 February, at 21 Aleje Ujazdowskie, a few dozen metres from the site of the assassination, they shot 100 prisoners from Pawiak; the same day about 200 more were murdered in the ruins of the ghetto. A contribution of 100 million złoty was imposed on Warsaw and the Warsaw county, the curfew was brought forward, Polish performances were suspended, and non-Germans were forbidden to drive cars and motorcycles in the city unless a German was at the wheel. Further executions took place in the following days.

What the assassination changed

A few more executions took place in February, but afterwards, as Polish historians stress, street terror in Warsaw weakened and returned on a mass scale only during the Warsaw Uprising. The underground had shown that it could track down and kill the highest-ranking SS official in the city in broad daylight, almost under the windows of his headquarters. For the occupier it was a severe loss of prestige; the SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Wilhelm Koppe, is said to have called the action “lace-work”.

The unit, which took the name “Parasol” in May 1944, carried out several more assassinations, and in August 1944 it fought in the Warsaw Uprising in the “Radosław” group. Some of the participants in the 1 February action died in the uprising. The “Kutschera” action remains a symbol of the underground’s response to street terror, just as the earlier action at the Arsenal is a reminder that Warsaw paid for each such success with the lives of hostages.