The capitulation of Warsaw

At 1.15 p.m. on 28 September 1939, in the former Škoda aero-engine factory in the Warsaw district of Rakowiec, Major General Tadeusz Kutrzeba and the commander of the German 8th Army, General Johannes Blaskowitz, signed the agreement on the capitulation of Warsaw. So ended the three-week defence of the capital. Contrary to the abbreviated wording found in chronologies, it was not some army and militia units “remaining in the city centre” that laid down their arms, but the entire garrison of the Warsaw Army: about a hundred thousand soldiers, supported by the Civic Guard and volunteer battalions of inhabitants. They had not been defeated in battle. They were forced to capitulate by the destruction and the suffering of the population after massive air raids, by the lack of water, electricity and ammunition, and by the loss of any hope of relief.

A city without hope

From mid-September Warsaw had been encircled. On the Bzura the Poznań and Pomorze Armies had been shattered, and their remnants had fought their way through to the capital, enlarging its garrison but giving it no strength to change its position. On 17 September the Red Army had entered Poland, and a day later the Commander-in-Chief, the President and the government crossed the Romanian border. For weeks the city had been bombed and shelled by artillery. On 23 September the equipment of the power station was destroyed, and on 24 September the water supply from the Filter Station stopped. The radio, the telephones and the printing presses were not working, and there was nothing with which to put out the fires.

The German command decided to take Warsaw on the left bank of the Vistula with Blaskowitz’s 8th Army by 3 October at the latest. Praga, on the right bank, was to be handed over to the Soviets later, in accordance with the arrangements made with the USSR. Almost a thousand guns were deployed around the city, and two air fleets were assigned to the attacks from the air.

“Wet Monday”, 25 September

On 25 September the Luftwaffe carried out against Warsaw the heaviest air raid in the history of warfare up to that time. Some 400 aircraft flew more than a thousand sorties and dropped several hundred tonnes of high-explosive bombs and several dozen tonnes of incendiaries. About 200 fires broke out. The Holy Spirit Hospital burned down, killing some 300 people, as did the main building of the Infant Jesus Hospital. The city’s deputy mayor, Jan Około-Kułak, was killed in the bombed town hall. Estimates of the number killed that day run to several thousand, and the wounded were far more numerous. The day went down in history as “Wet Monday” (a grim play on the Polish name for Easter Monday), “Black Monday” or “Bloody Monday”.

At the same time German infantry attacked the defenders’ outer positions. By evening the Germans had taken Fort Mokotów, Fort Piłsudski and Fort Bielany. General Blaskowitz ordered an attack for midday the following day on both sides of the Vistula. It was to be the prelude to a general assault.

The assault of 26 and 27 September

On 26 September German aircraft dropped leaflets over the city threatening its total destruction and the shooting of twenty Poles for every German soldier killed. At 8 a.m. the artillery opened fire, and the divisions of XIII Corps attacked Czerniaków and Mokotów. Pioneers of the German 46th Infantry Division blew holes in the walls of Fort Dąbrowski in Czerniaków and threw grenades and smoke candles inside until its garrison surrendered. Królikarnia also fell, and the volunteer battalion of Captain Konstanty Zbijewski was destroyed in the Czerniaków Garden City. On Chełmska Street and Niepodległości Avenue, however, the defenders halted the attack.

In Ochota an attack by the 31st Infantry Division broke through the positions of the 40th Infantry Regiment. According to eyewitnesses, the Germans drove Polish prisoners ahead of their tanks as human shields. A counter-attack by Lieutenant Colonel Józef Kalandyk’s reserve battalion of the 56th Infantry Regiment restored the line of Częstochowska Street at about 3 p.m. In the north, soldiers of the German 18th Division captured Fort Wawrzyszew, but the Capital Battalion held on at Blizne. On 27 September, from 6.20 a.m., the Germans renewed the attack and took the Bielany Forest and Boernerowo, but the defenders’ main positions still held in every sector.

The decision to capitulate

The army could still defend itself, but the city could not. The chief of staff of the Warsaw Defence Command, Colonel Tadeusz Tomaszewski, reported that there was enough ammunition for four days, and artillery ammunition for two. Tens of thousands of wounded and sick lay in the city, most of the hospitals had been destroyed, and epidemics threatened. On 25 and 26 September the commander of the Warsaw Army, Major General Juliusz Rómmel, heard representatives of the Citizens’ Committee and a council of officers. Mayor Stefan Starzyński wanted to fight on; the socialists Mieczysław Niedziałkowski and Zygmunt Zaremba spoke in favour of capitulation, as did most of the generals and colonels. Rómmel made the decision alone and took responsibility for it.

The first envoy, sent to Praga on the afternoon of 26 September, returned with the answer that only unconditional surrender was on offer. In the evening an aircraft landed on the Mokotów Field carrying Major Edmund Galinat, who brought an order from the Commander-in-Chief, Edward Rydz-Śmigły, concerning the creation of a clandestine organisation. Rómmel entrusted this task to Brigadier General Michał Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz. On 27 September Tokarzewski founded the Service for Poland’s Victory (Służba Zwycięstwu Polski), the first organisation of the Polish Underground State, and selected officers were released from the obligation to go into captivity so that they could form its cadres. Rómmel, Kutrzeba and Starzyński, although they could have flown out, remained in the city.

On the morning of 27 September Kutrzeba crossed the front line in Praga and then held talks with Blaskowitz at Rakowiec. At noon Brigadier General Walerian Czuma ordered the fighting to stop; under the agreement with the Germans the ceasefire took effect at 2 p.m. In the evening the Poles escorted the prisoners they had taken earlier to the German lines.

The agreement of 28 September

The final negotiations began on the morning of 28 September at Rakowiec. The Polish delegation was headed by Kutrzeba, and at the Germans’ demand representatives of the city authorities, with Starzyński, also took part. The agreement signed at 1.15 p.m. provided that:

• officers would go into captivity, retaining their swords, while NCOs and other ranks would be released to their homes after a short period in captivity;
• the defenders would lay down their arms by noon on 30 September, in piles, rather than handing them to German soldiers;
• the Wehrmacht would begin occupying the city at noon on 29 September;
• the activity of Polish parties and organisations was suspended, and twelve well-known citizens of Warsaw would be taken as hostages against sabotage;
• until the Germans took over, the city would be administered by Starzyński, with order kept by the State Police and the Civic Guard;
• from 30 September the Germans would supply 160,000 food rations a day.

Despite Kutrzeba’s protest, the Germans wrote the term “Fortress Warsaw” (Festung Warschau) into the text. It was meant to justify the weeks of bombing of a city that was in reality an open city with improvised defences. The same day Rómmel sent an officer to Modlin with instructions to open talks. The Modlin Fortress capitulated on 29 September. In Moscow that day Ribbentrop and Molotov were signing the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which completed the partition of the Polish lands.

The garrison marches out

News of the capitulation was received with relief and despair alike. Unrest broke out in the Workers’ Brigade for the Defence of Warsaw, some officers wanted to arrest the generals, and there were suicides. On the night of 28–29 September looting spread through the city and was brought under control only by army patrols. Soldiers destroyed or hid their weapons en masse.

The agreement came into force on 29 September. At noon that day the Germans began occupying Czerniaków and Powiśle, and in the evening the first Polish columns set out from the city. The garrison’s columns, eight in all, marched out on the evening of 29 September and throughout 30 September, mainly along Wolska Street, Grójecka Street, Puławska Street and the road to Babice, bidden farewell by lines of inhabitants; the last units left on 2 October. In all, 5,031 officers and 97,425 NCOs and other ranks laid down their arms. By 1 October the Wehrmacht had occupied the whole city. That day Blaskowitz received the officers of the Warsaw Army staff and praised their soldierly conduct, to which Rómmel replied that “the war goes on”.

The capitulation’s place in the war

The capitulation of Warsaw meant the end of the last major centre of resistance in central Poland. Hel laid down its arms on 2 October, and on 6 October General Franciszek Kleeberg’s group capitulated at Kock. On 5 October Adolf Hitler took a victory parade on Aleje Ujazdowskie; according to accounts by members of the underground, Polish sappers had laid an explosive charge under the route, but it was never detonated. From 1 October units of an Einsatzgruppe were operating in the city and began arresting hostages and members of the intelligentsia. Mayor Starzyński was arrested by the Gestapo on 27 October and died in a German prison or camp; the circumstances of his death remain uncertain to this day. Warsaw found itself in the General Government, created in October.

Estimates of civilian losses in September range from about 10,000 to 25,000 killed, while the army lost 5,000–6,000 dead. Yet the destruction was only a foretaste of what was to come: the ghetto, mass executions and the razing of the city after the Rising of 1944. Nor did the capitulation mean the end of the struggle. The Service for Poland’s Victory, founded the day before in the besieged city, soon became the Union of Armed Struggle and then the Home Army. Some of the weapons hidden by the defenders in September 1939 found their way into the hands of underground soldiers. The defence and capitulation of Warsaw also became an argument in the dispute over the very nature of the war: the Germans presented the bombing as an attack on a fortress, while witnesses such as the American reporter Julien Bryan showed the world a city of civilians destroyed from the air.