The entry into Warsaw

On 17 January 1945, the sixth day of the great Soviet offensive from the Vistula, soldiers in Polish uniforms entered left-bank Warsaw. What they found was not a city but its remains: burnt-out blocks of streets, blown-up churches and palaces, broken bridges, mined buildings and a handful of people who had survived in cellars. Three and a half months had passed since the surrender of the Uprising, during which the Germans had systematically demolished the deserted capital. The fighting for the city itself was brief, because the German garrison had withdrawn beforehand, against the will of Adolf Hitler. By around 3 p.m. Warsaw was in the hands of the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front.

The entry in the chronologies – “Red Army units enter Warsaw; a government favourable to the communists is installed” – calls for two clarifications. First, the first to enter the city centre were the divisions of the Polish 1st Army under Major General Stanisław Popławski, fighting as part of the Soviet front; the Soviet 47th and 61st Armies went round the city to the north and south and forced the Germans to withdraw. Second, the communist authority was not “installed” on 17 January: the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland had been formed in Lublin on 31 December 1944 by the transformation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN); the USSR recognised it on 5 January (the decree was dated 4 January), and it moved to Warsaw – to Praga, on the right bank – only on 1 February 1945. The capture of the capital did, however, allow it to act as the state authority in the historic centre of the country.

Ruins and a fortress

The Warsaw where fighting took place on 17 January was a city that had ceased to exist. After the surrender of the Uprising on 2 October 1944 the Germans drove out its population and then set about destroying it in a planned way, the work being carried out by police engineer units (the Technische Nothilfe) and special squads of arsonists and demolition men. According to estimates accepted in the literature, about 25 per cent of the buildings of left-bank Warsaw were destroyed during the Uprising, and more than 30 per cent after its fall – more than during the fighting itself. Together with the destruction of September 1939, the liquidation of the ghetto and the air raids, the war reduced to rubble about 84 per cent of the buildings in the left-bank part of the city (about 65 per cent of the whole of Warsaw including Praga). The last fires were set literally on the eve of the offensive: on 16 January the store of the Public Library on Koszykowa Street burned down with some 500,000 volumes. This campaign of demolition, begun after the surrender of the Uprising, formed part of the wider destruction of Warsaw.

On these ruins the German command wanted at the same time to build a fortress. As early as 27 July 1944 Hitler had declared Warsaw a fortress, and on 18 October the commander of the Ninth Army formally designated the urban area as one. Festung Warschau was to have two rings of defences – an outer one 44 km long, based on the old forts, and an inner one 19 km long on the edge of the suburbs – and several hundred concrete bunkers. Only a small part of these plans was carried out. There was a shortage of workers, concrete and explosives, and what there was went on demolishing the city; the fortress commandant, General Hellmuth Eisenstuck, testified after the war that the demolitions and fires deprived the garrison of quarters and the positions of cover. The garrison was the hastily formed Warsaw Fortress Division – security battalions and units made up of soldiers of lower medical categories – of very low combat value. At the end of December Eisenstuck was replaced by General Friedrich Weber.

Encirclement

The Soviet offensive from the Vistula began on 12 January from the Baranów–Sandomierz bridgehead, where Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front attacked. On 14 January Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front went over to the attack. The plan assumed that Warsaw would not have to be taken by storm: the main blows were struck westwards from the Magnuszew and Puławy bridgeheads, towards Łódź and Poznań, while two armies were to outflank the capital. The Soviet 61st Army under Colonel General Pavel Belov attacked from 14 January out of the Warka–Magnuszew bridgehead through Grójec towards Błonie, while Lieutenant General Frants Perkhorovich’s 47th Army forced the Vistula near Modlin on 15 January and advanced on Leszno and Błonie. The pincers were to close at Błonie, cutting off the German forces in Warsaw.

The Polish 1st Army – commanded since December 1944 by Popławski, a Red Army officer of Polish origin who had replaced General Zygmunt Berling, recalled by Stalin after the September fighting on the Vistula – held a defensive line on the right bank from Jabłonna to Karczew, including Praga, which Soviet and Polish troops had taken back in September 1944. According to the plan it was to attack on 17 January, once the ring around the city had been closed: the main forces – the 1st, 3rd and 4th Infantry Divisions, the 1st Armoured Brigade “Heroes of Westerplatte” and the heavy artillery – from the south, from the Góra Kalwaria area; the 2nd Infantry Division from the north, from Jabłonna; and the 6th Infantry Division from Praga, straight ahead, with the task of pinning the enemy down frontally.

The German front broke on the very first day of Zhukov’s attack. The German Ninth Army, whose rear Zhukov’s forces were penetrating deeply from the bridgeheads, had no reserves capable of stopping the tank armies. Faced with the threat of encirclement, the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Heinz Guderian, agreed to a withdrawal, and on 16 January the head of the OKH operations department, Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin, gave Army Group A permission to abandon Warsaw. On the morning of 16 January German units began to pull back westwards from the Vistula. According to Polish studies, about four battalions and auxiliary units remained in the city, and the Fortress Division disintegrated during the retreat.

17 January

At 3 p.m. on 16 January, when reconnaissance reported that the Germans were withdrawing, the 2nd Infantry Division crossed from the Jabłonna area to Kępa Kiełpińska and by evening had reached the northern outskirts of left-bank Warsaw. In the south the 1st Independent Cavalry Brigade crossed the Vistula near Karczew. On the night of 16–17 January the main forces of the army were crossing to the left bank between Góra Kalwaria and Magnuszew, while the 6th Infantry Division (PL) set off from Praga across the frozen river straight into the city centre. The divisions that according to the plan were to conduct subsidiary operations were the ones that decided the capture of the city.

At around 10 a.m. the 2nd Infantry Division joined the fighting in the city, linking up with the 6th Division in the area of the Saxon Garden. There were skirmishes with German rearguards – in the Bielany Woods, by the Citadel, in the area of the Main Station and at the junction of Jerozolimskie Avenue and Nowy Świat. By 3 p.m. left-bank Warsaw had been taken; in the evening the main forces of the Polish 1st Army, advancing from the west and south, entered it, while the Soviet 47th and 61st Armies were approaching from the west and north-west. Most of the German forces, however, managed to withdraw before the pincers closed.

Polish losses in the city itself were small: according to Polish studies, 275 killed, missing and wounded, including about 110 dead, of whom roughly 60 were killed by mines. In the Warsaw operation as a whole the Polish 1st Army lost more than 10,500 men, including 3,116 killed. The inscription “Warszawa 16–17 I 1945” was placed after the war on one of the tablets of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Hitler regarded the loss of Warsaw as proof of insubordination on the part of the General Staff. He demanded that the order be rescinded and the city defended at all costs, but it was too late. On 19 January the Gestapo arrested Colonel von Bonin and two other officers of the OKH operations department, and Guderian – as he described in his memoirs – was interrogated over the affair by Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Heinrich Müller; Bonin ended up in the Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps. The Warsaw affair contributed to the tightening of Hitler’s orders on withdrawals issued over the following days.

A desert of rubble

The soldiers who entered the city centre described a landscape without people: heaps of rubble where tenements had stood, burnt-out façades, toppled columns, streets cut by trenches and barricades. According to estimates cited by historians, in January 1945 about 22,000 people were living in left-bank Warsaw and about 140,000 in Praga; before the war the city had had more than 1.3 million inhabitants. Among those who survived in the ruins were the so-called Robinsons of Warsaw – people who had not left the city after the surrender of the Uprising and had hidden from the Germans for weeks in cellars and attics. The best known of them is the pianist Władysław Szpilman.

The city was riddled with mines and charges left behind by the retreating Germans – among the buildings mined were the power station, the gasworks, the Sejm building, the surviving railway stations and more than two hundred apartment buildings. Polish and Soviet sappers spent many months clearing Warsaw; in 1945, by estimates, it was covered by some 20 million cubic metres of rubble and nearly 100,000 mines and unexploded shells. All the bridges over the Vistula were down. Even so, in the very first days after 17 January thousands of the inhabitants expelled in the autumn began streaming back into the city – on foot, with bundles and handcarts – in search of relatives, homes and what was left of their belongings. For several weeks there was talk of moving the capital to Łódź, Kraków or Poznań; on 14 February 1945 the Capital Reconstruction Office was set up, which settled that Warsaw would be rebuilt.

The parade of 19 January

On 19 January, on Jerozolimskie Avenue, at a reviewing stand set up opposite the Hotel Polonia – one of the few large buildings in the city centre to have survived – a parade of units of the Polish 1st Army, mainly the 2nd Infantry Division, was held to the strains of “Warszawianka”. It was taken by representatives of the new authorities: the chairman of the State National Council (KRN), Bolesław Bierut, Prime Minister Edward Osóbka-Morawski, Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Gomułka and other members of the KRN and the government. For propaganda purposes it illustrated the slogan of the “liberation of the capital by the Polish soldier”, and the newsreels showed it under the title “Warsaw Free!”. An eyewitness, the writer Jeremi Przybora, remembered it as “a ghastly parade in the graveyard of Warsaw”.

The authorities later instituted the Medal for Warsaw 1939–1945 (November 1945), and in the USSR the medal “For the Liberation of Warsaw” (June 1945), which was awarded to more than 600,000 Soviet and Polish soldiers; 70 Soviet and 12 Polish units were given the honorific “Warsaw”.

The new authorities

The Provisional Government, which on 1 February moved from Lublin to the Railway Directorate building on Targowa Street in Praga, continued the programme of the PKWN and was dominated by the communists of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). The socialist Osóbka-Morawski became prime minister and foreign minister, Gomułka (PPR) and Stanisław Janusz (of the Peasant Party, SL) deputy prime ministers; defence was headed by the commander-in-chief of the Polish Army, Michał Rola-Żymierski, and public security by Stanisław Radkiewicz. It was recognised by Joseph Stalin and, at the end of January, by Czechoslovakia as well. The Polish government in London, headed since November 1944 by Tomasz Arciszewski, regarded it as self-appointed, and Britain and the United States continued to maintain relations with the government-in-exile. Stalin – in the view of historians – wanted to settle the dispute over who represented Poland by creating facts on the ground before he sat down to talks with Roosevelt and Churchill; since the Moscow talks of October 1944 it had been clear that the Lublin men were to have the majority in a future government.

The NKVD and the Home Army

Together with the army, NKVD units and the Smersh military counter-intelligence entered the city, along with officers of the security apparatus that Radkiewicz was building. Their task was to “secure the rear of the front”, which in practice meant hunting down the soldiers and activists of the Polish Underground State. The experience of the Wilno region, where after Operation Ostra Brama the NKVD had disarmed Home Army units and arrested officers and deported them deep into the USSR, and similar arrests in the Lublin region showed what could be expected. According to the findings of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), an NKVD jail operated in a villa at 2 Świerszcza Street in Włochy, just outside Warsaw, and between February and October 1945 nearly a thousand detainees passed through its cellars; in Praga the prison of the NKVD and the Security Office was housed in a tenement at 8 Strzelecka Street. Repression also fell on Warsaw insurgents returning to the city.

The Home Army as an organisation could no longer operate openly. Its commander, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, was in German captivity, and on 19 January, two days after the capture of Warsaw, his successor, Brigadier General Leopold Okulicki “Niedźwiadek”, issued – with the consent of the Commander-in-Chief and on the basis of instructions from the London government – the order dissolving the Home Army. In it he released the soldiers from their oath, while calling on them to go on working for the recovery of full independence; some of the cadres were to transfer to the secret organisation “NIE” (“No”). The dissolution was meant to deprive the NKVD of a pretext for repression, but – as historians stress – the arrests did not stop.

Liberation or new dependence

The verdict on 17 January 1945 divides Poles to this day. In communist Poland it was the day of the “liberation of Warsaw”, solemnly commemorated with the emphasis on the part played by the Polish soldier and on brotherhood in arms with the Red Army. For many Varsovians returning to the ashes, it was above all the end of the German occupation that had lasted since September 1939 – an occupation in which, by estimates, some 700,000 of the city’s inhabitants had died. For the soldiers of the underground and supporters of the London government, who remembered that the Red Army had stood on the Vistula throughout the Uprising and its last weeks, it was at the same time the beginning of a new dependence – of imposed rule and arrests. The Museum of Polish History gave one of its texts about this date the title “The Liberation That Never Was”. Both experiences – relief at the end of the occupation and a sense of new subjugation – are present side by side in the sources from those weeks.

Place in the war

The capture of Warsaw was one of the first clear fruits of the January offensive. On 19 January the Red Army entered Kraków and Łódź, and at the end of the month the first Soviet units reached the Oder, less than 100 km from Berlin. As early as 18 January the Polish 1st Army set off from Warsaw to the north-west, towards Bydgoszcz and Pomerania, where in February it broke through the Pomeranian Wall; its soldiers later reached Kołobrzeg, the Oder and Berlin.

The political consequences proved more lasting than the military ones. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 Britain and the United States agreed that the Provisional Government should be “reorganised” by bringing in politicians from Poland and from abroad; in June the Provisional Government of National Unity was formed with the participation of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and the Western powers withdrew their recognition from the government in London. In March 1945 the NKVD treacherously arrested Okulicki, the Government Delegate for Poland Jan Stanisław Jankowski and more than a dozen other leaders of the Polish Underground State; in June they were tried in Moscow in the Trial of the Sixteen. As for Warsaw – contrary to plans to turn it into a provincial town or leave it in ruins – it was rebuilt over the following years, and its Old Town, reconstructed from the rubble, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.