The surrender of the Warsaw Uprising

After 63 days of fighting, the Warsaw Uprising ended not with the storming of a last barricade but with an agreement. On 2 October 1944, at the headquarters of SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski in Ożarów Mazowiecki, the delegates of the Home Army High Command – Colonel Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki (“Heller”) and Lieutenant Colonel Zygmunt Dobrowolski (PL) (“Zyndram”) – signed the “Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Warsaw”. Hostilities were to cease that day at 8 p.m. German time (9 p.m. Polish time). Some historians (among them Adam Borkiewicz, Władysław Bartoszewski and Norman Davies) state that the final text was not signed until about 2 a.m. on 3 October; a note by one of the negotiators, Colonel Franciszek Herman (PL) (“Bogusławski”), according to which the Polish delegation returned to its own barricades at 11.30 p.m., points to signature on 2 October.

The often-repeated statement that on this day the Germans “finally managed to crush” the Uprising therefore needs qualifying. The Germans had earlier taken Wola, Ochota, the Old Town, Powiśle, Czerniaków, Mokotów and Żoliborz, but Śródmieście (the city centre), where most of the insurgents and tens of thousands of civilians were concentrated, remained in Polish hands to the end. The decision to end the fighting was taken by the Commander of the Home Army, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, who judged that with no help from outside, with hunger and with the population exhausted, further resistance was pointless. The surrender was forced by the military situation, but it took the form of an agreement under which the Germans recognised the insurgents as soldiers and not – as hitherto in their propaganda and practice – as “bandits”.

The last days: Mokotów, Żoliborz, Kampinos

August and early September had brought the outbreak of the Uprising, the Wola massacre and the fighting after the fall of the Old Town, followed by the failed attempt of the Polish 1st Army – Berling’s troops on the Vistula – to land on the left bank of the river. After the fall of Czerniaków (23 September), von dem Bach decided to eliminate two weaker centres of resistance before striking at Śródmieście.

On 24 September German units attacked Upper Mokotów. The fighting was fierce – the school building at 8 Woronicza Street changed hands several times – but after two days the commander of the district’s defence, Lieutenant Colonel Józef Rokicki (PL) (“Karol”), ordered a withdrawal through the sewers to Śródmieście. The evacuation began on the evening of 26 September; about 800 soldiers had got through when Brigadier General Antoni Chruściel (“Monter”) categorically ordered a return to Mokotów. Chaos broke out in the sewers, the Germans blocked some of the passages and threw grenades into the manholes, and some of the soldiers who emerged on enemy-held ground were killed – on 27 September, by the German gendarmerie post on Dworkowa Street, about 140 insurgents who had come out of the sewer there by mistake were shot. At noon on 27 September the last defenders of Mokotów surrendered in exchange for recognition of combatant rights; about a thousand soldiers went into captivity.

On 29 September the Wehrmacht’s 19th Panzer Division attacked Żoliborz and that same day took the southern part of the district, including Wilson Square. The commander of the defence, Lieutenant Colonel Mieczysław Niedzielski (PL) (“Żywiciel”), intended to break through to the Vistula and evacuate his units to the right bank, held by Soviet and Polish troops, but the attempt failed. On orders from the High Command, the defenders of Żoliborz surrendered on 30 September. The same day President Władysław Raczkiewicz appointed Bór-Komorowski Commander-in-Chief in place of the dismissed General Kazimierz Sosnkowski.

The force that had supported Warsaw from outside for two months was also destroyed. On 27 September the Germans launched Operation Sternschnuppe, an anti-partisan sweep in the Kampinos Forest. Group Kampinos withdrew towards the Holy Cross Mountains, but on 29 September it was surrounded and routed in the Battle of Jaktorów.

The talks at Ożarów

Bór-Komorowski had already been coming to the conclusion that Warsaw would not withstand another assault. He broke off a first sounding of the Germans in September on 11 September, when it seemed that help would come from the east. By the end of the month there were no more illusions: on 28 September the High Command sent Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, a signal warning that the insurgents could hold out for 72 hours at most, and received no reply. Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s last appeal to Joseph Stalin, of 30 September, likewise went unanswered. Despite the opposition of General “Monter”, who proposed asking the Polish command on the other side of the Vistula for help, the Commander of the Home Army decided on 28 September to open talks.

On 30 September the High Command’s delegates arrived at von dem Bach’s headquarters in Ożarów. A ceasefire was agreed for 1 and 2 October between 5 a.m. and 7 p.m. to allow the civilian population to leave the city. The negotiations proper were conducted on Bór-Komorowski’s behalf from 1 October by Colonel Iranek-Osmecki, the High Command’s chief of intelligence, assisted by Lieutenant Colonel Dobrowolski and Colonel Herman. Von dem Bach, who for two months had directed the suppression of the Uprising and was responsible for the units that murdered civilians, proved willing to make concessions in the talks. He wanted to end the fighting quickly, to recover forces needed at the front and to present the surrender as his own success; he also sought – as the literature later emphasised – to leave behind an image of himself as a “chivalrous” opponent.

The terms of the agreement

The agreement, whose text survives in its Polish version, recognised as “Home Army units” all Polish formations tactically subordinate to the Home Army commander since 1 August, and thus also the units of other organisations fighting under his orders. On laying down their arms, their soldiers were to enjoy the rights of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention of 27 July 1929; the same rights were granted to those captured during the fighting and – “without distinction of sex” – to persons accompanying the Home Army, including women couriers, nurses and staff personnel. The prisoners were not to be prosecuted for military or political activity during the Uprising or earlier, officers’ ranks conferred by the Home Army command were recognised, and identity cards bearing noms de guerre were sufficient proof of membership. The Germans undertook not to apply collective responsibility to the civilian population. The soldiers were to march out in formed units under their own officers, with their weapons but without ammunition, and lay them down at designated points; officers were allowed to keep their side arms.

Point 10 of the agreement stipulated that the evacuation of the civilian population demanded by the Germans would be carried out “in a manner sparing the population unnecessary suffering”, with the possibility of removing objects of artistic, cultural and religious value, and that the German command would “make every effort” to safeguard the public and private property remaining in the city. The details of the evacuation were to be set out in a separate agreement. The evacuation of the hospitals was entrusted to the Polish Red Cross; nearly 14,000 patients and hospital staff were taken out of Śródmieście. For a time three armed Home Army companies remained in the city to keep order and guard the warehouses, along with unarmed medical units.

Into captivity

The first units marched out of Warsaw on 4 October and the last on 5 October. The soldiers passed through the barricades on the western edge of Śródmieście, laid down their arms and headed for Ożarów, where they were assembled in the halls of the cable factory and then taken by rail to prisoner-of-war camps in the Reich. According to figures cited in the literature, some 15,000 soldiers went into captivity, among them about 900 officers and 2,000 women, as well as six generals. Bór-Komorowski went into captivity on 5 October; he was received at Ożarów by von dem Bach, and the general was then taken via Berlin to the Oflag at Langwasser near Nuremberg.

About 3,500 insurgents slipped into the crowds of civilians and avoided captivity. Among them were Brigadier General Leopold Okulicki (“Niedźwiadek”), whom Bór-Komorowski had named as his successor in the underground, the Government Delegate for Poland, Jan Stanisław Jankowski, and the chairman of the Council of National Unity, Kazimierz Pużak. The structures of the Polish Underground State survived the fall of the capital, although they lost their main base there.

Losses

Exact figures have never been established. Polish historians usually estimate the insurgents’ irrecoverable losses at between about 16,000 and 18,000 – including some 10,000 killed and several thousand missing who must be presumed dead – with about 20,000 wounded, roughly 5,000 of them seriously. Civilian losses are most often put at 150,000–200,000 killed; at least a third of them died from bombs and shells, and many thousands in mass executions, the largest of which was the Wola massacre. The Polish 1st Army lost nearly 5,500 killed and wounded in the fighting for Praga and in the attempts to cross the Vistula.

German losses are disputed. In a report to Heinrich Himmler of 5 October, von dem Bach gave 1,570 killed and 7,474 wounded for the period from 1 August to 5 October. In a statement made in a Polish prison in 1947 he spoke of 10,000 killed, 7,000 missing and 9,000 wounded; some historians accept these higher figures, others regard them as inflated.

The material destruction was enormous. During the fighting about 25 per cent of the buildings of left-bank Warsaw were reduced to rubble. After the surrender it was to be worse still.

The expulsion of the population and the razing of the city

Under the agreement the population was to leave the city, but in practice the evacuation took the form of an expulsion. In the first ten days of October most of the surviving inhabitants left Warsaw on foot, with whatever belongings they could carry, and ended up in the Dulag 121 transit camp at Pruszków, which von dem Bach had set up as early as 6 August in the halls of the railway workshops. Between 390,000 and 410,000 people passed through the camp in all. According to estimates accepted in the literature, between 500,000 and 550,000 Varsovians and about 100,000 inhabitants of the surrounding localities lost their homes as a result of the Uprising. Nearly 150,000 were deported to forced labour in the Reich or to concentration camps; those deemed unfit for work – the elderly, the sick, mothers with small children – were dispersed across the General Government, often in open coal wagons, and left without any means of subsistence. Polish staff helped some 30,000 people get out of the Pruszków camp.

The promise to spare property remained on paper. According to von dem Bach’s account, Adolf Hitler had given an oral order to raze Warsaw to the ground as early as the beginning of August. On 9 October, at a conference at his field headquarters in East Prussia, Himmler ordered the city’s total destruction once everything of value to the Reich had been removed from it; the governor of the Warsaw District, Ludwig Fischer, confirmed this in a note of 11 October. There began a systematic demolition and burning of Warsaw by special demolition squads, lasting more than three months and combined with looting on a massive scale. On 25 October the building of the Krasiński Entailment Library on Okólnik Street, with the largest collection of manuscripts in Poland, went up in flames. In this way more than 30 per cent of the buildings of the left-bank city were destroyed – more than in the fighting itself. The demolition was halted only by the Soviet offensive of January 1945.

The Soviet stance

Throughout the Uprising the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front stood a few kilometres from the centre of Warsaw, and from 14 September in Praga, on the other side of the Vistula. In August Stalin refused Allied aircraft permission to land at Soviet airfields, and in his correspondence with the Western leaders (22 August) he called the leaders of the Uprising a group of criminals who had launched the Warsaw “adventure” in order to seize power. In September his stance softened: on 10 September he agreed to Allied aircraft landing, from the night of 13–14 September Soviet aircraft dropped supplies, and the front command allowed the Polish 1st Army to make a landing across the Vistula. A large-scale assault on Warsaw, however, was never undertaken.

Historians explain this attitude in different ways. Some point to the Red Army’s real difficulties after the great summer offensive and to the strong German counter-attacks on the approaches to Warsaw in August; others – such as Władysław Pobóg-Malinowski – held that Stalin deliberately let the Germans destroy the forces loyal to the government in London, and that the limited operations in September were meant only to prolong the fighting. In the last days of the Uprising the Soviet side and its Polish allies did not change course. On 30 September, at a press conference in Moscow, the chairman of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), Edward Osóbka-Morawski, accused the Home Army command of avoiding contact with the Soviet troops and called Bór-Komorowski a “war criminal” whom the PKWN would put on trial. The front on the middle Vistula came to a halt for more than three months.

Place in the war

The surrender of Warsaw closed the most important act of Operation Tempest (Burza) – the attempt by Home Army units to liberate Polish cities before the Red Army arrived and to greet it as the rightful hosts. The Uprising, conceived as a demonstration of the independence of the Polish state, ended with the destruction of the capital and the loss of thousands of the underground’s best-trained soldiers and activists. At the same time the government in London lost its most important argument in its dispute with Stalin and the PKWN, and its standing with the Western Allies weakened. It was this situation that Prime Minister Mikołajczyk’s talks in Moscow in October addressed.

The assessment of the Uprising remains the subject of one of the longest-running debates in Polish historiography. Supporters of the decision to launch it point out that the alternative was passivity in the face of the advancing Red Army and that the Home Army’s soldiers were in any case pressing to fight; critics stress the lack of military preparation, the misreading of the political situation and the scale of civilian losses, which – they argue – could have been foreseen.

The ruins of Warsaw, which the Germans went on demolishing until January 1945, were taken by the Red Army and the Polish 1st Army on 17 January 1945. On 19 January General Okulicki disbanded the Home Army; a few months later, together with Jankowski, Pużak and other leaders of the Polish Underground State, he was treacherously arrested by the NKVD and sentenced in Moscow in the Trial of the Sixteen. Bór-Komorowski saw out the war in captivity, while von dem Bach never stood trial for the crimes committed in Warsaw. Rebuilding of the city began in 1945; the debate over whether the Uprising was necessary, and the memory of its victims, became a lasting part of Polish culture.