Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw by Norman Davies Read Free Book Online

All these men had once seen Austrian service and in 1919–20 had fought in the Polish–Soviet War. For them, to enter the wartime Resistance was simply to follow their patriotic duty and to continue their career. 14
    Western Europeans remember the winter of 1939–40 as ‘the Phoney War’. But there was nothing phoney about the war in the East, where Hitler and Stalin were both actively pursuing their conquests. The Finno-Soviet Campaign, for example, began soon after the September Campaign finished, and continued until the eve of Hitler’s next major venture. As usual, the Western perspective is rather partial and misleading.
    The consequences for the First Ally were unspeakable. Its territory was devoured, its population enslaved, its Government separated from its people. The Nazi zone of occupation was divided into two parts. The western section was directly incorporated into the Reich, from which all ‘racial undesirables’, mainly Slavs and Jews, were expelled. The eastern section was set up as a separate, lawless General Government, variously dubbed ‘Gestapoland’ or the ‘Gangster Gau’. The Soviet zone of occupation was formally annexed to the USSR, but was cordoned off and administered as a separate region. The northern section, renamed Western Byelorussia, was attached to the existing Byelorussian SSR, and the southern section, renamed Western Ukraine, was attached to the Ukrainian SSR. The Wehrmacht protected its officer prisoners from the SS, and sent them off to regular POW camps in Germany. Many common soldiers were released. The Red Army too sorted officers from other ranks. Both sides filtered the entire population through police measures, which classified different groups according to ideological principles. The Nazis used a pseudo-racial system, which hived off German ‘Aryans’ from Slav and Jewish ‘subhumans’ and introduced numerous subdivisions, which put Reichsdeutsch at the top of the heap and people of supposedly unmixed Jewish descent at the bottom. The Soviets introduced a pseudo-social system, where political and ethnic discrimination overruled all attempts atgenuine class analysis and where Communist party membership opened the gates to the only master class. Everyone was declared a Soviet citizen. Russians and other East Slavs enjoyed preferential treatment, as did so-called ‘workers and peasants’. Twenty-one categories of ‘enemies of the people’, varying from gamekeepers to philatelists and including all ‘bourgeois’ politicians, all state employees, all private employers, and all religious leaders, were targeted for elimination. In those early months, the Nazis shot 50,000 civilians in so-called reprisals, 15,000 political and religious leaders, and 2,000 Jews. They also created ghettos for Jewish settlement in each of the main cities. They founded several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, for local political suspects, removing tens of thousands of innocent people, including priests, from circulation. The Soviets were better prepared. The NKVD arrived with huge lists of names and addresses for immediate arrest. Their state concentration camp system, or Gulag, had been operating for twenty years. In that first winter, they started the vast operation of deporting 1.8 million either to the Arctic camps or to forced exile in Central Asia. Within a year, many of the deportees were dead. In line with usual Soviet practices, the entire families of persons sentenced to the Gulag were deported to distant exile from which many would never return. About 25,000 captured army and police officers, mainly reservists, were interned by the NKVD, and, after several months’ investigation, shot in cold blood.
    For obvious reasons, the First Ally watched events in Finland with the keenest interest. Admiration for the Finns, whose tiny army outclassed the largest military force in the world, was mixed with growing excitement at the prospect that the Western powers would