Between 5 and 12 August 1944, one of the most horrendous atrocities of World War 2 took place.
Three German battle groups had been assembled in the Warsaw suburb of Wola to assist in crushing the uprising. They consisted of regular Wehrmacht & SS police units as well as the ‘cut-throats, renegades, sadistic morons’ of the Russian/Ukrainian RONA brigade plus Oskar Dirlewanger’s SS penal brigade. Their overall commander, SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, had no qualms about inflicting bloody terror on the populace to facilitate a rapid surrender. So, when the battle groups were stopped in their tracks while trying to reach the liberated city centre, they turned their attention instead to raping, torturing & slaughtering Wola locals – predominantly women, children & the elderly.
By 5:30pm, 15,000 civilians had been murdered. Von dem Bach finally gave the order to cease executing women & children, but, writes historian Martin Gilbert, ‘the killing continued of all Polish men who were captured, without anyone bothering to find out whether they were insurgents or not. Nor did either the Cossacks or the criminals in the Kaminsky & Dirlewanger brigades pay any attention to the order: by rape, murder, torture & fire, they made their way through the suburbs of Wola & Ochota, killing in 3 days of slaughter a further 30,000 civilians… German units also burned down 2 local hospitals with some of the patients still inside. Hundreds of other patients & personnel were killed by indiscriminate gunfire & grenade attacks, or selected & led away for executions.’
As Timothy Snyder puts it, ‘the massacres in Wola had nothing in common with combat... the ratio of civilian to military dead was more than 1,000 to 1, even if military casualties on both sides are counted.’ There were so many corpses the Germans had to burn them in huge pyres on the street, stacking consecutive layers of bodies & wood on top of each other then setting them alight.
In an appalling postscript, none of the perpetrators were ever brought to justice. Indeed, the SS commander Heinz Reinefarth – who was directly involved in the killings – became a mayor & MP in West Germany before retiring with a general’s pension.
