The Germans began by liquidating resistance in the western suburbs of Wola and Ochota before concentrating on reducing the stronghold of the Old Town. It was here that some of the fiercest fighting took place, at very close quarters. After four weeks of dogged resistance, the command of the group defending the Old Town decided to evacuate. On the night of 1 September the remnants of this force, over 4,000 men, climbed down into the city sewers, carrying as many of their wounded as they could. The long trek waist-deep in filth was not made any easier by the Germans pouring poison gas down manholes, but eventually most of the men emerged in the city centre.
This continued to hold out, but towards the end of September the other pockets of resistance were reduced one by one. There seemed to be little point in prolonging the agony, and on 2 October General Bór-Komorowski signed the capitulation. Churchill and Roosevelt had stressed that the soldiers of the AK were regular Allied troops, and the Germans treated them accordingly. The civilian population, however, were herded into cattle trucks and sent to concentration camps or forced labour in Germany.
They left behind 250,000 dead, buried in the ruins. As soon as they had gone, Hitler’s personal instructions went into effect: squads of SS demolition experts, Vernichtungskommando, moved in and proceeded to dynamite every building left standing. By the time the Red Army entered Warsaw in January 1945, there was nobody and nothing to liberate, except for stray dogs and rats. A huge desert of rubble remained as a monument to the city which suffered more than any other in the whole war.
In the last hours before the capitulation tens of thousands of people had slipped out, making for the safety of the countryside. Among them were several thousand soldiers of the AK, its new commander, General Leopold Okulicki, and the entire Delegatura. The fall of Warsaw was not to be the end of the struggle for the AK, which still had units throughout the country. Yet its role was effectively at an end.
Five years of meticulous planning, ingenuity and heroism had yielded impressive results in the field of intelligence-gathering, and accounted for some 150,000 German military personnel. But neither the Tempest operations nor the Warsaw Uprising gave the organisation a chance to show its full potential. And they had proved politically disastrous as well. Far from strengthening Mikołajczyk’s bargaining position, the Warsaw Uprising had turned him into a supplicant.
During talks which took place in Moscow in October, Stalin demanded that Mikołajczyk accept his proposed frontier in the east, in return for which Poland would be compensated with former German territory up to the river Oder. He also wanted Mikołajczyk to dissolve the Polish government and come to Poland to head a provisional government made up of men from the Lublin committee. Pressed by Churchill and Roosevelt, the Polish Prime Minister felt obliged, against his better judgement, to demonstrate his goodwill by accepting this compromise. In January 1945 General Okulicki dissolved the AK and released its soldiers from their oath of loyalty to the London government.
Stalin had no intention of sticking to this compromise. Despite strong objections from Churchill and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in February and at Potsdam in July, he went on to appoint an interim government consisting of twenty-one ministers of whom sixteen were his men, with Edward Osóbka-Morawski as premier and Mikołajczyk as his deputy. The Allies formally recognised this and withdrew recognition from the Polish government, the majority of whose ministers had rejected the compromise agreed to by Mikołajczyk. They protested at the Allies’ high-handed behaviour and continued to function in London in defiance of these arrangements. The majority of its soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians who found themselves in the west remained loyal to the government and refused to return to Poland. The wisdom of their decision would soon become apparent.
Behind the Red Army came Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, and with it the new Polish security services, the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB). They were concerned primarily with rooting out of Polish society every element deemed unsympathetic to the Soviet Union, and in the first place that meant former members of the AK.
In March, sixteen men, including General Okulicki and all the members of the former Delegatura, were invited by Stalin’s plenipotentiary in Poland, the NKVD General Ivanov, for talks at Pruszków outside Warsaw. There they were seized and flown to Moscow where they were put on trial for collaborating with the Nazis, and given sentences of up to ten years. Tens of thousands of AK members, former officers, political workers and landowners were interrogated, tortured, and often murdered: as many as 16,000 people are thought to have died in this way.