Epilogue...
Let us now turn to the fate of a frequently mentioned protagonists of the Warsaw Uprising:
General Count Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski...
... went into German captivity on October 5, 1944 with the last AK fighters. From February to April 1945 Komorowski was a prisoner in Oflag IV-C Castle Colditz, where the German officers of high standing and important prisoners of war imprisoned. During his captivity, he was symbolically appointed Commander in Chief of the Polish Armed Forces.
He never saw his home again. After the war he went into exile in London. From 1947 to 1949 Komorowski was prime minister of the government in exile.
Bor-Komorowski died in London in 1966. In 1994 his ashes were transferred to Poland and buried in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.
Lieutenant Colonel Mieczysław Niedzielski...
... the last commandant in the Zoliborz district, who had to be forced to surrender, fell into German hands with two serious wounds.
He gave the false name of a common soldier and was first taken to the prisoner-of-war camp Sandbostel near Bremen. When he was recognized, the SS shipped him to the Neuengamme concentration camp as a Gestapo “special prisoner”.
After an intervention by the Swedish diplomat Count Folke-Bernadotte with SS chief Himmler, he was transferred to a “normal” prisoner-of-war camp, the Oflag XC officers' camp near Lübeck, where British troops liberated him in April 1945.
He, too, never saw his homeland again, stayed in exile, first in Great Britain, later in the USA and died in Chicago in 1980.
In 1992 his remains were transferred to Poland and buried there in the “Powązki Military Cemetery” as part of a special ceremony.
SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski
... received the Knight's Cross on September 30, 1944 for his "services" in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising.
He then continued to serve his "Führer" faithfully, setting up the XIV. SS Army Corps in the Baden-Baden area and later the X. SS Army Corps in Pomerania. He then commanded the Oder Corps of Army Group Vistula from February 17, 1945.
After the war von dem Bach was arrested by US troops and interned in the war crimes prison in Landsberg am Lech.
In the Nuremberg war crimes trials, he presented himself to the international military tribunal as the key witness for the prosecution - against the promise not to be extradited to the Soviet Union or Poland. In Nuremberg he incriminated all major war criminals without exception, but absolved himself of all guilt.
In March 1951, von dem Bach-Zelewski was classified as the main culprit in the context of denazification by the Munich main court and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp and confiscated property. In December 1951, an appeal chamber gave him credit for the five years he had spent in custody since 1954.
Afterwards he was only under house arrest, which he spent in his apartment in the Franconian town of Laffenau (now a district of Heideck). From 1954 he lived in Eckersmühlen near Roth and worked in Nuremberg as a night watchman for 400 marks a month, which was slightly above the average salary at the time.
In December 1958 he was arrested again and charged with the murder order against Anton von Hohberg and Buchwald, which he had issued in 1934. In the trial that began in January 1961 before the Nuremberg-Fürth Regional Court, he was sentenced in February 1961 to four years and six months in prison for manslaughter. In November 1961 he received a six-month prison sentence for negligent perjury in the proceedings against the former SS-Obergruppenführer and police general Udo von Woyrsch and was therefore sentenced by the Nuremberg-Fürth regional court to a total of four years and ten months.
On August 3, 1962, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in another trial for the murders of five communists and the attempted murder in another case in the spring and summer of 1933. He was never held accountable for his involvement in the Holocaust and for the murderous “SS-Einsatzgruppen” in the Soviet Union.
Neither for his “merits” in Warsaw in 1944!
At the beginning of March 1972 he was given exemption from prison, seriously ill; on March 8, 1972 - shortly after his 73rd birthday - he died in the Munich-Harlaching prison hospital.
SS-Obergruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth...
... spent three years in American captivity until 1948. He had been transferred to Nuremberg several times to testify before the International Military Tribunal. His testimony did not take place.
Several extradition requests by the state of Poland were not granted. In 1948 Reinefarth was transferred to Hamburg, the British zone. The British also refused Reinefarth's extradition to Poland in 1950.
It later emerged that this conspicuous exemption was due to the fact that Reinefarth had quickly changed sides after the war with the US military intelligence service CIC.
It can also be traced back to discreet US interventions that he was never charged for his acts during the Warsaw Uprising and that he was acquitted of all guilt in the denazification proceedings by the Hamburg-Bergedorf court in 1949.
The agile Reinefarth made it up to the mayor of the city of Westerland / Sylt in 1951, an office to which he was re-elected several times and which he held until 1964.
He died in 1979 in Westerland.
„Ataman“ Timofej Domanow...
... made his way with his rickety Cossack corps shortly before the end of the war to Friuli in northern Italy, where the Cossack mercenaries wanted to found a state called "Kosakia" under the protection of the SS.
After the surrender he went into British captivity - but the British handed him and all the Cossacks in their hands - as agreed with Stalin in Yalta - over to the Soviet Union.
Domanov was tried with other former Cossack leaders on German pay in Moscow in 1946, sentenced to death in a fast-track trial and ended up on the gallows a little later in Lefortovo prison in Moscow.
His body was cremated and the ashes scattered.
SS-Brigadeführer Oskar Paul Dirlewanger,...
... Head of the "SS Special Brigade Dirlewanger" which he led, originally formed from convicted poachers and which was directly subordinate to Heinrich Himmler and which raged in Warsaw with devilish brutality even by SS standards, tried to go into hiding on April 22, 1945 , but fell into French captivity. He came - initially unrecognized - in a prisoner-of-war camp in Altshausen in Upper Swabia, then in the Saulgau district in Württemberg.
It was unfortunate that the French employed armed former Polish forced laborers as security guards. Dirlewanger was recognized by German inmates and betrayed to the Poles, who of course knew about his role in Warsaw.
The Polish guards then repeatedly mistreated him so severely that he died from it - probably on June 19, 1945.
Generalleutnant Hans Källner...
Commanding general of the 19th Panzer Division, which played a key role in the bloody suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, was commissioned to lead the XXIV Panzer Corps shortly before the end of the war. In this position he fell on April 18, 1945 near Brünn (today: Brno, Checia).
General Zygmunt Berling...
... The commander of the Polish People's Army, who fought in the Red Army, was relieved of his command after the Warsaw Uprising on Stalin's orders - allegedly because, without the permission of the High Command, he used parts of his troops to help the hard-pressed Warsaw rebels across the Vistula had sent the fight.
Berling turned down the - face-saving - function offered to him as head of the Polish military mission in Moscow and was then forcibly sent to the Moscow Military Academy.
In 1947 he returned to Poland and a year later was appointed commander of the new General Staff Academy in Warsaw until he resigned from military service in 1953. Between 1953 and 1970 he held senior positions in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Only in 1963 did he join the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR).
He died in Warsaw in 1980.
Marshal Konstantin Konstantinowitsch Rokossowski,
... The Marshal, who was actually born under the name Konstanty Rokossowski in Russian Poland, was - much to his annoyance - not allowed to take part in the final battles for Berlin with his army group. Stalin assigned him the task of pushing past Berlin to the north and forcing the Elbe.
There, on the so-called "Elbe Day", the vanguard of his army group met units of the American allies for the first time near Torgau. On the Baltic coast, Rügen was conquered and shock troops came as far as Wismar, which had already been taken by the British. A few hours after the (1st) signing of the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, he met the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery there on May 7, 1945.
After the end of the war, Rokossovsky commanded the Victory Parade in Moscow on June 24, 1945. Until 1949 he was Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Group of the Soviet Army.
Stalin, who wanted a more energetic sovietization of the Polish People's Army, had Rokossowski appointed to Poland that year by the President Bolesław Bierut appointed by the Soviet Union and appointed Marshal of Poland and Minister of Defense.
The small photo above shows Rokossowski in this ministerial office - he is wearing a Polish uniform!
In October 1961, the Polish party leader Władysław Gomułka got Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev through that Rokossowski and his staff were ordered back to Moscow.
Rokossowski was appointed Inspector General of the Armed Forces and Deputy Minister of Defense in 1957. His last honorary position was that of member of the group of inspectors general of the Soviet Army.
He died in Moscow in 1968 and - like Stalin and his rival Marshal Zhukov - is buried on the Kremlin wall.
Dear Planeteers!
Blood and death every day for more than two months! Besides the research, the many translations and the duration, my series on the Warsaw Uprising was also pretty difficult to digest in terms of subject matter!
More than nine months of research went into the collection of the almost innumerable details.
Thank you for reading!
Martin
