Cracow under German Occupation, 1939-1945 (originally published in 2003)

In 1939, France and Britain were committed by treaty to come to the defense of Poland. Poles took it for granted that their allies would hit Hitler hard, and promptly. They expected a short war. Once Britain and France attacked in the West, Germany would have to withdraw from the East. Rather than staying in Warsaw to be captured, the Polish government, along with many soldiers and pilots, evacuated over the Carpathian mountains and made their way to France, ready to carry on the fight. Even with German troops marching through their streets, Poles thought of themselves as still part of the great anti-Hitler coalition that would soon sweep away the German dictator. The lightning German conquest could be seen as a tactical setback in a war that, by the logic of the times, the Allies should soon win.

In Poland, the only country whose armed forces fought the Nazis from the first to the last day of the war, people did not know that they had been thrust into a new phase of history where the occupation would be far worse than the war.
Nor could they surmise, in 1939, that Nazi occupation would blend almost seamlessly into Soviet "liberation" more than five nightmarish years later. In 1939, Poles still believed in treaty obligations, and could hardly have conceived of the fate to which their allies would abandon them when they divided Europe up at the Yalta Conference. So it was that, as Chwalba notes, the fall of Cracow and Warsaw came as less of a shock to Poles than the fall of Paris the following summer. 

The Germans began by acting the way occupying forces were supposed to. They met with Polish officials in Cracow to discuss the resumption of normal public life. Schools and the universities, they implied, could reopen. Yet when the Cracow university faculty convened in October 1939, thinking they would be discussing practicalities with the German supervisors, they instead found themselves being screamed at by a hysterical Nazi. Then they were dragged out to waiting army trucks and shipped off to a concentration camp in Germany, where many of them would die. That, rather than the swift September occupation, was the real beginning of a nightmare that would last for fifty years.

Capital of the Nazi German East

The first large city to be taken by an invading German army in the Second World War, Cracow made it to 1945 without suffering physical destruction by bombing, demolition, siege, or street fighting. The Germans regarded it as "ur-Deutsche" (primordially German) and made it the capital of the General Government, the quasi state they established for those eastern territories that they did not annex to the Reich proper. Hans Frank, long Hitler's lawyer, moved into Wawel castle as governor. Large numbers of German bureaucrats assigned to govern the East followed.

While the city's buildings came through unscathed, its large Jewish population, which accounted for over a third of the inhabitants and owned a predominant share of the real estate, met the tragic end as all European Jews. The Germans stole all their possessions, herded them into a ghetto, then shipped them off to slave labor or to the gas chambers. At every step of this monstrous process, the Germans treated the Jews with sneering contempt, beating, humiliating, or shooting any Jewish individual they chose, at any moment they chose, for any reason or for no reason at all, with no expectation of ever having to face even the slightest consequences for their actions. 

Everyone who has seen Schindler's List knows, however, that there were special circumstances even in the midst of the Shoah. 


Although the Germans built Auschwitz only fifty kilometers away, they sent the majority of Cracow's Jews not there, but to the ghastly Belzec death camp to the east. The thousands of local Jews who avoided the large transports there in 1942-1943 were, for the most part, imprisoned afterwards in the Plaszow camp, just down the road from the ghetto that the Germans had set up.

This was exceptional - a large Jewish population being held in a camp on the outskirts of the city where they had lived. They were exposed to the butchery of the handsome commandant, Amon Goeth, who struck even some of his fellow Nazis as repulsively bloodthirsty. Yet the fact that the Cracow Jews were incarcerated near their homes, property (some of which they managed to preserve from German confiscation), and associates, and to boot in a get-rich-quick, highly corrupt atmosphere, made miracles like Schindler's possible in a way that would have been unthinkable elsewhere. Schindler was an opportunist who used a con man's skills to do good while attempting to do well for himself. A member of the Nazi apparatus and an Abwehr informer, he saved over a thousand people from the Holocaust. (Other German businessmen whose names are not remembered, like Madritsch and Tisch, did a great deal of good without being quite so focused on personal gain, although they were all on the make.)

Perhaps equally remarkably, the Polish government-in-exile, operating out of distant London, used its agents, couriers, and its "underground state" to save 2,000 Jews in hiding in "Aryan" Cracow. The Polish resistance kept records including the real names of the concealed Jews to whom it paid monthly subsidies. All of the Poles engaged in this effort did so in full awareness that they could face summary execution or deportation to Auschwitz if detected.

At the same time, not only the Germans, but some Poles as well, were acquiring Jewish-owned property. At best, a Polish "new class" of wheeler-dealers and war profiteers enriched themselves by taking remorseless advantage of the tragic desperation of people on their way to extermination. At worst, some Poles sank to deceit, blackmail, and fraud in grabbing the victims' property. Sixty years later, the status of many formerly Jewish-owned buildings in Cracow is still up in the air amid continuing revelations that wartime deeds and titles were falsified. Fraudsters engaged in these swindles were, and still are, found in all denominational communities.

The lowest circle of infamy belongs to those who aided the German extermination campaign for monetary gain. The clandestine Polish press threatened "szmalcownicy" (blackmailers and extortionists) with death sentences passed by underground courts during the war, but in Cracow, as elsewhere, these admonitions did not suffice. Some Poles, and even a few Jews, collaborated in various ways with the Gestapo and the extermination apparatus.

The Germans did more than create the conditions that made this nightmare of money and blood possible. They wallowed in it. Chwalba (who has written interesting books on corruption and collaboration in the parts of Poland that were under Tsarist rule before the First World War) demonstrates at length that corruptibility was hardly an exception in the capital of the German East. "The Germans were all on the take," he writes. 

Four Wartime Cities

Andrzej Chwalba's book, unlike any of the previous volumes in this series (with the partial exception of the first volume, which opens with Jerzy Wyrozumski's  fascinatingly exhaustive ruminations on the origins and shape of Cracow at the dawn of its recorded history), affords the reader that particular pleasure of watching the professional historian unpack and put to use all the tools at his disposal.

In the first place, Chwalba takes a groundbreaking approach to Cracow's multicultural history by dividing the main part of his narrative into four sections titled "Krakau," "Krakiv," "Kroke", and "Krakow"--the German, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Polish names for Cracow.

The Germans had an interest in making their Eastern capital as grand a place as possible. After all, they planned first to get rid of the Jews, and then to get rid of the Poles, initially by concentrating them on the right bank of the Vistula once the Jews were gone from the ghetto the Germans had set up for them there. As every Polish schoolchild used to learn, the Germans appropriated as much of the Polish heritage as possible. The way they converted Copernicus into a German emblemizes this cultural cleansing. What they could not germanize, like the Mickiewicz monument on the Main Square or the Grunwald monument celebrating the Slavic triumph at Tannenberg, they destroyed.

Yet they also built roads, infrastructure, flood-control projects, and whole housing districts, including the solid looking apartment houses along what is now ulica Krolewska, which remain desirable residential property to this day. Chwalba shows, on the one hand, how the Germans continued or embarked upon projects drawn up before the war by Polish urban planners and, on the other hand, how much of postwar Cracow consists of what the Germans themselves either built or planned (with the exception, he notes, of Nowa Huta, which only the Soviets could have planned). He not only lists the various German organizations that operated in Cracow, but sketches their activities and even lists the buildings where they had their headquarters.

The Ukrainian chapter is relatively sketchy, but remains an eye-opener. The fact that the pre-war Polish government perversely allowed a "Ukrainian Institute" to function at the Cracow university while forbidding one in Lviv (Polish Lwow, with its large Ukrainian minority) meant that Cracow was already a Ukrainian intellectual and emigre political center. After the Germans and Soviets carved up Poland in 1939, Ukrainians gathered in Cracow with the hope that they would someday follow the Wehrmacht eastward and set up their own government in their own country. 


As a side effect, many Ukrainians became zealous supporters of the German push to strip Cracow of its Polish identity. Some local Ukrainian leaders nevertheless distinguished themselves by their humane attitudes. In the event, the Germans had no desire to see any kind of independent government established in the Ukraine. Many Ukrainians traveled east hopefully in 1941 but soon returned to Cracow embittered. Some joined auxiliary formations that, among other things, served as concentration camp guards and special police squads. Others lingered as ethnic activists in Cracow through the Nazi twilight. Much more of this tale remains to be told, but Chwalba's chapter is a long overdue starting point.

The story of how the Germans destroyed Cracow's great Jewish community has been recounted in detail since the end of the war, especially in memoirs by survivors. Chwalba uses a judicious selection of these sources, and draws on the often neglected accounts collected immediately after the end of the war by the Jewish Historical Commission in Cracow. He details the sickening progression of anti-Jewish restrictions that the Germans imposed, but the final chapter, played out in the death camps, lies outside the scope of his book on Cracow.

There is interesting material on the murky subject of the Judenrat and the Jewish social welfare agencies that operated officially in the ghetto while supporting certain resistance operations. If there could be any reservations about this part of the book, they would have to do with a lack of detail on the attack that Jewish partisans carried out against the Cyganeria cafe on ulica Szpitalna, frequented by German officers. There is an extensive and relatively balanced discussion of the complex relations, better and worse, between Jews and Catholic Poles during the war, but perhaps too little on the Plaszow camp; the author may have been unable to decide whether the camp was part of his subject or not.

Chwalba makes one often overlooked point that explains a great deal of what happened during the war and afterwards. Namely, the fact that the Germans placed their Jewish ghetto in a district that had been predominantly inhabited by non-Jewish Cracovians, and moved these non-Jewish residents into the poor Kazimierz quarter that many of the ghetto victims had been forced to vacate. Something similar happened with much of the formerly Jewish-owned real estate on the wealthier western side of town, which the Germans seized for themselves, and into which Poles often moved as soon as the Germans fled in 1945.

This not only mixed up the property relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Cracovians in a way that is still evident. It also, unintentionally, ensured that the bricks and mortar of the old Jewish quarter were not destroyed, but rather persisted in the material sense (inhabited by people who were, for the most part, too poor to alter the character of the district during the communist decades) to become the city's most vibrant neighborhood today, one where every stone is unmistakably Jewish and yet where few Jewish people, aside from tourists, can be found.

Everyday Occupation Life

The section on "Polish Cracow" during the war constitutes the greater part of the book, and it is here that Chwalba is at his best, giving us a nuts-and-bolts explanation of occupation life, and a great deal of little known history.

Chwalba covers the wide range of Polish organizations that remained active during the occupation. Aside from the secret military and quasi-military resistance organizations, these included the RGO, the Main Welfare Council (which distributed aid both overtly and covertly, including the aid to Jews mentioned earlier, while also cooperating with the Underground). Like the RGO, the Catholic Church had to steer a delicate course. It could not offend the Germans in a way that would provoke mass reprisals. At the same time, it had to speak out in the name of those who were suffering and avoid doing anything that could be construed as acknowledging the legitimacy of the occupation authorities.

Hans Frank was quoted as dreaming of ejecting the Archbishop-Prince, Cardinal Adam Sapieha, from the diocesan palace. Instead, Frank ended up biting his tongue as he listened to Sapieha's bitter admonitions, for the hierarch's authority made him, in effect, the head of the Church and the most respected figure in Poland during the war. Clerics noted that Pius XII's refusal to condemn Nazi atrocities against Polish Catholics reduced the reputation of the Vatican to the lowest point in a century, while Sapieha was laying up the moral capital that enabled the Church in Cracow to withstand both the Nazis and the communists who followed them.

Not only the Church, but Cracow as a whole learned lessons under the Nazis that would help in resisting communism for fifty years. This is where Chwalba's craftsmanship shines. He shows how people lived during the occupation in everyday terms--where their money came from and where they spent it, what they ate, what they wore, and how they diverted themselves--under conditions of extreme restriction.

At a certain point in 1943, the official food ration for Poles in Cracow dropped to 930 calories per day, less than the rations in the concentration camps, at least on paper. German employers were complaining that the Poles assigned to labor for them were too weak to work efficiently. Public health data showed that the population had, on average, been losing weight steadily since the beginning of the war. This seems to have been the very moment when civilians began to exhibit the genius for "scrounging" and "organizing"--for making do in spite of the regulations--that would see them through not only the rest of the occupation, but also the communist era. Within a year, the situation had reversed itself and the Poles in Cracow were eating better than the Germans running the city. The Nazi policy of separate shops for Poles and Germans backfired, for the Poles learned how to get around the official restrictions and sell things under the counter, in a way that the Germans never did.

This state of affairs benefited the new class of black market profiteers who made themselves obnoxious with their flashy cars, clothing, and jewels, and who frequented expensive restaurants that carried on long past the curfew as speakeasies or clandestine night clubs. People arriving in Cracow from other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe marveled at seeing well dressed people on the streets, with women in new hats instead of the ubiquitous wartime scarves.

Few women, of course, could afford new hats. Nor could any but a tiny percentage of Poles splash money around at exorbitantly priced speakeasies. However, the curfew meant that people took it for granted that, if they invited friends to drop in for the evening, the party would have to carry on until dawn. Behind the blackout curtains, bridge became a ruling passion of the middle classes. In the family circle, enforced togetherness in the evenings led to the rise of pursuits like reading aloud from books (we must remember that the Germans denied Polish children anything beyond an elementary education) or from the underground press.

The Germans seized the city's established theaters and turned them into shrines to "Ur-Deutsch" culture, but the Poles were allowed to organize their own "popular reviews." This was controversial: the Polish establishment called for a boycott of these "demoralizing spectacles," but the reviews achieved a certain artistic level and drew audiences of entertainment-starved young people and members of social strata who had not been regular theatergoers before the war. Thus the Cracow cabaret tradition was reinvigorated, and the foundation laid for another aspect of cultural life that would thrive under communism and ultimately help to undercut that later form of totalitarianism.

Chwalba describes the much noted phenomenon of theatrical performances in private apartments, adding surprising data on its scale. Some of these clandestine theatrical productions, he notes, involved audiences of over a hundred, including factory workers, and eyewitnesses recall that the applause and laughter could sometimes be heard at the far end of the street.

Then there is the story of the Philharmonic. Frank was a music lover and decided early on to form an orchestra of Polish musicians under German management and with a German conductor. The Governor General allowed Poles to attend the concerts. Perhaps he wrongly thought that listening to Beethoven would convince them of Nazi superiority; more probably, he wanted to ensure that his musicians could play to a full house. When the Germans fled in January 1945, the Polish orchestra personnel carried on, and so the Cracow Philharmonic continues to this day, with a heritage running directly back to the occupation.

Liberation

Chwalba's final chapter examines the liberation of Cracow by the Red Army. He scrutinizes the communist-era myths of General Koneev's miraculous "maneuver that rescued Cracow" (supposedly carried out for purely altruistic reasons by this hard-bitten Soviet general, who decided for some reason that Cracow's cultural substance should be saved even at the cost of his own men and of his campaign objectives), of the city's capture "without a shot being fired," and of how either the Soviets or the Polish resistance (take your pick) managed at the last moment to cut the master cable by means of which the Germans were about to set off massive demolition charges and blow Wawel, the Main Square, and everything else of any historical value in the city sky high.

Chwalba shows that there was no master demolition plan, only standard military precautions for blowing up bridges when retreating (and the Germans did manage to blow up the bridges over the Vistula, although not until the Soviets had already crossed  some of them). The Red Army spared the city any destructive artillery shelling, but there was no need for such measures with the Germans already in full flight. On the other hand, and this is something that communist historiography took great pains to conceal for five decades, the Soviet Air Force did bomb infrastructure targets, especially the train station, and, yes, there was "collateral damage."

The respected Cracow publisher Wydawnictwo Literackie has been engaged for decades in their multi-volume, large-format history of the city. It was fortunate that the volume covering the period between the First and Second World Wars came out after the end of the old system in 1989, since the hand of the communist censor lay heavily upon all material dealing with those years. This is all the more true of Andrzej Chwalba's volume on the Nazi occupation,  the time directly preceding the establishment of "People's Power."

It comes as something of a shock to realize, when glancing through Chwalba's bibliography, that there has been only one previous general book on the subject, Wronski's Chronicle of Occupied Cracow (in Polish), which contained a wealth of day-by-day information but steered clear of general historical assessments, treated the resistance movement in a highly selective way, and propounded the official "heroic" version of the war years while passing over all those intriguing rumors about the war that every visitor to Cracow begins hearing soon after first walking across the Main Square. Chwalba's book more than fills the gap.

Review of: Andrzej Chwalba. Krakow w latach 1939-1945 [Cracow, 1939-1945]. Dzieje Krakowa tom 5. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002. (In Polish.)

© Cracow Letters 2003