The final year of General “Grot” Rowecki’s life

General Stefan Rowecki (codename: “Grot”), the leader of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), was arrested in Warsaw on 30 June 1943. Rowecki was discovered by the Gestapo after being betrayed by three Poles who worked for the Home Army intelligence service. A key role was played by Eugeniusz Świerczewski, who knew Rowecki from the pre-war years. He recognised “Grot” in the street and informed the Germans. Other agents who spied on the general were Ludwik Kalkstein and his fiancée, Blanka Kaczorowska, of whom the historian Witold Pronobis wrote: “She played an important and particularly heinous role. Until the beginning of March 1944, she was a member of Section II (Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence) of the main command of the Home Army. She remained undetected as an agent and denounced more people – around 29 officers and soldiers in all.”[1]Świerczewski was the only one of the three to be arrested during the war, in June 1944. Following interrogation by counter-espionage officers from the Home Army, he was sentenced to death by the military court and hanged in the cellar of a building in Warsaw. His body was then hastily buried.

General Rowecki was immediately (after his arrest – translator’s note) taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Schuch Avenue (Aleja Szucha) in Warsaw. The unofficial interrogation there, which was initially conducted in order to confirm his identity, was led by the head of the Secret State Police, Ludwig Hahn, and attended by other officials. Jürgen Stroop, who was responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, later described General “Grot” when interviewed by Kazimierz Moczarski: “He was unusually serious and completely calm. I must admit that he made a deep impression on me. He wore civilian clothes, but you could tell at first glance that this was someone of the highest military rank.”[2]

Since the Germans feared that attempts would be made to free their prisoner, a special aeroplane was ordered from Berlin, which flew the general back to the German capital the very next day, on 1 July 1943. The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, then assumed personal responsibility for “Grot”. In the interrogations that followed, the option was of course considered of persuading “Grot” Rowecki to collaborate with the Nazis in order to weaken the Polish underground. However, in a note left by Heinrich Himmler after a meeting with Hitler, the Führer rejected the idea of involving the general “in the neutralisation of the Polish resistance movement”, since he regarded “the experiment” as being “too dangerous”.[3]

 

However, the Germans only really became convinced of the futility of the idea when the discussions with “Grot” failed to achieve the desired outcome. The general was questioned by Alfred Spilker, head of the special Gestapo division (Sonderkommando) for liquidating the resistance, and Harro Thomsen, the person responsible for Polish matters at the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). What did they talk about? It is said that Thomsen took precise minutes of the interrogations for the record, but these were burned along with other documents when the Berlin Gestapo headquarters were cleared on 22 April 1945.[4]

At some point between 16 and 20 July “Grot” was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, about 30km to the north of Berlin, where he was interned in the “Zellenbau” (“cell block”), also known as the “bunker”. This T-shaped building was separated from the rest of the camp and was under the direct control of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Of the original building, only the west wing remains, in which the special exhibition about the general is being shown by the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum (Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen), which is run by the Brandenburg Memorial Foundation (Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten). In effect, the “Zellenbau” was a special prison where political prisoners and officers from different countries were held, together with agents working for foreign intelligence services whose cover had been blown. The prisoners included the chairman of the Communist Party of Germany, Ernst Thälmann, the head of the “Confessing Church”, Pastor Martin Niemöller, Georg Elser, who conducted an assassination attempt on Hitler on 8 November 1939, the Ukrainian politician and partisan leader Stepan Bandera and a group of Ukrainian nationalists, Molotov’s nephew Vasily Kokorin, and Stalin’s son Jakov Dzhugashvili, who later took his own life here. Other Poles were also held there, although “Grot” was the best known among them.

The prisoners named on a commemorative plaque in the former “Zellenbau” are: generals “Grot” Rowecki and Bolesław Roja, the cleric Dr Juliusz Bursche, Bishop of the Evangelical Augsburg Church in Poland, the Bishop of Lublin, Władysław Góral, politicians and social activists such as Józef Grzecznarowski and Stanisław Kelles-Krauz, both members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) and the communists Aleksander Kokoszyn, later the commander of the Polish Internal Military Service (Wojskowa Służba Wewnętrzna, WSW), Józef Tkaczow, and Józef Mrozek, who after the war worked in the Ministry of Public Security in Poland. 

In the yard in the western section of the camp there are three poles to which the victims were so firmly bound with their arms twisted against their backs that after a considerable length of time, they broke out of their shoulder joints. 

 

It is not known in which of the 80 cells Stefan Rowecki was initially interned (it could have been cell no. 71), or why in January 1944 he was moved to cell no. 50 next to the SS office. What is certain is that the window of this cell did not look out onto the exercise yard, making contact with other prisoners considerably harder. It is thought[5] that he was moved there because of a planned escape, and/or in connection with a report by a Ukrainian prisoner who claimed that the Banderites (supporters of Stepan Bandera – translator’s note) were planning to murder the general and to make his death look like suicide.[6]

In Sachsenhausen, as in Berlin, General Rowecki was classified as an “honourable prisoner” (Ehrenhäftling). He was permitted to wear civilian clothing, was given special meals known as “troops’ food”, which were otherwise reserved for the SS guards, and was allowed to correspond with his family. The five letters in total which he wrote to his cousin Halina Królikowska, née Chrzanowska, are valuable historical documents, which were only able to be saved from the ravages of war thanks to the brave actions of his relatives. They are an important record of the general’s life in the camp, of his concern for his immediate family and, in veiled language, for the fate of the Home Army. With the approval of the Germans, “Grot” was able to receive packages containing food, clothing and medication.

For many years, he had suffered from a disease of the liver. In Sachsenhausen, his health deteriorated dramatically. In one of his letters, he asks for a delivery of fruit “and something made of vegetables (but without peas or cabbage), dried plums, jam, blueberries.”[7] In the “Note for the doctor in Warsaw” which he attaches to a letter written in February 1944, he complains that the examinations conducted in Berlin in December had no effect at all. The general was informed neither of the results, nor was he given a diagnosis. “Shortly afterwards, I was informed that nothing malign, nothing that indicated underlying disease, was found.”[8]

 

It is known that the general kept a personal notebook and diary, which have sadly been lost. The only records of his time in the camp are the letters to his family mentioned above, the reports written by Volodymyr Stakhiv, a member of the group of Bandera supporters, and the interrogations by senior Gestapo officials. In 1948, Harro Thomsen testified that he regularly visited the general in the “Zellenbau” every four to six weeks. In 1973, he withdrew this testimony, although according to Żenczykowski, he did so “in an unconvincing manner”.[9] In the summer of 1943, the general received a surprise visit from Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo (see above). Rowecki recounted this meeting to Stakhiv and admitted that the subject of this and other meetings was the current political situation, a possible relaxation in German-Polish relations, and the risk of Poland becoming “flooded with Bolshevists”.[10]

I don’t want to die in a foreign land.
I want a soldier’s grave with green sward and a field stone.

General Rowecki was murdered in Sachsenhausen, probably at some time during the morning of 2 August 1944. He was court-martialled and then shot. His body was incinerated in the camp crematorium.

The order to execute the general came directly from Reichsführer SS Himmler, probably after he was informed of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising.[11]

***

 

After having been betrayed to the Gestapo by Poles and murdered by the Germans, General “Grot” was “killed” a second time during the trial of his betrayers.

In the grounds for the judgement of 1953, in which Blanka Kaczorowska was sentenced to life imprisonment, the court in communist Poland stated that: “In the view of the Voivodeship court, the defendant is a victim of criminal activities by the leadership of the Home Army, which (...) collaborated with the Gestapo, acted in service to the Gestapo, and worked at its side against the majority of the population of the Polish nation in their fight led by the Polish Worker’s Party for national and societal liberation.”[12]

Kaczorowska and Kalkstein were subsequently released from prison prematurely: she after five-and-a-half years; he after less than twelve years.[12]

***

In the special exhibition General Stefan “Grot” Rowecki – “Special Prisoner” in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1943–1944, which was opened on 4 November 2014, the most important stages in the life of the head of the Home Army are presented, together with his military and political activities. Out of necessity, only fragments of his story can be told.

The expansion and consolidation of the Polish underground resistance, the constantly changing strategies it deployed in its fight against Soviet Russia and Germany in a “war on two fronts” – furthermore within the context of the rapidly developing events on the eastern front – are complex and sensitive issues. Certainly, the events of August 1944 and the years that followed surpassed even “Grot’s” wildest and darkest prophecies, particularly those associated with the manner in which the battle for liberation was conducted, including the national uprising in Poland towards the end of the war.

Dr Tomasz Szarota and Tadeusz Żenczykowski have written extensively on this subject.

 

Wojciech Drozdek, August 2020

 

Our thanks to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum for supporting this project and for their permission to publish the photographs. Our particular thanks to Dr Horst Seferens (press and public relations) for the additional information and for the opportunity to visit the “Zellenbau”, which was closed to the public during the pandemic.

For more information about the Sachsenhausen Museum and its different sections, including the “Zellenbau”, see: https://www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de/en/

 

Bibliography:

Stefan Rowecki (Grot): Wspomnienia i notatki. Czerwiec-wrzesień 1939, Czytelnik, Warsaw 1957.

Irena Rowecka-Mielczarska: Ojciec. Wspomnienia córki gen. Stefana Grota-Roweckiego, Czytelnik, Warsaw 1985.

Tomasz Szarota: Stefan Rowecki „Grot“, PWN, Warsaw 1983.

Tadeusz Żenczykowski: Generał Grot. U kresu walki, Polonia, London 1983.