Germans occupy Warsaw

In the early morning of 5 August 1915 the retreating Russians blew up the bridges over the Vistula, and a few hours later the first units of the German Ninth Army of Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria entered Warsaw from the west. The city was taken without a fight. The German war communiqué of that day reported that Prince Leopold’s army had broken through, in the course of a day and a night, the outer and inner lines of forts, in which Russian rearguards were still putting up a stubborn defence, and that “the city was occupied by our troops this morning”. For Warsaw this ended the Russian rule which, since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, had lasted exactly a hundred years. A German occupation lasting more than three years began.

The decision to retreat

The Germans had already stood before Warsaw in the autumn of 1914, during the Battle of Warsaw and Dęblin, and then for more than half a year the front came to a halt on the Bzura and the Rawka, a few dozen kilometres west of the city. Its fate was decided only by the great summer offensive of the Central Powers, which began on 13 July. From the north the armies of General Max von Gallwitz forced the Narew; from the south the troops of Field Marshal August von Mackensen took Lublin on 30 July and Chełm on 1 August. During the night of 28–29 July the Silesian Landwehr of General Remus von Woyrsch crossed the Vistula at Ryczywół, between Warsaw and Ivangorod. The Russian armies in central Poland found themselves in a deep pocket, threatened from three sides.

The Commander-in-Chief of the North-Western Front, General Mikhail Alekseyev, had long been preparing to abandon the left bank of the Vistula. On 24 July he issued a preliminary directive for a general retreat, and on 3 August, according to the Austrian official history, he decided to withdraw the Second and Fourth Armies behind the Vistula. The Second Army of General Vladimir Smirnov was to give up Warsaw during the night of 4–5 August. For several days its corps crossed to the other bank one after another, leaving only a screen in front of the city. On 4 August a German communiqué announced that the Russians had been driven from their positions near Błonie back to the outer line of forts, and that Prince Leopold’s army was attacking the fortress.

Evacuation

The city had been preparing for the Russians’ departure for several weeks. Offices, archives and state institutions were taken away. The Imperial University of Warsaw was moved to Rostov-on-Don. Machinery was dismantled in factories and sent into the interior of Russia together with raw materials and some of the workers. The American correspondent Stanley Washburn, who accompanied the Russian army, saw copper being carted across the Vistula bridges for days on end: bells, machines and tools. Through the streets the carts of peasants from around Błonie and the Bzura, evicted or fleeing from the front, moved eastwards. This was part of the great wave of refugees known as bezhenstvo. Before leaving, the Russians set fire to the Petersburg and Terespol (PL) stations in Praga and destroyed many objects of military importance.

As the Russian authorities left, Poles took over the running of the city. Since August 1914 a Citizens’ Committee, later the Central Citizens’ Committee, had operated in Warsaw; it dealt with supplies and care for the population and took over more and more of the tasks of the municipal council. Order was kept by the volunteer Citizens’ Guard. According to accounts from those days, on the evening of 4 August the Russian police disappeared from the streets, and during the night its chief handed the city over to the commander of the Guard. The last Russian president of Warsaw, Aleksander Miller, handed over the town hall to the chairman of the Committee, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski. Sources differ as to whether this happened on 4 or already on 5 August. Miller left the city money for only the next two months.

The bridges

On the evening of 4 August the last Russian columns passed through the city. According to Washburn they marched calmly, without panic, and after midnight there were almost no Russian units left in Warsaw. In the early morning the sappers blew up the bridges. Washburn writes of three in the morning, Polish accounts of six. The first to be blown up was the Poniatowski Bridge, opened to traffic only a year and a half earlier. Then the Russians destroyed the two central spans of the Kierbedź Bridge and the railway bridge by the Citadel. One witness recalled that the blast knocked out all the window panes in his flat.

The Germans enter

For a few hours Warsaw was left without any authority except the Polish Citizens’ Guard. In the morning the first German patrols entered the city from the direction of Wola and Mokotów, or according to other accounts along Jerusalem Avenue, followed by infantry and cavalry units. Accounts differ as to the hour, but the German communiqué confirms that the city was taken before noon. Soon the Germans occupied the town hall. Many Varsovians saw Prussian Pickelhauben for the first time, and in the shops marks and pfennigs appeared instead of roubles and kopecks. Polish accounts describe the reception of the victors as cool: the trams ran at the usual time, and a silent crowd stood in the streets.

Prince Leopold reported the capture of Warsaw by telegraph to his elder brother, King Ludwig III of Bavaria, who awarded him the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Max Joseph for it. The fighting for the city, however, was not over. The Russians dug in at Praga, on the right bank of the Vistula, and from the morning of 5 August shelled the city centre with artillery and rifle fire. The German communiqué accused them of deliberately shelling the Royal Castle. On 6 August a bomb dropped from a Russian aircraft fell on the Old Town, killing one person. Only after two days did the Germans cross the Vistula near the city, and on 8 August they took Praga. According to the German communiqué they took several thousand prisoners in Warsaw.

The Poles and the occupation

On 6 August the Citizens’ Committee set up a City Administration, and the Citizens’ Guard continued to keep order. At first the Germans tolerated Polish institutions, but they quickly showed who was in charge. On 24 August they created the Government General of Warsaw, covering the part of the Kingdom of Poland they had occupied, and its head became General Hans Hartwig von Beseler, the conqueror of Antwerp. In September he dissolved the Central Citizens’ Committee. At the same time the Germans, wishing to win over the Poles, agreed to what the tsarist authorities had refused for decades. On 15 November 1915 the Polish-language University of Warsaw and the Warsaw Polytechnic were opened. The occupation also brought requisitions, the removal of machinery to Germany, and hunger. German soldiers left Warsaw only in November 1918.

Significance

The capture of Warsaw, the third-largest city of the Russian Empire, was the greatest propaganda success of the Central Powers in the east. The Austrian official history stresses that together with the fortress of Ivangorod, taken by the Austro-Hungarians a day earlier, the Russians lost both “sally ports” from which their “steamroller” had set out westwards in the autumn of 1914. The Germans, however, did not achieve their strategic aim. The Russian armies got out of the pocket before the troops advancing from the Narew and from Lublin could close it. The retreat continued, and in the following weeks further fortresses fell on the line of the Niemen, the Narew and the Bug.