Free Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw by Norman Davies Page B

provinces continued to be recognized by the Western powers as Polish citizens. And lastly, if Soviet practice were to run to form, all persons handed over to the NKVD for repatriation could be given a very short expectation of life.
    The British Cabinet discussed the matter briefly on 17 July 1944, and one of the Cabinet ministers, Lord Selborne, passed his reflections to the Foreign Secretary. He talked with some distaste about ‘the prospect of sending many thousands of men to die either by execution or in Siberia . . .’; and ‘in the interests of humanity’ he raised the possibility of ‘absorbing them in some of the less populated countries of the world’. Eden gave the idea short shrift. ‘If the men don’t go to Russia’, he minuted, ‘where do they go? We don’t want them here.’ He then realized that numbers of British prisoners were in Soviet care, and his stance hardened:
To refuse the Soviet Government’s request for the return of their own men would lead to serious trouble with them. We have no right whatsoever to do this, and they would not understand our humanitarian motives . . . [it] would arouse their gravest suspicions. 31
    The repatriation affair had numerous repercussions. One of them was to make forceful intervention on the First Ally’s behalf so much more delicate.
    In early July 1944, the Soviets unleashed a ferocious offensive in the central sector of the Eastern Front. It was designed by agreement to coincide with the expected Allied breakout from Normandy and hence to prevent theGermans from boosting their defences in France. Gen. Rokossovsky’s First Byelorussian Front surged through the German front line in a hailstorm of men and machines. It rapidly reached the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, where the German–Soviet War had begun three years earlier, and surged across the River Bug. Beyond the Bug, the Vistula waited. The Red Army had reached a new territorial sphere which even Stalin did not claim as part of the Soviet Union – so it changed its name to the Soviet Army. At Lublin, they were only 650km (405 miles) from Berlin.
    The military situation was very fluid. The Germans were pulling back. But they were quite capable of mounting counterattacks, as indeed they did. Observers on the spot could hardly gauge what was happening. Column after column of weary but disciplined German soldiers trudged towards safety on the far side of the Vistula. The frontline echelons of Soviet troops pressed hard on their heels.
    The political situation was particularly bewildering. The Soviets were not behaving as they had done five years before. In 1939, their main message had been ‘Your country is finished.’ Now, they were going out of their way to proclaim ‘Your country will rise again.’ Moreover, they had brought a separate army with them made up of local lads. It had been recruited from former refugees and deportees, whom no one had expected to see again; and it was commanded by a pre-war officer. The National Liberation Committee, which they also installed, did not look like the usual Communist-type organization. It was not headed by a Russian or by a known Communist, but by an unknown little man, who was presenting himself both as a local and as a non-party figure. His colleagues seemed to include a peasant, a priest, a prince, and another pre-war officer. It was all strangely moderate. Like the British Labour Party at the time, the Committee advocated the nationalization of industry and promised agrarian reform. But it did not talk of ‘Five-Year Plans’ or the collectivization of agriculture. Above all, it did not claim to be a Provisional Government. So the inevitable suspicions were accompanied by gaping mouths. At all their political meetings, the Committee’s representatives were careful to hang the First Ally’s national flag alongside the Hammer and Sickle, the Stars and Stripes, and the Union Jack.
    Shortly after entering Lublin, the Soviet authorities took the frontline