The Warsaw Uprising

On August 1, 1944 the Polish resistance, led by the Armia Krajowa (AK, or Home Army) launched an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw. What followed was 63 days of urban warfare characterized by an intensity, according to eyewitnesses, similar to that of Stalingrad about two years before. The powstanie warszawskie led to the deaths of 150,000-200,000 civilians and tens of thousand of combatants. The Germans rampaged in a berserk frenzy while the Soviets dithered on the other side of the Vistula River. The uprising concluded in a Polish defeat. While a point of great national pride, it remains a topic of fierce debate in Poland to this very day.

To mark the 60^th anniversary of the uprising, Poland announced the opening of the Warsaw Uprising Museum on July 31, 2004. The museum is both supremely moving and super-modern, including a short 3-D film called Miasto Ruin (“City of Ruins”) that shows a digital reconstruction of the devastation the city experienced during the Second World War. The museum is located, fittingly enough, in the Wola neighborhood, where the Nazis committed the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of people in a matter of days (to be discussed in more detail below). When I was taking a walking tour of Warsaw, my guide recommended the museum to my fellow tourists and me, although she added a caveat that the museum was, in her opinion, too triumphal about the uprising. In her mind, she explained carefully, the rising should not have occurred at all.

This jived uncomfortably with posters and signs everywhere dedicated to, when I was visiting, the 70^th anniversary of this iconic event. Graffiti of the logo of the AK – an anchor (in Polish, Kotwica) formed out of the letters “P” and “W”, which stand for Polska Walcząca (“Fighting Poland”)– was to be found throughout the city, including on the walls of alleys and under street bridges. A huge commemorative barricade sat on Nowy Świat (or perhaps the street was at that point Krakowskie Przedmieście, which Nowy Świat becomes as one walks north up the Royal Route), as a reminder of the sacrifices made not only by members of the AK, but by civilians, who overturned tram cars and used everything they could get their hands on to serve as barricades against the Germans. This would not have sit well with my interlocutor on the tour. A young woman, likely in her late 20s, she expressed her unease at the triumphalism with which the uprising is remembered. This is understandable: is the death of up to 200,000 civilians and the near-total destruction of a major city ever justifiable, even upon the altar of national dignity? To which a graffiti artist of the Kotwica might retort: “Our honor as Poles depended upon rising up against the Germans to show that we were a people willing to give our all for our capital city. We needed to show the world that we had fought and died for our country so that it could remain ours.” This, crudely, sums up the debate over the powstanie.

The Red Army captured several Polish cities in quick succession in the summer of 1944: Wilno on July 13, Lublin on July 23, Brześć on July 26, and Lwów on July 27. When arriving in Lublin, the Soviets set up the Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (PKWN, or Polish Committee of National Liberation – known informally to history as the Lublin Committee) – a puppet regime of non-representative Polish Communists, the majority of whom had spent the war not in Poland under the Nazi jackboot, but in Moscow in service of the Soviet regime. The Soviets intended the PKWN to govern Poland rather than the Polish government-in-exile, which operated from London. Stalin and the Soviet government considered the government-in-exile, as they viewed all Poles, as bourgeois, if not outright fascist, agents in thrall to capitalist influence.

For a brief historical recap: in August 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow and signed a nonaggression treaty. According to its terms, the countries would not interfere with each other’s conquests. In a secret annex, it was agreed that they would split the territories in between them (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine) into respective spheres of influence. Poland as far east as the Bug River would be German; east of that territory would be Soviet. The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and the Soviets followed on September 17. The Soviets, viewing the Poles and especially their officers as a reactionary body, sought to decapitate this class. In April and May 1940, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, shot some 22,000 Polish officers, including at Katyń. In June 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, putting an end to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviets and the Poles began a queasy alliance of sorts, but when the Poles would inquire as to the fate of these officers, Stalin would put them off with excuses. In April 1943, the Germans discovered a mass grave at Katyń outside of Smolensk in the Soviet Union. While the Soviets insisted that it was in fact a German atrocity (certainly not hard to believe given German murderousness), the Poles suspected otherwise; in this tense time, the Soviets abruptly cut off their diplomatic relations with Poland. The Western Allies, shamefully, demanded that the Poles swallow their pride and accept the Soviet explanation. 

This episode sets the stage for the Warsaw Uprising. Before June 1944, when the Soviets were approaching Polish territory, Polish politicians and military officers debated the best course of action upon a German retreat. The consensus was that, should diplomatic relations be restored, the AK soldiers would reveal themselves to the Red Army; otherwise, they would remain hidden and await further notice. The commander-in-chief of the AK, Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was opposed to an uprising unless if the following held: the Allies had expressed their support for the Polish position regarding Poland’s eastern frontier; the Western Allies were on the German doorstep; and the Nazi government was on the verge of collapse. None of these was remotely the case as the Soviets approached Polish soil – the Western Allies had not even landed on the Normandy beaches. Sosnkowski’s deputy, Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, was strongly in favor of an uprising. His plan, Operation Tempest (Akcja Burza), called for rolling uprisings that would occur as the Germans were retreating and as the Soviets were approaching. The AK would fight the Germans as they fled westward and join up with the Soviets, having the knowledge and dignity of having liberated their cities themselves.

The first operation of Burza was near Kowel (now in western Ukraine) – the AK fought the Wehrmacht and then linked up with the Soviets. While the Poles did not know it, the Kremlin had passed down an order in November 1943 that, when the Red Army encountered the AK, it was to disarm AK fighters and execute anyone who refused to give up his weapons. This happened to the Polish fighters of the AK in Kowel and Lwów – they fought the Nazis only to be humiliatingly disarmed, or murdered, by the Soviets.

The Soviets advanced toward the Vistula and there were rumors that they were close to entering Warsaw. On July 27, the German governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, ordered 100,000 Polish men and women to report for duty to begin constructing defensive fortifications. Much to their credit, few Poles showed up. In the face of the Soviet onslaught, the Germans didn’t bother to enforce their order and Fischer fled westward (he was later hanged for war crimes at Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison). Soviet tanks were spotted east of Praga, Warsaw’s easternmost district. This convinced the head of the AK in Warsaw, Antoni Chruściel, that an uprising was necessary (he had previously been against the idea). The main purpose was to have shown that they had fought the Germans, liberated their capital city themselves, and were therefore able to rule themselves in a postwar world.

And so the uprising began on August 1, 1944. The Germans responded with utter ferocity. Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler passed down orders that “Warsaw was to be wiped from the face of the earth, all of the inhabitants were to be killed, there were to be no prisoners.” Himmler appointed one of his most trusted men, SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, as head of the German troops in Warsaw. Bach-Zelewski's expertise lay in the wholesale slaughter of men,  women, and children, mostly Jews, in "anti-partisan" actions in Belarus. Under his command served Bronislaw Kaminski, a Russian turncoat, and Oskar Dirlewanger, a child molester and necrophiliac who led a motley crew of criminals known as the Dirlewanger Brigade. This unit committed atrocities of the utmost savagery in Warsaw. 

The initial objective of the Polish resistance (led by the AK and including fighters ranging from Communists, who were few, to the nationalist right, who were many, and everything in between, including Jews of all ideological stripes who had survived the Ghetto) was to secure main east-west roads in the city and bridges over the Vistula, as well as to capture the major districts of the city, including the Old Town, the city center, and other areas. The Poles faced an onslaught of Germans who fought without mercy.

Between August 5-12, the Germans entered the Wola neighborhood as they pushed west to east toward Warsaw’s city center. There, they interpreted Hitler and Himmler’s orders quite literally. They went house to house and murdered everyone they found, regardless of age or sex. Heinz Reinefarth, a German commander in Wola, later estimated that 10,000 civilians were murdered on August 5 alone. The Germans used human shields as they advanced, making Polish civilians walk in front of them and having Polish women sit atop their tanks. During this German rampage in Wola, some 40,000-50,000 civilians were killed. Later, the Germans impressed Polish civilians in the so-called Verbrennungskommando Warschau, where they were forced to recover the victims’ bodies and burn them.

The Polish resistance fought bravely, but were cut off from food and supplies of weapons and ammunition, and had to rely upon the Allies for assistance. The AK only counted on the uprising lasting for a few days and did not have the supplies necessary for such a long battle. The inter-Allied politics of the moment ultimately greased the way for the elimination of the Warsaw Uprising. The Soviets were the obvious Allied power in the territory proximate to Warsaw. However, they were only able to capture Praga from the Germans on September 11, about 40 days after the uprising began. While it is undeniable that the Red Army was exhausted and a rest at the Vistula was necessary, what is also undeniable is that the Soviets were not too sad about seeing the destruction of the AK. The Nazis were, in many ways, doing the dirty work for them. The AK and other resistance groups would certainly have become the seed of any future anti-Communist resistance in Poland.

Churchill was adamant about supporting the Polish fighters in Warsaw. The British, South Africans, and Poles based in Italy flew air sorties and dropped food, ammunition, and weapons. The Soviets, however, would not allow the planes to refuel at their air bases, meaning that the pilots had to make a perilous journey from Bari and Brindisi, Italy to Warsaw and then back without stopping. Many of them were shot down by the Germans on their way to or from Warsaw. When Churchill pressed Roosevelt to help him in trying to convince Stalin to allow them the use of Soviet airbases, Roosevelt responded, “I do not consider it advantageous to the long range general war prospect for me to join with you in the proposed message.” The Soviets had spilled the most blood in defeating the Nazi enemy, fighting tenaciously in the streets of Stalingrad and the fields of Kursk, and it would not do to ruffle their feathers. In essence, Poland, for whom the Allies had gone to war in 1939 (and whose men had fought beside the Western Allies in the skies above Britain, at Monte Cassino, and on the beaches of Normandy, among other places), was sacrificed to placate Stalin (and, to be fair, in recognition of the geopolitical situation). While the Soviets had excuses before they reached the east bank of the Vistula in mid-September, these wore thin and they agreed to make airdrops to the Polish fighters beginning on September 13. Their fighters had to fly low so as to be accurate in dropping supplies to the increasingly small areas that the Poles controlled in Warsaw; unfortunately, this being the case (plus a lack of parachutes), many of the supplies that were dropped were destroyed upon landing. When the Soviets finally allowed the U.S. to use its air base in Poltava, U.S. pilots proceeded to carry out airdrops over Warsaw, only to accidentally drop the vast majority of the supplies in German hands.

The combination of overpowering German firepower and the lack of food and supplies thinned the areas under Polish control. In mid-September, after the beginning of Soviet airdrops, the 1^st Polish Army under Zygmunt Berling, fighting under Soviet command, attempted to cross westward over the Vistula to link up with the AK. In the face of heavy German fire, only a few made it to the west bank, and these had to retreat back eastward after a short while. The Poles were squeezed in the areas of the Old City and Mokotów. Reading the writing on the wall, the Poles of the Old City escaped the Germans through the sewer system (indeed, the image of Polish fighters emerging from manholes became an icon of the uprising – one of the sculptures at the Warsaw Uprising memorial depicts such a scene).

Bór-Komorowski was eventually forced to surrender to Bach-Zelewski on October 2. The Polish general demanded that the AK be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention – that is, to be treated properly as prisoners of war, something that could not be taken for granted when it came to the Nazis. The Germans agreed, and they also allowed the civilian population to leave the city. The civilians were evacuated to a transit camp at Pruszków, whence tens of thousands were shipped as foreign laborers to Germany and thousands more to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

Meanwhile, the Soviets treated the Polish resistance fighters as they had been treating the AK throughout Poland. They forcibly disarmed them and arrested them as fascist agents and Nazi collaborators. Sixteen high-ranking AK officers were arrested and put on a show trial in March 1945 in the so-called Trial of the Sixteen. Thousands of AK members wound up in the Soviet Gulag and many were never to see their native Poland again. Meanwhile, at the Yalta Conference, the Allies agreed to Stalin’s demand that the Soviets retain all of the Polish land they had acquired in 1939 – that is, in their agreement reached with Nazi Germany. The Poles were to receive territorial compensation at the expense of Germany in the west, which is why formerly German cities such as Breslau and Stettin are today the Polish cities of Wrocław and Szczecin.

Was it worth it? The Poles continue to debate the uprising 70 years later. Certainly a majority see it as a heroic fight against tyranny that proved to the world Polish valor and self-respect. The blood of the martyred gave the Polish people a collective identity and pride that allowed them to stand strong in the face of the Communist tyranny to come. Bór-Komorowski insisted upon the uprising's rightness until the end of his days. But there is a large body of those who believe, like my tour guide, that it was not worth it. After all, the Germans subjected the Poles to a mass slaughter. After the battle, German Verbrennungs und Vernichtungskommandos (Burning and Destruction Detachments) systematically set about destroying the Polish capital. 85-90% of the city was laid waste. This was to go toward fulfilling Heinrich Himmler’s order of October 17: “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transit station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” 

Was such epic destruction worth it? After all, the Soviets sat on their hands, with a few exceptions, as the Germans went about doing their dirty business. While the purpose of the uprising was to prove that the Poles had earned the right to rule themselves, the Soviets picked up where the Germans left off and subjected the people of Warsaw, and of Poland, to 45 years of oppression and misery. The Polish resistance was not as lucky as the French resistance, which rose up in Paris and was able to link up with the Western allies and get their country back. The Polish leadership, including Bór-Komorowski, knew the Soviet policy of disarming, arresting, and even executing AK fighters elsewhere in Poland - why would Warsaw be different? Perhaps it would have been better if the Poles had put down their arms and passively accepted the Soviets, if grudgingly, so as to spare the bloodletting? 

While my sympathies lie with the artists of the Kotwica, it is not for me, a non-Pole who is removed in time, space and identity from these events, to decide whether or not the cost was worth it. But it is an eye opening, thought-provoking tragedy that makes one question the Manichaean Good-Evil lens through which we often view the Second World War.