What was the Warsaw Uprising?
The Warsaw Uprising was a 63-day battle fought from 1 August to 2 October 1944 by the Polish Home Army against the German occupiers of Warsaw. Some 45,000 to 55,000 insurgents, of whom only about one in ten had a weapon, hoped to free their capital before the Soviet Red Army arrived, but the Soviets halted across the Vistula and Allied air drops were too few. It ended with an agreement on the cessation of hostilities, which the Warsaw Rising Museum also calls a capitulation. About 16,000 insurgents were killed, died of wounds or went missing, an estimated 130,000 to 200,000 civilians died (Polish historians most often give about 150,000), and the Germans then expelled the survivors and destroyed much of the city.7
At five in the afternoon on 1 August 1944, the hour the insurgents called W-hour, Warsaw rose against five years of German occupation. For 63 days soldiers of the Home Army, many of them very young, fought street by street for their city.8
The decision
Since 1939 Warsaw had lived under brutal German occupation, and the Polish Underground State had built a secret army, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), loyal to the government in exile in London. Under its plan Burza (Tempest), Home Army units were to rise against the retreating Germans and greet the advancing Red Army as the hosts of their own land. Warsaw was at first left out of the plan, but as the Soviets neared the city in July 1944 the command changed its mind. The Soviet Union had already taken direct control of eastern Poland and set up its own Polish Committee of National Liberation; the Home Army wanted to hold the capital before the Red Army could “liberate” it.9
On 25 July the Home Army command decided on armed action in the capital, and the next day the government in London authorized its Delegate to proclaim the rising when he saw fit. On 31 July General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the commander of the Home Army, gave the order: W-hour would be 17:00 on 1 August. The coded order reached the couriers only the next morning, so many units could not reach their assembly points in time, and in Żoliborz, Śródmieście and Wola the shooting began early.10
The armies
The Home Army's Warsaw District numbered about 45,000 soldiers, joined by some 2,500 from other underground groups; the Warsaw Rising Museum counts 55,000 who fought at some point, among them about 12,000 women and 5,500 boys and girls under eighteen. Only about one soldier in ten had a weapon by the Warsaw Rising Museum's count (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says a quarter). They improvised: they built their own grenades and Błyskawica submachine guns, armored a truck and called it Kubuś, and took what they could from the enemy.11
Against them stood about 25,000 Germans, organized in three groups under Heinz Reinefarth, Rainer Stahel and Hans Rohr and backed by artillery, armor and aircraft. They included some of the worst units in the German forces: Oskar Dirlewanger's SS penal regiment and Bronisław Kamiński's RONA brigade of Russian collaborators. The overall command of the suppression went to SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach.12
W-hour
On 1 August the insurgents attacked across the city. Within three days they held large parts of Warsaw, including the center and the Old Town, but they failed to take the Vistula bridges, the railway stations and many fortified German positions, which left the enemy's main lines of communication open. Barricades went up everywhere; some 2,000 were built during the uprising.13
The massacre of Wola
Hitler ordered Warsaw razed, and Himmler spelled the order out, writes Maciej Łuczkowski of the IPN: every inhabitant, women and children included, was to be killed, and no prisoners taken. On 5 August Reinefarth's forces, among them Dirlewanger's and Kamiński's men, attacked the western district of Wola. For three days they went from house to house, shooting men, women and children in factory yards, by railway embankments and in hospitals; at the Wola Hospital on Płocka Street, the Warsaw Rising Museum records, the staff and the wounded and sick were killed on 5 August.14
No one knows how many died. Estimates range from about 15,000, the figure preferred in an IPN study, to 40,000 or even 60,000, and the bodies were burned to hide the crime.15
The Old Town and the sewers
The Old Town was cut off from the city center on 6 August and encircled by 13 August. For three more weeks its defenders held out under bombing and artillery fire in a maze of ruins, while civilians died in their thousands; on 1 September alone more than 2,000 people were killed in bombed churches. On the nights of 1 and 2 September the defenders withdrew through the sewers: about 4,500 reached Śródmieście and some 800 Żoliborz along some 25 kilometers of underground routes. The Germans then took the district, where about 30,000 civilians had died.16
Powiśle, with the city's power station, fell on 6 September. Insurgents in the city center held out, kept hospitals, kitchens and a postal service running and, by the Warsaw Rising Museum's count, printed 167 newspapers and broadcast for nearly 1,400 hours on their radio station, Błyskawica, which went on the air on 8 August and made its last broadcast on 4 October.17
Alone: the Allies and the Soviets
The Red Army stood on the far bank of the Vistula and did not come. Stalin met the Polish prime minister, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, on 3 and 9 August, promised help and did nothing, and Soviet propaganda called the uprising a fantasy of the émigrés and then a conspiracy against the Soviet Union. Until 9 or 10 September Stalin refused to let Allied aircraft land on Soviet airfields; on 15 August his deputy foreign minister told the American ambassador that the rising was “a purely adventuristic affair”. Russian historians such as Mikhail Meltyukhov reject the charge of a deliberate halt: in their reading a German counterattack at the end of July stopped the Red Army before Warsaw, and by late August its offensive strength was spent.18
From 4 August British, South African and Polish crews flew supplies from Brindisi in Italy, more than 1,300 kilometers over enemy territory. About 280 aircraft took part and losses were heavy; of some 200 tonnes of supplies dropped, the Warsaw Rising Museum counts only 60 to 90 tonnes that reached the insurgents. On 18 September 107 American B-17s made a single large daylight drop, most of which fell into German hands. Soviet drops began on 13 and 14 September, often without parachutes.19
Czerniaków, Mokotów, Żoliborz
On 14 September the Red Army and the 1st Polish Army, raised in the Soviet Union, took Praga on the east bank. Soldiers of the 1st Polish Army crossed the river to the insurgent bridgehead in Czerniaków, held by the Kryska group and the battalions of Colonel Jan Mazurkiewicz “Radosław”, but under constant attack the bridgehead was overrun on 22 and 23 September.20
One district after another followed. Mokotów fell on 27 September, after a failed attempt to evacuate it through the sewers, and Żoliborz capitulated on 30 September. Only Śródmieście was left, crowded with starving civilians.21
Capitulation
On 2 October 1944 the Home Army's envoys signed at Ożarów an agreement on the cessation of hostilities, which the Warsaw Rising Museum also calls the capitulation. The insurgents were to lay down their arms and leave the city in formed units; they would be treated as prisoners of war, and the civilians had to leave Warsaw. By the museum's count 15,378 soldiers, about 2,000 of them women, went into captivity; 11,668 marched out of Śródmieście on 4 and 5 October. Bór-Komorowski chose to share their fate and left the city on 5 October.22
The cost
Wójciuk counts about 16,000 insurgents killed, dead of wounds or missing and some 20,000 wounded. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 130,000 to 200,000: Kuberski writes that Polish historians most often give about 150,000, while the Warsaw Rising Museum gives 130,000 to 150,000 in Wójciuk's figures and 180,000 in its history of the uprising. On the German side Wójciuk gives about 3,000 soldiers killed or dead of wounds, after Norbert Bączyk, and about 10,000 wounded; Kuberski cites incomplete German reports of 2,000 killed and 7,000 wounded. The surviving population, 350,000 people by German count and as many as 550,000 by Polish estimates, was driven out through the transit camp at Pruszków, from which about 150,000 were sent to labor or concentration camps.23
Then the Germans destroyed the city on purpose. Demolition squads burned and blew up block after block, libraries, archives, museums and monuments. About a quarter of Warsaw's buildings were lost in the fighting and another 30 percent in the demolition that followed; by the end of the war 84 percent of the left-bank city lay in ruins.24
Memory
The Warsaw Rising Museum, opened for the sixtieth anniversary in 2004 in a former tram power station in Wola, shows a full-size replica of a B-24 Liberator and a reconstructed sewer, and in the surrounding Freedom Park a Wall of Remembrance carries the names of nearly 11,000 fallen insurgents.25› Witold Pilecki
