Warsaw Uprising

In August 1944, as the Red Army neared the Vistula, the Polish underground Home Army rose against the German occupiers of Warsaw. The fighters held out for 63 days, from 1 August to 2 October, in what is regarded as the largest military action by any European resistance movement in the Second World War. Its defeat cost the lives of perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 civilians, left the capital in ruins and helped clear the way for Soviet-backed rule in Poland.

By 1944 Poland had endured almost five years of occupation by Nazi Germany. The Home Army (Armia Krajowa) answered to the Polish government-in-exile in London, whose relations with Moscow had collapsed in April 1943 after the revelation of the Katyn massacre. Its commander, Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, devised Operation Tempest: as the Germans retreated, local Home Army units would harass them from behind and co-operate with the advancing Soviet troops. In Warsaw the aim was also political. By freeing the capital themselves, the Poles hoped to assert their sovereignty before the Soviet Union and its Polish communist allies could take control. On 29 July a Moscow-based radio station urged Warsaw to rise.

The uprising began at 17:00 on 1 August. Between about 20,000 and 49,000 insurgents took part, but only a small fraction were armed at first. They seized a large arms depot, the main post office and the power station, and gained control of much of the city centre, the Old Town and Wola. Yet many German strongpoints held out, the insurgents failed to take the Vistula bridges, and their districts were left isolated from one another.

German reinforcements arrived under the SS general Erich von dem Bach. From 5 August, units including those of Heinz Reinefarth, Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronislav Kaminski went from house to house in Wola and Ochota shooting residents of every age. Estimates of the civilians killed there range from 20,000 to 50,000, and some put the figure higher. The fighting then became a grinding siege in which the better-armed Germans retook the city district by district, while insurgents used the sewers to move between districts; at the start of September the defenders of the Old Town escaped this way.

Soviet forces reached the east bank of the Vistula but gave little effective support. Polish and Western historians broadly agree that Joseph Stalin held back to let the Home Army be destroyed. For weeks he also refused Western aircraft permission to land on Soviet-held airfields, so British, Polish and South African crews flew long missions from Italy and Britain with heavy losses. In mid-September soldiers of the Soviet-allied First Polish Army crossed the river but suffered severe casualties and could not hold on.

The Home Army signed a capitulation on 2 October 1944, under which its soldiers were to be treated as prisoners of war; about 15,000 were sent to camps in Germany. The whole civilian population was then expelled through a transit camp at Pruszków, from which tens of thousands were sent to labour or concentration camps. Acting on orders from Heinrich Himmler, German units systematically demolished what remained. By January 1945, when Soviet and Polish troops entered the city, some 85 per cent of its buildings had been destroyed.

Estimates suggest that about 16,000 members of the resistance were killed and some 6,000 badly wounded. German losses are put anywhere between about 2,000 and 17,000 killed and missing. The defeat of the Home Army allowed the Soviet-backed administration, rather than the London government, to take power, and Poland remained in the Soviet bloc until 1989. During the Cold War the communist authorities persecuted many Home Army veterans and distorted the story of the rising, which could be researched and commemorated openly only after 1989.

Our 1938 map shows Poland before the war, and our 1945 map shows the country at the end of World War II.