Rico's rants: 1944: The Warsaw Uprising

19 October 2015

1944: The Warsaw Uprising

War History Online has an article about an almost-forgotten struggle against the Nazis during World War Two:

This month was the 71st anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising in August of 1944. It was a general rebellion of the Polish clandestine army, together with the citizens of Warsaw, against the German occupation of Poland, which lasted from September of 1939 to May of 1945. To say “occupation” is not sufficient, for the German invasion of Poland, followed by the installation of a German regime on Polish territory, meant six years of unbelievable cruelty, organized homicide of the citizens of the once-independent Polish state, and immeasurable destruction of Polish heritage.
The capital of Poland, Warsaw, was totally annihilated, and a majority of its inhabitants were murdered or transported to German concentration camps. While the Soviet Red Army waited on the other bank of the Vistula River until the burning city bled to death, German troops were carrying on the massacre of the citizens of Warsaw and the insurgents with a cruelty and delight nobody expected from the nation which gave the world Schiller, Goethe, and Beethoven. It is estimated that, during and after the Uprising, Germans expelled from their homes a half million inhabitants of Warsaw and about a hundred thousand people from villages near Warsaw. About ninety thousand Warsaw residents were sent to forced labor in the Reich, a hundred thousand were sent to concentration camps, and over three hundred thousand people were forced to leave the ruins of the city in cattle cars.
After 1945, many survivors returned to the remnants of their city, and in spite of Stalin’s plane to recreate Warsaw as a typical Soviet moloch, old Warsaw was partly rebuilt after the war, although the city lost its prewar charm and metropolitan beauty forever. Even worse though, was loss of the nation’s elite; the best of the Polish youth of the 1930s and 1940s was murdered.