Warsaw Uprising

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Warsaw Uprising began at 17:00 on the 1st of August 1944, when tens of thousands of Polish fighters rose against the German occupation. At that moment, Soviet tanks sat just kilometres from the city. The Red Army, which the Polish resistance had counted on to arrive within days, would not come. What followed was 63 days of fighting that made the Warsaw Uprising the single largest military effort by any European resistance movement in World War II. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly from mass executions. The city was razed afterward on German orders. This documentary asks who made those 63 days inevitable, who could have shortened them, and why the city was sacrificed on the altar of competing political ambitions.

• 2. A Trap Built From Two Enemies

  ›

  On the 25th of April 1943, Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile after the Germans revealed the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers. Stalin refused to admit any Soviet responsibility and denounced the accusations as German propaganda. He then created the Rudenko Commission to pin the atrocity on the Germans. The Western Allies accepted Stalin's denial to keep the anti-Nazi coalition intact. From that moment, the Polish Home Army faced a grim arithmetic: Germany occupied Warsaw, but the Soviet Union had designs on Poland's future government.

  Home Army commander Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski laid out his own plan on the 20th of November 1943, which became known as Operation Tempest. Local units were to harass the German Wehrmacht as Soviet forces advanced, then co-operate with the incoming Red Army as much as possible. The political goal was equally explicit: to assert Polish sovereignty before the Soviets could install a pro-Moscow administration. After successful Polish-Soviet cooperation in Operation Ostra Brama, Soviet security forces behind the front shot or arrested Polish officers and conscripted lower ranks by force. The choice facing the Home Army by mid-July 1944 was stark. Fail to rebel, and Soviet propaganda would brand them impotent or Nazi collaborators. Rise up, and risk fighting without Soviet support.

  On the 25th of July 1944, the Polish government-in-exile approved the Warsaw uprising plan over the objections of Commander-in-Chief General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, leaving the exact timing to local commanders. Six days later, on the 31st of July, General Bor-Komorowski and Colonel Antoni Chrusciel ordered full mobilization for 17:00 the following day. Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, who had just arrived from London, warned that Allied help would be minimal. Nobody listened.

• 3. Outgunned From the Start

  ›

  As of the 1st of August 1944, Polish military supplies consisted of 1,000 guns, 1,750 pistols, 300 submachine guns, 60 assault rifles, 7 heavy machine guns, 20 anti-tank guns, and 25,000 hand grenades. Historians who reviewed those numbers noted they might have been enough for an urban terror campaign, but not to seize control of a city. The Home Army forces in the Warsaw District numbered between 20,000 and 49,000 soldiers, most trained for partisan and guerrilla warfare rather than prolonged daylight combat.

  The Germans had garrisoned Warsaw for precisely this kind of fight. General Rainer Stahel commanded roughly 11,000 troops in the city proper as of the 31st of July. A police and SS contingent under SS-Oberführer Paul Otto Geibel added another 5,710 men. By the 20th of August, German forces directly engaged in Warsaw had grown to 17,000 men in two battle groups, including the notorious Kaminski Brigade and the Dirlewanger unit. SS-General Erich von dem Bach replaced Stahel as overall commander in early August.

  The Home Army did improvise. Resistance workshops produced submachine guns, K-pattern flamethrowers, grenades, mortars, and an armoured car built on the chassis of a Chevrolet 157 van. Fighters also captured two Panther tanks and two armoured personnel carriers from the enemy. Volunteers from at least 15 countries joined the uprising, wearing the red-and-white armband of the Polish national flag and fighting under the slogan 'Za nasza i wasza wolnosc' - For our and your freedom. About 350 Jews freed from the Gesniowka concentration camp on the 5th of August also took up arms.

• 4. The Wola Massacre

  ›

  On the 5th of August, Heinz Reinefarth's three attack groups began their advance along Wolska and Gorczewska streets, executing Heinrich Himmler's orders to kill civilians behind the front lines. Special SS, police, and Wehrmacht detachments went house to house, shooting inhabitants regardless of age or sex and burning their bodies. Estimates of civilians killed in Wola and Ochota range from 20,000 to 50,000, with some sources placing the toll in Wola alone at 40,000 by the 8th of August. The main perpetrators were Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronislav Kaminski.

  The atrocities followed a deliberate policy: crush the Polish will to resist without committing to heavy urban combat. Men and women were shot in churchyards. Householders were dragged into the streets. Pregnant women were killed. Children were killed. The Germans eventually concluded this strategy was backfiring. By mid-September they stopped executing captured fighters on the spot and began treating some as prisoners of war, recognizing that brutality alone had only stiffened resistance.

  Despite the losses in Wola, Polish forces stabilized elsewhere. The Zoska and Wacek battalions captured the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and freed roughly 350 Jews from Gesniowka. The Old Town held. By the 4th of August, the majority of the city was in Polish hands, though critical positions including the bridges over the Vistula, the PAST skyscraper, and the Gdansk railway station remained with the Germans. The resistance then entered a siege phase that increasingly favored the better-equipped German side.

• 5. Life Inside the Siege

  ›

  Warsaw had roughly 1,350,000 inhabitants in 1939. Over a million were still living in the city when the Uprising began. In Polish-controlled districts during the first weeks, people tried to reconstruct normal life. Theatres opened. Newspapers that had been underground appeared openly. The two main daily newspapers were the government-run Rzeczpospolita Polska and the military Biuletyn Informacyjny.

  On the 7th of August, Antoni Bohdziewicz's war correspondents group assembled the Blyskawicka long-range radio transmitter in the city centre. From the 9th of August, Polish Radio broadcast three or four times a day in Polish, English, German, and French, airing news, appeals for help, government reports, patriotic poems, and music. It was the only such station operating in German-held Europe. Among those who appeared on air were Jan Nowak-Jezioranski and John Ward, a war correspondent for The Times of London.

  Food ran out faster than anyone expected. On the 6th of August, Polish units recaptured the Haberbusch i Schiele brewery complex on Ceglana Street. From that day forward, Warsaw's population lived largely on barley from the brewery's warehouses. Thousands of people organized daily into cargo teams to collect bags of barley and distribute them through the city centre, then ground the grain in coffee grinders and boiled it into what they called spit-soup. By the 21st of September, the Germans had blown up the remaining pumping stations on Koszykowa Street. The city's public wells became the only source of drinking water. By the end of September, the city centre had more than 90 functioning wells.

• 6. Abandoned From the Air

  ›

  From August 1943 to July 1944, more than 200 RAF flights had already dropped an estimated 146 trained Polish personnel, over 4,000 supply containers, and $16 million in banknotes and gold to the Home Army. When the Uprising began in August 1944, Allied airdrops continued from bases in Italy, with the 1568th Polish Special Duties Flight flying B-24 Liberators, Handley Page Halifaxes, and Douglas C-47 Dakotas out of Bari and Brindisi. The South African Air Force joined from Foggia. The RAF ultimately flew 223 sorties and lost 34 aircraft.

  The Soviets denied the Western Allies use of Soviet airfields for weeks. When the Allies specifically requested landing strips on the 20th of August, Stalin refused two days later, calling the Polish resistance 'a handful of criminals' and the Uprising an enterprise by 'enemies of the Soviet Union.' British Prime Minister Winston Churchill telegraphed U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt on the 25th of August proposing to send planes in defiance of Stalin. Roosevelt replied on the 26th of August: 'I do not consider it advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you.' He was unwilling to antagonize Stalin before the Yalta Conference.

  On the 18th of September the Soviets finally allowed 107 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the U.S. Eighth Air Force's 3rd Division to fly a single supply mission under Operation Frantic. The planes dropped 100 tons of supplies, but Soviet intelligence reports estimated that 96% landed in German-held territory. The Soviets refused any further American flights until the 30th of September, by which time weather made flying impossible and the Uprising was nearly over. Total allied drops across all operations amounted to somewhere between 104 and 239 tons depending on the source, most of it unrecovered.

• 7. Surrender and Erasure

  ›

  On the 7th of September, German General Rohr proposed negotiations. Bor-Komorowski agreed the following day. Over three days, the 8th, 9th, and the 10th of September, about 20,000 civilians were evacuated under a bilateral agreement, and Rohr formally recognized Home Army soldiers as military combatants entitled to prisoner-of-war treatment. The Home Army formally surrendered on the 2nd of October when its supplies were exhausted.

  The cost was catastrophic. Approximately 16,000 members of the Polish resistance were killed and about 6,000 were badly wounded. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly in mass executions. The Germans lost around 16,000 men. After the surrender, the remaining civilian population was deported. The Germans then systematically destroyed Warsaw, building by building.

  The defeat had immediate political consequences. With the Home Army broken, the pro-Soviet Polish Committee of National Liberation was positioned to take power rather than the London-based government-in-exile. Poland would remain part of the Soviet-aligned Eastern Bloc until 1989. Polish and Western historians agree that Stalin deliberately halted his forces to exhaust the Home Army, though Soviet and Russian historians have argued the Red Army lacked the capacity to advance. Declassified Soviet archive documents revealed that Stalin issued explicit orders on the 23rd of August 1944 instructing Red Army troops to prevent Home Army units in Soviet-controlled areas from reaching Warsaw, and to apprehend and disarm them. General Berling, who had independently ordered the small river landings that were the only external ground force to physically reach the uprising, was relieved of his command by Soviet superiors and transferred to the War Academy in Moscow, where he remained until 1947.