Warsaw rises
At 5pm on 1 August 1944, Europe’s largest underground resistance, The Polish Home Army, rose up against the Germans. Men, women and children fought to liberate Warsaw
The Polish Home Army was determined to end years of brutal German occupation
In Poland the subject of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is seen from many different perspectives and, like all battles, has its own specific circumstances: military, political, social and – seen from Poland’s history of uprisings – cultural. Yet, while no longer suppressed, as it was in the years of communism and Cold War, it still remains a battle relatively unknown outside of Poland today.
Fought from 1 August-2 October 1944, the outcome of the 63-day battle is a tragedy. An estimated 18,000 Polish insurgents lost their lives and between 180,000-200,000 civilians died during the uprising. Warsaw became a city of ruins. However, despite the catastrophic end, it is also a story of tragic beauty, heroism and fierce resistance against the odds.
A history of uprisings
With the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Polish resistance to the occupiers was instant. Poland had only relatively recently regained its independence at the end of World War I, following 123 years of Russian, Prussian and Austrian partitions, and building underground secret networks against an enemy occupier was something of a second nature. Generations of Poles had fought for independence – in the Kosciuszko Rising in 1794, with Napoleon for the Duchy of Warsaw from 1807-1815, the November Uprising of 1830, the January Uprising of 1863 and in Piłsudski’s Legions in WWI, all fighting for the rebirth of the Polish state.
By 1940 Poland’s armed resistance movement had formed as the Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej (Union of Armed Struggle) and developed into the Armia Krajowa (AK or Home Army) in 1942 – the biggest underground army in occupied Europe. By 1944 an estimated 400,000 soldiers carried out military training, diversionary activities, sabotage operations and intelligence gathering in preparation for an armed national insurgency.
Occupation
The occupation in Warsaw, Poland’s capital city with around 1.3 million inhabitants in
1939, was particularly brutal from the very start. Germans confiscated property, renamed streets and put up “Nur für Deutsche” (only for Germans) signs across the city. Every citizen was forced to carry their ‘kennkarte’ ID card, work and residence permits to show any German official on patrol at any given time.
The German authorities imposed strict food rationing. The average adult in Warsaw lost ten kilograms in weight during the occupation. Monetary depreciation meant loss of any pre-war savings and disproportionately low wages, creating an extortionate black market. Mass arrests and executions of civil servants, doctors, teachers, lawyers, scientists and artists increased and continued throughout the occupation, such as the massacres at Wawer, 1939, Palmiry, 1939/1940, Kabacki Forest, 1939/1940, and Sekocinski Forest in 1942.
From October 1941, under the penalty of death, Jews were no longer allowed to leave the Warsaw Ghetto. Helping or hiding Jews was also punishable by death, not only for the one responsible, but also for their entire family. Despite this, many still offered any assistance they could. In 1942 Jan Karski delivered an impassioned plea on behalf of Poland’s Jews to Allied officials in London and to American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1943 the remaining Jewish population revolted in the heroic but doomed Ghetto
Uprising.
In the autumn of 1943 Ss-brigadeführer Franz Kutschera, head of the SS and police in Warsaw, introduced public street executions. The police were allowed to kill anyone at will, on the spot. Round-ups, mass executions and forced deportations as slave labour to Germany became so frequent that when someone left their house, they would not know if they would ever come back.
It is impossible for anyone that has not lived through it to understand what it really means to live in constant fear of arrest, torture and death. This terror created a strong unity against the Germans, and sometimes with total strangers, when a glance, a word or some small gesture from someone that just happened to pass on the street could save a stranger’s life.
Class of 1920
Many of the young soldiers that would come to fight in the uprising of 1944 were born in the 1920s, and are known in Poland as the ‘Class of 1920’. Born free in the Second Polish Republic, they felt a strong sense of patriotic duty and civic engagement, and as they came of age during the brutality of the occupation, they felt it was their responsibility to fight for Poland’s freedom.
As German authorities closed all secondary schools and universities, forbidding Polish history, geography and literature to be taught, teachers took up the struggle against the occupier by providing clandestine study groups. It is estimated that 90,000 students attended these secret schools held in private homes, taught by about 5,500 teachers in 1943-1944.
From a young age many joined the ‘Grey Ranks’ and were very active in the scout movement, learning first-aid skills and military drills. Teenagers spent their free time on conspiratorial activities and small-scale sabotage. Painting the anchor symbol of ‘Poland Fighting’ on a wall of a house or busy street was very dangerous but boosted morale immensely in the fight against the occupiers.
The iconic PW anchor symbol for “Polska Walczaca” (Poland Fighting) was designed by Anna Smolenska, a scout and arts history student who would perish in Auschwitz in 1943.
Commanded by Brigadier General Emil August Fieldorf ‘Nil’ (Nile), the Home Army’s Directorate of Diversionary Operations, The KEDYW, consisted of elite units and undertook all manner of diversionary and sabotage activities, such as train derailment, arson, blowing up bridges, planting bombs in SS barracks, sabotage work at German factories and freeing prisoners held by the Gestapo.
One of the KEDYW’S special units, named ‘Agat’ (Anti-gestapo), and later ‘Pegaz’ and ‘Parasol’, carried out the assassinations of exceptionally brutal Nazi officials. The first successful liquidation was of the sadistic deputy commandant of Pawiak prison, Ssoberscharführer Franz Bürkl, in September
1943. The Sten gun used to kill Bürkl was carried to the location in a specially constructed violin case. One of the assassins, Bronisław Pietraszkiewicz, pseudonym ‘Lot’ (Flight), was to become the leader of ‘Operation Kutschera’, assassinating Ss-brigadeführer Franz Kutschera in February 1944. Similar to the better known killing of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, Kutchera died on location. Just as the mass reprisal killings in Lidice had followed Heydrich’s death, 300 people were shot in Warsaw by the
“AS THEY CAME OF AGE DURING THE BRUTALITY OF THE OCCUPATION, THEY FELT IT WAS THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO FIGHT FOR POLAND’S FREEDOM”