Hope amid Terror: The Significance of the Warsaw Uprising
After almost five years of brutal German occupation of Poland, the city of Warsaw rose against its Nazi occupiers in an act of defiance that has shaped the country’s identity ever since. On August 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army, a national underground resistance force, led an uprising against the well-armed German Army. With German forces retreating before advancing Soviet troops, the underground leadership hoped to liberate Warsaw and establish an independent Polish government before the Red Army arrived.
The underground forces had been preparing for an uprising against the Germans by collecting, producing, and storing weapons; by organizing some 40,000 troops in military units; and by training those troops for combat. In the first few days of August, this inexperienced force was able to capture most of the center of the city, until the Germans called for reinforcements with heavy artillery and aircraft. While some German units fought the insurgents, others systematically burned houses and murdered civilians in areas that surrendered.
Hans Frank, the Nazi German governor of occupied Poland, reported to Berlin: “Warsaw in the most part is in flames. Burning of the houses is the best way to liquidate insurgent hiding spots. … In this city of one million inhabitants, there is poverty beyond description. After the crushing and end of the uprising, Warsaw will suffer the deserved penalty of complete annihilation.”
Most civilians were caught in the crossfire of the opposing forces, with German snipers indiscriminately targeting everyone who came into their sights. The Germans also brutally murdered the personnel and patients of several hospitals. Soviet forces deliberately remained on the other side of the Vistula River and provided no relief, allowing the Germans to further decimate the population. By the uprising’s second month, food supplies ran critically low, and British and American airlifts did little to alleviate the situation. Some Poles were stranded in basements for weeks with little food or water. Nevertheless, the spirit among the population remained high despite the constant threat of death and overall hardship. Most of the surviving group of fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jews who had received virtually no assistance from the citizens of Warsaw during their battles more than a year before, emerged from hiding and took an active part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
The Warsaw Uprising lasted for 63 days. In the end the insurgent forces were fragmented and overwhelmed, and on October 2, 1944, they formally surrendered. The Germans treated captured Home Army combatants as prisoners of war.
Following the surrender, the Germans forced hundreds of thousands of Polish residents to leave Warsaw and sent an estimated 150,000 to forced labor or concentration camps. The Germans also systematically looted and demolished much of the city. Only about 174,000 inhabitants remained, less than six percent of the prewar population. Approximately 11,500 of these survivors were Jews. When Soviet troops entered Warsaw on January 17, 1945, they found a completely devastated city.
An estimated 166,000 Polish citizens lost their lives in the Warsaw Uprising, including as many as 17,000 Polish Jews. Including these losses, by the end of the war the Germans had killed 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles and 3 million Polish Jews.
Although it was unsuccessful and exacted an enormous human toll, the Warsaw Uprising has had an enduring impact on Polish history. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, one of the heroes of the Home Army and a postwar anti-communist activist, said: “The Warsaw Uprising although it was a military affair, at the same time it was something much bigger than that. It was an outburst of social desires, a reflection of overall faith of the Nation.” It was and is still a powerful national symbol in Poland.
Jacek Nowkowski is senior curator in the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
