Warsaw Uprising

Eighty-one years ago today, the city of Warsaw stood poised on a razor’s edge. After five brutal years of German occupation, humiliation, and terror, there was hope, however fleeting, that freedom might be at hand.

On this day, July 31st, 1944, the Polish underground, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), Europe’s largest resistance force, received a fateful order. After days of tension, conflicting signals, and Soviet radio propaganda urging action, General Tadeusz “Bór” Komorowski gave the command to rise. The uprising would begin at five PM the following day, – “W Hour.”

Across the city, tens of thousands of young men and women prepared to risk everything. Most lacked proper weapons and many had only pistols or grenades fashioned in secret workshops, yet what they possessed in full was moral clarity, courage, and a deep, ancestral love for Poland.

They believed the Soviets would help. How could they not? Moscow’s own radio broadcasts, including “Radio Kościuszko,” called upon Varsovians to “rise up against the German occupiers.” Soviet planes had dropped leaflets urging action. The Red Army was on the eastern bank of the Vistula. Warsaw was within reach- but it was a trap.

British historian Norman Davies wrote:

“The call to rise up against the Germans was a Soviet stratagem. The aim was to prompt a premature uprising in Warsaw so that the Germans could eliminate the anti-communist resistance before the Red Army entered the city.”

On the night of July 31st, the city pulsed with hope and dread. Some resistance units gathered in safehouses, others in sewer tunnels, messages were passed, passwords confirmed. In homes across Warsaw, parents kissed their sons and daughters goodbye, knowing full well they might never return.

A young courier named Krystyna told her mother that night, “This may be the last time we speak. But if I die, let it be for something that mattered.”

The Germans were still strong. Warsaw was still under the boot of the SS and Gestapo. Yet the Armia Krajowa dared believe that Poland could liberate itself, by Poles, for Poles, before the Soviets arrived to install their own tyranny.

General Leopold Okulicki, later murdered by the Soviets in 1946, had warned of this duplicity. He once said:

“Between two enemies, one must not mistake the silence of the other as friendship. We must prepare not only for liberation, but for betrayal” and he was right.

When the Uprising began the next day, the Soviets halted their offensive. Stalin cynically called it a “local affair.” Soviet aircraft were forbidden to drop supplies. American and British airmen, who tried to resupply the Poles from bases in Italy, were shot at by Soviet anti-aircraft batteries and Stalin refused to allow the Allies to use Soviet airfields, so Warsaw was left to die.

Yet, July 31st is not only a day of betrayal, it is a day of astonishing moral grandeur.

At that moment, with the world watching but unmoved, the people of Warsaw chose to fight, not for glory, not for conquest, but for the dignity of a free homeland.

They did not rise because they thought they would win, they rose because not rising would have been a slow death of the soul.

In the words of a Home Army commander that evening:

“If we are to die, let us die standing, as free men.”

Let us never forget what Warsaw was on this day, a city of ghosts and courage. A people betrayed by allies and surrounded by enemies, yet still willing to rise.

Let us honor the dead, defend the truth, and never allow memory to be twisted by those who stood by and watched Warsaw burn.

Sources:

Davies, Norman. Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw. Macmillan, 2003.

Zamoyski, Adam. Poland: A History. HarperPress, 2009.

Ciechanowski, Jan M. The Warsaw Rising of 1944. Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Testimonies from “Warsaw Rising Museum Archives” and Home Army veterans.

Edward Reid – on Facebook

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVE2eFgDYSw)

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German retaliation

By the fourth day of the Warsaw Uprising, the initial wave of Polish euphoria had begun to give way to the grim reality of German retaliation. What followed was not simply a military response, but a campaign of unrestrained terror, driven by vengeance, ideology, and racial contempt.

On August 4, SS units and foreign collaborators began systematically entering the Wola district, one of the strongholds of resistance. But their mission was not to fight insurgents alone. It was to annihilate civilians.

Among the most feared units were the Dirlewanger Brigade, composed of convicted criminals, and the RONA (Russian Liberation Army), made up of Soviet collaborators, largely former Red Army soldiers from Ukraine and Russia under the command of General Bronislav Kaminski. These forces were infamous even among the German ranks for their brutality.

“They were not soldiers. They were beasts in human form. They did not shoot—shooting was merciful. They raped, they mutilated, they set people on fire alive.”

—Zofia Chojnacka, survivor of the Wola massacre

Eyewitnesses describe German and auxiliary troops herding women, children, and the elderly into courtyards and machine-gunning them en masse, or throwing grenades into cellars where families had taken shelter.

On this day, the Wola massacre began in full, lasting several days and ultimately killing between 40,000 and 50,000 civilians, most of them non-combatants.

“We heard screams all night. A child’s voice crying for his mother, then nothing. Silence, then fire. The stench of burning flesh entered our mouths.”

—Stanisław Żaryna, resistance courier

One German officer reportedly asked why such mass executions were being ordered. The reply from SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, overseeing the suppression of the uprising, was simple:

“Warsaw has to be pacified, even if it costs the lives of half a million Poles.”

What makes August 4 particularly horrifying is the deliberate use of foreign troops to do the worst of the killing. These men, outside the regular Wehrmacht or SS, often acted with even fewer restraints. RONA troops, in particular, were notorious for rape, looting, and murder on a scale that shocked even Nazi commanders.

“They dragged young girls into the street, some no more than children, and raped them in front of their mothers. Then they shot them both.”

—Anonymous diary entry, Wola, August 4, 1944

The fighting that day was asymmetrical. In many places, there was no combat at all, just organized civilian slaughter. Those who resisted were killed. Those who begged for mercy were killed. Hospitals were emptied and burned with the wounded still inside.

Still, the people of Warsaw resisted. They built barricade, they passed messages, they prayed.

August 4 was not just a day of war, it was a day of massacre.

It was the day the world should have screamed, but mostly stayed silent.

The brutality that began on August 4 would continue for weeks, but its memory, its darkness and its defiance, still lives in Warsaw’s streets, in the ashes beneath the bricks, and in the Polish soul.

Edward Reid on Facebook

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The Murder of Warsaw. GROUND ZERO’44 PART I [ENG/napisy pl]

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khPqn3Cqrro)