Written by a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, this book examines the background of the ill-fated 63-day uprising that pitted poorly armed Polish civilians and volunteers against Hitler's well-armed and veteran forces. Borowiec also examines Stalin's decision to stand by while Warsaw and its defenders were destroyed. Borowiec provides a day-by-day account of the combat and the efforts to resupply the partisans by Allied aircraft. In this, the first English-language history of the Uprising, Borowiec relies on his own experiences, those of other participants, and other materials not usually available to Western scholars and researchers interested in World War II. His firsthand account brings those 63 days to life.
An exploration of Europe's urban reconstruction after World War II, this volume contains 12 essays, based on new research which examine the significant architectural continuities in pre-war and post-war building. They highlight the unusual character of rebuilding in several case studies.
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the uprising from both sides *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "When we crush the uprising, Warsaw will get what it deserves: total annihilation." - Adolf Hitler "I kneel before the heroes who fought in Warsaw, however I think that the uprising was the biggest and most reckless catastrophe of Poland." - General Wladyslaw Anders After a brief revival following World War I, during which it successfully defeated a Soviet attempt to invade in an effort to carry "international revolution" into Germany and Central Europe, Poland once again fell victim to its neighbors in 1939. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and Josef Stalin's USSR collaborated in the conquest, and then split Poland between them. The Germans carried out most of the fighting and gained the choicest parts of the nation. As a penetratingly bitter New York Times editorial stated on September 18th, 1939, "Germany having killed the prey, Soviet Russia will seize that part of the carcass that Germany cannot use. It will play the noble role of hyena to the German lion. This gross betrayal of the professions that Soviet Russia has been making for years is being defended in the manner with which the world has now grown sickeningly familiar. Because Poland has 'virtually ceased to exist, ' Russia is free to break every treaty with it (Sword, 1991, 292). The Germans instituted oppressive rule in their portion of Poland, executing some 7,000 people on political grounds and imprisoning thousands of others. 1.5 million Poles became forced laborers in Germany, and though seldom noted, the Soviets applied equally brutal methods in their sector, executing 22,000 Polish officers at the Katyn Forest Massacre. NKVD death squads murdered 40,000 civilians and deported 1.4 million people to Siberia and other remote areas, from which a sizable percentage never returned alive. As the Soviets began to push the Germans back west, the Red Army plunged headlong into Poland in late June 1944 on the heels of German Army Group Center's retreating forces. The British urged the AK to cooperate with the Soviets, but the Russians wanted Poland and treated the Resistance as enemy partisans. The NKVD arrested AK members by the thousands, executing their leaders out of hand. By late July, the Polish government in exile thought it was time to order the AK to lead an uprising in Warsaw. The sight of German units retreating, and Soviet tanks seen on July 31st very close to the city, prompted the order to openly retake Poland's capital for the nation. Unfortunately, it was a decision also predicated on a naively optimistic faith in Anglo-American support. As a result, the Poles fought bravely but futilely in August and September against the Nazis, and the Nazis, as they so often did, mercilessly destroyed the city causing the trouble. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the notorious SS, told his men, "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." In fact, the Germans had intended to destroy Warsaw from the beginning of the war, and they were terribly successful. One Allied pilot recalled, "There was no difficulty in finding Warsaw. It was visible from 100 kilometers away. The city was in flames but with so many huge fires burning, it was almost impossible to pick up the target marker flares." It's estimated that up to 200,000 Poles were killed in the process, and to top it all off, the Soviets arrested and executed countless more after the Nazis were finally gone. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944: The History of the Polish Resistance's Failed Attempt to Liberate Poland's Capital from Nazi Germany looks at the events that led to the uprising and the Nazi destruction of the city.
A dramatic eye-witness account of the German suppression and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto from April to May 1943, prepared by the Commanding Officer of the operation, SS-Brigade Leader Jürgen Stroop. The hand-compiled report, of which only three copies were ever made, contains three sections: an executive summary of the entire operation, copies of the official day-to-day combat reports, and 72 photographs, many of which have never before been published. The Ghetto uprising started in April 1943 after the Germans attempted to remove the remaining 40,000 Warsaw Jews-and the factories in which they worked-to Lublin. The Jews, aided by the underground Polish Communist Party, had prepared an extensive network of bunkers to stage an armed uprising. As vividly described in his report, Stroop systematically cleared the Jewish residential area, block by block, using artillery, Waffen-SS troops, Ukrainian and Russian SS-auxiliaries, and large numbers of Polish police. Despite the fanatic resistance, the overwhelming forces deployed by the German authorities-combined with Stroop's policy of first and foremost closing down and moving all the factories which had, inadvertently, been supplying the Jewish resistance with physical means of defending themselves-meant that it was inevitable that the Ghetto would be cleared. Once this mission was accomplished, Stroop leveled what remained of the Jewish residential area and then symbolically blew up the main synagogue in Warsaw-up to that time, one of the largest in the world-to mark the formal end of the clearing of the Ghetto. The one and a half month conflict resulted in the deaths of 14,000 Jews, twelve SS men, two Russian/Ukrainian SS-auxiliaries, and one Polish policeman. Stroop estimated that of the Jewish deaths, some 7,000 had died during the course of the battle, and that a further 6,929 had died while being transported to Treblinka. This edition contains all the original German pages alongside full English translations.
Historian Alexandra Rich presents the full untold story of how one of history's bravest revolts ended in one of its greatest crimes. In 1943, the Nazis liquidated Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. A year later, they threatened to complete the city's destruction by deporting its remaining residents. A sophisticated and cosmopolitan community a thousand years old was facing its final days—and then opportunity struck. As Soviet soldiers turned back the Nazi invasion of Russia and began pressing west, the underground Polish Home Army decided to act. Taking advantage of German disarray and seeking to forestall the absorption of their country into the Soviet empire, they chose to liberate the city of Warsaw for themselves. Warsaw 1944 tells the story of this brave, and errant, calculation. For more than sixty days, the Polish fighters took over large parts of the city and held off the SS's most brutal forces. But in the end, their efforts were doomed. Scorned by Stalin and unable to win significant support from the Western Allies, the Polish Home Army was left to face the full fury of Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. The crackdown that followed was among the most brutal episodes of history's most brutal war, and the celebrated historian Alexandra Richie depicts this tragedy in riveting detail. Using a rich trove of primary sources, Richie relates the terrible experiences of individuals who fought in the uprising and perished in it. Her clear-eyed narrative reveals the fraught choices and complex legacy of some of World War II's most unsung heroes.
A blow-by-blow, ground-level account of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the 2-month Polish Resistance effort to liberate Warsaw from Nazi occupation. Poland’s most famous post-war poet offers “the finest book about the insurrection of 1944”—an essential read for fans of WW2 history (John Carpenter). On August 1, 1944, Miron Białoszewski, later to gain renown as one of Poland’s most innovative poets, went out to run an errand for his mother and ran into history. With Soviet forces on the outskirts of Warsaw, the Polish capital revolted against 5 years of Nazi occupation, an uprising that began in a spirit of heroic optimism. 63 days later it came to a tragic end. The Nazis suppressed the insurgents ruthlessly, reducing Warsaw to rubble while slaughtering some 200,000 people, mostly through mass executions. The Red Army simply looked on. First written over 25 years after the uprising, Białoszewski’s account gives readers an unforgettable sense of the chaos and immediacy of the final days of World War II. He tells of slipping back and forth under German fire, dodging sniper bullets, collapsing with exhaustion, rescuing the wounded, and burying the dead. This unusual memoir is a major work of literature and a reflection on memory that resists the terrible destruction it records. Madeline G. Levine has extensively revised her 1977 translation, and passages that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored.
