Warsaw Uprising (1944): The Polish Home Army's 63-Day Revolt

The Warsaw Uprising was the largest single armed revolt by a resistance movement in German-occupied Europe during the Second World War. On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army rose against the German garrison of Warsaw, expecting help from the approaching Red Army and hoping to free the capital before the Soviets arrived. After 63 days of street fighting, with little outside aid, the insurgents surrendered on 2 October; the city was then emptied of its people and largely destroyed.

Background

Poland had been occupied since the German and Soviet invasions of 1939 (see the invasion of Poland). German rule in Warsaw was brutal: mass street round-ups, executions and deportations were part of daily life, and the city’s Jewish population had been confined to the ghetto and almost entirely murdered, with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 ending in its destruction.

The Polish government-in-exile in London directed an underground state, whose armed wing was the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK). With several hundred thousand sworn members across occupied Poland, it was one of the largest resistance movements in Europe, and it ran secret schools, courts and newspapers as well as sabotage and intelligence operations. In 1944, as the Red Army advanced westward after Operation Bagration, the Home Army launched Operation Tempest, a series of uprisings to liberate Polish cities just before Soviet troops arrived and so assert Polish sovereignty.

Relations with Moscow were very poor. The Soviet Union had broken off relations with the London government in 1943 after it called for an investigation into the Katyn massacre, and in July 1944 Stalin backed a rival communist Polish Committee of National Liberation in Lublin.

The decision to rise

By late July 1944 Soviet tanks were approaching Warsaw’s eastern suburb of Praga, and German units appeared to be retreating in disorder. Soviet radio broadcasts called on Poles to rise. The Home Army commander, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, and the Warsaw district commander, Colonel Antoni Chruściel (“Monter”), decided to begin the uprising at 17:00 on 1 August, known as “W-hour”.

The insurgents numbered perhaps 40,000–50,000, including many young people and women serving as couriers and medics, but only a small fraction had firearms. They faced a German garrison that was soon reinforced with SS and police units, artillery, tanks and aircraft.

The fighting

On the first days the insurgents took much of the city centre, the Old Town and other districts, but failed to capture key targets such as the Vistula bridges, the airfield and many fortified German buildings. Polish flags flew over Warsaw for the first time since 1939, and the insurgents ran their own newspapers, radio and postal service. Scouts delivered mail across the insurgent districts, and the Home Army radio station Błyskawica broadcast to the outside world. On 5 August soldiers of the Zośka battalion captured the Gęsiówka concentration camp in the ruins of the former ghetto, freeing several hundred Jewish prisoners, many of whom then joined the fighting. On 20 August insurgents took the telephone exchange building, one of the strongpoints in the city centre.

Himmler placed SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski in charge of crushing the revolt. Units including the Dirlewanger Brigade and the Russian collaborationist RONA brigade carried out mass killings. In the Wola massacre, beginning on 5 August, tens of thousands of civilians, perhaps 40,000–50,000, were shot in a few days, along with patients and staff of hospitals. Similar killings took place in Ochota.

The Germans then reduced the insurgent districts one by one with artillery, bombers and tanks. The Old Town fell on 2 September after its defenders escaped through the sewers to the city centre. Later in September the riverside district of Powiśle and then Czerniaków fell, and Mokotów capitulated on 27 September. Civilians lived in cellars under constant shelling, short of water, food and medicine, and the insurgent hospitals were overflowing. Fighters and civilians alike were targeted by heavy mortars and rocket launchers that Poles nicknamed “bellowing cows” and “wardrobes” from the sound they made.

Outside help

The Red Army had halted on the east bank of the Vistula after German counterattacks near Warsaw in early August. In mid-September Soviet forces took Praga, and soldiers of the Polish 1st Army fighting alongside the Soviets crossed the river to help, but they suffered heavy losses and withdrew.

British, Polish and South African air crews flew supply missions from Italy, at heavy cost, and many containers fell into German hands. Stalin refused for weeks to allow Western aircraft to land on Soviet-held airfields; on 18 September a large US air drop was finally carried out, but by then the insurgents held only small areas. Whether the Red Army could have saved Warsaw remains debated, but the political dimension of the Soviet stance is widely recognised.

Surrender and destruction

On 2 October 1944 Bór-Komorowski signed the capitulation. The Home Army soldiers were granted prisoner-of-war status, and about 15,000 went into captivity. The remaining civilian population, several hundred thousand people, was expelled, many through the transit camp at Pruszków; tens of thousands were sent to forced labour or concentration camps.

Hitler ordered Warsaw to be wiped out. Over the following months German demolition squads burned and blew up buildings, libraries and archives street by street. The Royal Castle, already burned in 1939, was blown up, and churches, palaces and much of the national heritage were deliberately destroyed. When Soviet and Polish troops entered on 17 January 1945, most of the city west of the Vistula was rubble.

By the numbers

Legacy

After the war, Poland’s communist government long denigrated the Home Army and imprisoned many of its veterans. The uprising could only be openly commemorated after 1989. In 1945 the Soviet secret police lured sixteen leaders of the Polish underground state to talks and then put them on trial in Moscow, including the last Home Army commander, General Leopold Okulicki, who died in Soviet custody. Debate about whether the uprising should have been launched, given the odds, has continued among Poles ever since, alongside admiration for those who fought. Today it is central to Polish national memory: sirens sound across Warsaw at 5 p.m. every 1 August, and the Warsaw Rising Museum opened in 2004. The rebuilt Old Town, reconstructed after the war, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Timeline

• 1944, 31 July: The Home Army command decides to begin the uprising.
• 1944, 1 August, 17:00: The uprising begins across Warsaw.
• 1944, 5–7 August: Mass killings of civilians in Wola.
• 1944, 2 September: The Old Town falls; defenders escape through the sewers.
• 1944, mid-September: Soviet troops take Praga; Polish units cross the Vistula and are driven back.
• 1944, 18 September: A large US air drop reaches Warsaw.
• 1944, 2 October: The Home Army signs the capitulation.
• 1945, 17 January: Soviet and Polish troops enter the ruined city.

Why it matters

The Warsaw Uprising was an act of desperate courage that ended in catastrophe. It shaped Poland’s post-war fate and its national memory, and it remains a symbol of the dilemmas faced by small nations caught between two great powers.