The Warsaw Uprising 1944
Posted: Friday, May 6, 2005
The story of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is grim. Over 200,000 Poles died, most of them civilians. The Polish independentist elite (which was anti-Nazi and anti-Communist) was decimated, in particular its youth who fought and sacrificed in the hopeless endeavor to regain the nation's independence. The capital was in ruins, methodically blown up block by block long after the insurgents surrendered on October 4, 1944. "Polen hatte eine ganze Generation verloren, und seine Hauptstadt dazu," according to the apt conclusion of Wlodzimierz Borodziej who ably retold the story of the Uprising to the German reader.
Borodziej set out to synthesize the existing knowledge about the Uprising. To anchor the tragedy within its proper context, he painted a broad historical background starting with the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century. Next, he concentrated on the German and Nazi occupation regimes in Poland after September 1939, stressing correctly that "ohne den Hitler-Stalin-Pakt vom 23. August 1939 hätte es keine polnische Frage im Zweiten Weltkrieg gegeben."
Arguably, Borodziej is at his best when dealing with the diplomatic background. Poland was basically abandoned by its allies in 1939, and the tradition of neglect continued afterward both diplomatically and militarily. Neither the British nor the Americans were willing to antagonize Stalin by opposing his Polish policy. For Stalin, according to Borodziej, the main bone of contention was, first, Poland's eastern territories and, second, the desire to control the rest of the country through a Communist proxy regime established in Moscow and later transplanted to Lublin.
Poland's experience from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries was punctuated by insurrections against foreign powers occupying the country: Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary. Initially, the risings were staged by regular Polish military units reinforced by volunteers (1794, 1806, and 1830-1831). Later, Poland's armed endeavors were based upon poorly trained levée en masse commanded by Polish veterans of foreign armies. The only successful Polish rising took place in November 1918, when the Poles of Poznan /Posen rebelled against the Prussians. As the news of the rising spread, coinciding with the armistice on the western front, the Polish underground disarmed German and Austro-Hungarian troops throughout central Poland. The Poles thus liberated themselves and re-established a Polish state after almost 120 years of captivity.
As Borodziej correctly points out, almost all senior officers of the Polish army and underground during the Second World War had been junior participants in the rising of 1918 and were hoping to repeat its success in 1944. Accordingly, from the very beginning, they drafted numerous contingency plans for a national uprising to liberate Poland. Also from the very beginning, the Polish independentist underground leadership, which organized and commanded the Polish Underground State and its main clandestine force, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), took the stance that Poland had two enemies: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Although after June 1941 the latter became "the ally of our allies," unofficially the Polish attitude toward the Soviet Union remained mistrustful at best.
The situation became seriously exacerbated after the discovery of the victims of the Katyn massacre perpetrated by Soviet Russia and the subsequent break-off of diplomatic relations between the Polish government-in-exile and the USSR. Katyn was but the tip of an iceberg. A powerful wave of revolutionary banditry swept central and eastern Poland with the Soviet and Polish Communist partisans raiding Polish villages and assaulting the AK troops. By 1944, in certain regions of Poland, the Wilno /Vilnius area in particular, a state of virtual war existed between the independentist Poles and the Communists. As Soviet forces rolled west, Stalin's ill-wi
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