…

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944
Why It Happened? Its Consequences? Its Significance?

Essay by Professor Donald Pienkos

The Background: On September 1, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s armies invaded the Republic of Poland. Two days later, Poland’s British and French allies declared war on Germany. While they failed to back up their words with military action on Poland’s behalf, their decision marked the start of the Second World War – and six destructive years.

On September 17, 1939 Josef Stalin’s Soviet army joined Hitler’s forces in ruthlessly partitioning Poland, with war devastated Warsaw falling under German rule. But Poland’s defeated leaders managed to form a Government in exile in France led by a respected figure, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who became its Prime Minister and Commander of its armed forces. His government not only won British and French recognition, by early 1940 it organized political resistance in the homeland along with an underground military force, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK) that would come to include over 350,000 devoted members.

After the Germans defeated France in June 1940, Britain fought alone against Hitler, with the Polish exile government, relocated in London, its sole major ally. But things changed dramatically in June 1941 when Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. A Soviet-British alliance followed overnight, with ominous consequences for Poland. When Hitler declared war on the United States that December, his move led to a ‘Big Three’ anti-Hitler alliance headed by Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Stalin, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States.

Sikorski did his best to work with the Soviets. But his Government’s understandable response to the shocking news in Spring 1943 of Nazi claims of Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Massacre led to a break in diplomatic relations with Stalin. In July 1943, Sikorski was killed in an air crash. Two men succeeded him, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk as Prime Minister and General Kazimierz Sosnkowski as Commander in Chief. But they could not replace him. Worse, they disagreed over Poland’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Mikolajczyk sought to continue Sikorski’s conciliatory policy. Sosnkowski totally distrusted the despotic Stalin.

In November 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt held their first Summit meeting with Stalin in Teheran, Persia. There, and without informing Mikolajczyk, each privately conceded half of Poland’s territory to Stalin to strengthen their alliance against Hitler.They also agreed to pressure the London Poles to remove the “anti-Soviet” members from their government. At the same time they continued to mislead Mikolajczyk into trusting that his Government had their full support.

The Looming Crisis: After their victory at Stalingrad, Stalin’s forces moved relentlessly westward against the battered Germans. In January 1944, the Red Army entered into pre 1939 Polish territory. By July it was near Warsaw. On July 22, Stalin’s obscure group of communists and fellow travelers in the city of Lublin declared themselves the committee of national liberation. Rejecting the London Poles as unrepresentative of the nation’s will, they belittled the AK in the Poles’ struggle against the hated Germans.

These developments created a profound dilemma for the AK. If its leaders did nothing, the approaching Soviet army approaching Warsaw was sure to drive the Germans from the capital – with Stalin’s Lublin lackeys the self proclaimed liberators of a new “People’s Poland.”

But what if they called on the 40,000 Home Army soldiers in Warsaw to rise up against the Germans? By winning they could proclaim the capital for the London Government, which they expected the Big Three Allies to recognize.

But here the London Poles gave no clear guidance. General Sosnkowski, who opposed an insurrection, was out of touch with events. On July 25, Mikolajczyk and his cabinet informed Warsaw’s leaders that the decision on an uprising was theirs to make. He then flew to Moscow where he hoped for an agreement with Stalin on Poland’s future.

The Uprising: The decision, by General Tadeusz ‘Bor’ Komorowski, the AK Commander-in-Chief, and Stanislaw Jankowski, the underground government’s head in Warsaw, called for the liberation of Warsaw in the name of a free Poland loyal to the London Government – before the Red Army could enter the city. The date was set for Tuesday August 1. The time 5 p.m.

But here they faced some real unknowns. Would Poland’s British and American allies in fact support the uprising? Would the Germans fight to hold Warsaw or would they withdraw? How soon would the Soviet army move on Warsaw? What of the Lublin committee, whose radio appeals were already calling on the city’s inhabitants to rise up?

The AK leadership decided that its largely young, eager, patriotic fighters would drive the Germans from Warsaw and in a matter of a few days, and with substantial assistance from their Big Three allies.

A quick, decisive success was essential, since fewer than 10 percent of the insurgents were armed and most had provisions for only seven to ten days. The task was awesome – to defeat a heavily armed German occupation force of 16,000 troops.

The AK forces did take over about three quarters of the city in the Uprising’s first days. But they failed to seize control of a number of strategic targets, including the bridges over the Wisla River to Warsaw’s Praga district – bridges the Red Army needed to cross to join the fight.

Then Hitler surprised everyone. He not only sent in reinforcements to suppress the Uprising. He ordered his troops to kill everyone – combatants and civilians alike.

Worse, prompt and substantial foreign military assistance the Home Army leaders expected did not arrive when it mattered most. And the Soviet Army not only suddenly failed to advance on the city. Stalin denounced the insurrection as the work of criminals. Backing his Lublin lackeys over the London Government, he rejected Mikolajczyk’s pleas for help.

Only on September 18, seven weeks after the start of the Uprising, did a massive convoy of U.S. – led Allied planes fly with aid over Warsaw. But it had little real impact, since most of its supplies fell into German-controlled sectors of the city.

The carnage in the Uprising was horrific and unimagined. Over the 63 days of the fightng,which ended on October 2, 1944, perhaps 200,000 civilians perished. The AK lost 17,200 killed, with another 5,000 seriously, some mortally wounded. For the Germans, 10,000 were killed, 7,000 wounded, and 9,000 were missing and probably killed. After the AK capitulated, the capital’s 700,000 survivors were marched out of the city.

Hitler then ordered Warsaw’s systematic demolition. When the Soviet army at last crossed the river in January 1945, it liberated ruins. Of one million citizens there in 1939, only 22,000 remained.

Consequences: The crushing of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 did not itself bring about the Soviet takeover of Poland and Stalin’s creation of a post war puppet state. Poland’s fate had already been largely determined in November 1943 at Teheran.

Amazingly, the Uprising received relatively little notice at the time and has since gotten far less attention than the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. For example, William Shirer’s blockbuster best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, does not even mention it – in a work of 1,000 pages

A serious literature about the 1944 Uprising does exist, one that includes a number of published memoirs by its participants, But it remains little known.

Too, only a few motion pictures about the Warsaw Uprising have been made. The most important one produced in Poland, but not widely shown in the U.S., came out in 2014, seventy years after the Uprising. Just one major American film, “The Pianist,” deals with it but only in the most minimal fashion. To this day many people confuse the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

In democratic post communist Poland, the extraordinary Museum of the Warsaw Uprising has been erected; from its founding in 2004 it has had more than 8.5 million visitors, Its aim is to “pay homage to those who fought and died for independent Poland and its capital city.”

Reminders of the Uprising are to be found throughout the city – on the walls of buildings where stone tablets mark the many places where AK soldiers and civilians were executed, in the city’s churches and cemeteries, and in a remarkable set of sculptures of AK insurgents unveiled in 1989 near the City’s Old Town district.

Research on the Uprising will continue of course. Judgments about its merits, meaning, and consequences, including its impact on post 1944 Polish thinking as well.

In August 1980, another generation of brave and idealistic men and women, many of them young, like so many of the heroic AK soldiers of August 1944, would create the Solidarity movement in Gdansk. It would take Solidarity nine difficult years of non-violent resistance to a failed Soviet-imposed regime to achieve their noble goal – a Poland free and independent, the Poland of today. In their devotion to country they are indeed true brothers and sisters of the AK freedom fighters who gave so much of themselves in 1944.

Sources of note –

Jozef Garlinski, Poland in World War II (London: MacMillan, 1985).
Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, The Secret Army (New York: MacMillan, 1951. 1984).

Janusz Zawodny, Nothing But Honor: The Story of the Warsaw Uprising (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution, 1979).

Richard Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944 (NY: Hippocrene Books, 1997, second rev. ed.).

Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).

Roger Moorhouse, Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2020)

Stefan Korbonski, Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State, 1939-1945 (New York: Minerva Press, 1956).

Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (New York: MacMillan, 2003, 2004)

Jan M Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of 1944 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

About the Speaker: Donald Fienkos is Professor Emeritus (Political Science) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwukee. At UW-M Don was a founder of the Polish Studies and the Russian and East European Studies programs. A long time PHA supporter, its Polish Fest and the Polish Center, Don is a member of the Milwaukee Society of the PNA and the Polish American Congress. He is the author of the Congress’ official history For Your Freedom Through Ours.