Eastern Front · Polish Home Army vs Germany
Warsaw Uprising
1 August 1944 – 2 October 1944
The Polish Home Army rose in Warsaw as the Red Army approached the Vistula, hoping to liberate the capital before the Soviets arrived. German forces crushed the rising district by district over 63 days while Soviet forces on the far bank did little to help. Between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians died and the city was systematically demolished.
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Day by day
— W-Hour
Soviet tanks are in the eastern suburbs and Moscow radio has been calling on the city to rise. At 17:00 some 25,000 men and women of the Home Army attack German posts across Warsaw, about a tenth of them with a firearm. By nightfall they hold most of the city centre, the Old Town, Wola, part of Ochota, Zoliborz and Mokotow, but not the bridges, the airfield or the main roads.
— Wola
Himmler has ordered every inhabitant killed and the city levelled. Reinefarth's corps group, with Dirlewanger's penal brigade and the Kaminski brigade, attacks east along Wolska street to reopen the road to the bridges, and shoots the civilians of Wola house by house: about 40,000 in three days. The same morning the Zoska battalion takes the Gesiowka camp and frees 348 Jewish prisoners.
— The sewers
The Old Town has been shelled by railway guns and 600-millimetre mortars and bombed at will for a month, and falls this morning. About 5,300 of its defenders go out through the sewers to Srodmiescie and Zoliborz, a walk of several hours bent double in the dark; the wounded who cannot go are murdered in the hospitals. Ochota and Wola are already gone.
— The far bank
The Red Army took Praga yesterday and stands on the east bank; the Germans blew the bridges behind them. Tonight battalions of Berling's 1st Polish Army row over to Czerniakow and Powisle. They get about 1,200 men across in a week, without the artillery and armour that would have made it matter, and most of them are killed or driven back into the water.
— The drop
Stalin has at last allowed the shuttle flight. A hundred and ten Flying Fortresses come over at 4,000 metres in clear weather and drop 1,284 containers; the wind and the shrinking held ground take them where they fall, and perhaps 130 reach Polish hands. Czerniakow is finished on the 23rd and Mokotow on the 27th.
— Capitulation
Zoliborz went on 30 September and only Srodmiescie is left. The surrender is signed at Ozarow after midnight: the Home Army is to be treated as a regular army and taken prisoner, the civilians marched out. About 16,000 insurgents and 150,000 to 200,000 civilians are dead in 63 days. The city is then emptied and burned block by block, and the Red Army does not cross the river until January.
