The destruction of Warsaw in 1944 was one of the most deliberate acts of urban annihilation in modern history. Following the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of August to October 1944, Hitler ordered the complete destruction of the city. German forces spent three months systematically demolishing Warsaw block by block, burning libraries, looting museums, and dynamiting buildings according to a methodical programme. By January 1945, when Soviet forces entered the city, an estimated 85 percent of Warsaw had been destroyed. A city of over a million people had been reduced to rubble.
The Warsaw Uprising
On 1 August 1944, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) launched an uprising against the German occupation, timed to coincide with the approaching Soviet forces. The uprising was the largest single military operation by any resistance movement in occupied Europe. Approximately 40,000 to 50,000 Home Army fighters, supported by the civilian population, took on the German garrison in a battle that lasted 63 days.
The German response was ferocious. Heinrich Himmler ordered that Warsaw be “completely destroyed” and that no prisoner be taken. In the first days of the uprising, SS units under SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski conducted mass executions of civilians in the Wola and Ochota districts. In Wola alone, between 40,000 and 50,000 civilians were killed in a week , men, women, children, patients in hospitals, staff in medical facilities , shot in gardens, in the street, and in mass executions using machine guns. It was one of the largest single massacres of the war in Western Europe.
The systematic destruction
After the uprising was suppressed on 2 October 1944, the surviving civilian population , approximately 700,000 people , was expelled from the city. Then the destruction began in earnest. Special German demolition units, the Vernichtungskommandos, moved systematically through the empty city with flamethrowers and explosives. They burned the National Library. They burned the Warsaw University Library. They blew up the Royal Castle, symbol of Polish statehood, which had already been looted of its contents. They burned street after street of apartment buildings, warehouses, factories, and churches. The destruction was not the byproduct of battle. It was programmatic.
What was lost
The destruction of Warsaw meant the destruction of the accumulated heritage of one of Central Europe’s great cities. An estimated 10,455 buildings were demolished. Approximately 25 museums were destroyed. 14 libraries were burned, containing collections of irreplaceable manuscripts, incunabula, and archives. The city’s historic old town, the Royal Castle, and the Łazienki Palace complex were all reduced to ruins. The human cost was equally catastrophic: somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians died during the uprising and its suppression, in addition to the 40,000 to 50,000 killed in the Wola massacre.
See also
- Adolf Hitler
- Heinrich Himmler
- The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943
- The Polish Underground State
- Polish Victims
- Auschwitz and the Polish Prisoners
- Generalplan Ost: The Plan to Erase Poland
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards