The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color

I was in Warsaw a few weeks ago and ended up visiting that museum almost on a whim, so I wasn’t prepared for the experience. I don’t think a museum has ever hit me that hard — inspiring, gut-wrenching, and unforgettable.

tasuki

I used to live nearby and was always weirded out by the statue just being one of the required two-minute stops for all the tourist groups. A short monologue, then move on to the next attraction...

aaron695

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sdoering

Great work. My SO is doing family research on the part of her family that came from Warsaw (and a few other parts of Poland). I know she will love to see those.

Robotbeat

Incredible to see just so many smiling, cheerful faces surrounded by utter destruction and death. The power of comradery, I suppose.

pzo

It shows only the better part but doesn't show the bad part. Poles are divided about usefulness of this uprising, how it was (badly) executed and many believe it was deemed to fail.

The aftermath [1] was that ~220k Poles died and out of that 150-200k civilians, often with mass execution - later on a lot of warsaw population was sometimes bitter toward the uprising’s leadership.

To put it in context: within 2 months 200k people died, similar number like in Hiroshima but almost nobody wordwide know about warsaw uprising.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising#Aftermath

TheOtherHobbes

Harrowing.

For those who don't know, the Uprising was a planned resistance action to expel the Nazis from Warsaw.

Supposedly it was planned in collaboration with the Russians. But the Russian army stood down while the resistance fought alone for two months.

This allowed the Germans to regroup, fight back, and eventually to destroy the city, and most of the resistance itself.

TheAlchemist

That's not accurate - the uprising was not planned in collaboration with the Russians.

The whole point of the uprising was to liberate Warsaw before the Russians get in, as everybody knew that Russians are not liberating Poland - they are looking to occupy the country, just as Germany did. If the Uprising was successfull, it would give a great credit and negotiating card to the Polish government.

Unfortunately, Russians knew that too - that's exactly why they stopped their advance and watched the city being razed to the ground. Also unfortunately, they were right and ended up occupying Poland for the next 45 years.

shakow

It was definitely not planned with the Soviets, for multiple reasons:

  - the Poles of the AK (London government loyal) were not the communist faction (Lublin government loyal), and saw the insurrection as the last chance to get a Poland out of the Soviet sphere of influence post WWII – especially after the publicization of Katyn;

  - even if they had wanted, Stalin had zero interest in giving a hand to London-loyal Poles that were in frontal opposition to “his” Lublin-loyal Poles;

  - the Germans were not caught flat-footed, they already knew of the insurrection preparations and therefore not only was the city well garrisoned, it would have been in any case, as it was the strategic lock of the area to hold the RKKA on the Vistula;

  - and all the above is moot in any case, because the RKKA units that reached the neighborhood of Warsaw in '44 had as many chance of taking the city as the German units that reached Moscow in '41 – they were just spent and at the end of their logistic tail after months of fighting during the Bagration operation, and had no chance of successfully developing an opposed crossing of the Vistula against two Panzerkorps.

So the London-loyal Poles were in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and at least they were able to go with a glorious bang. Like a Marshal said, “c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre”.

pzo

> So the London-loyal Poles were in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and at least they were able to go with a glorious bang.

Many argue this uprising is nothing to be proud of and the crime of the leadership with devastating results: ~200k civilians went with this bang, and city completely wiped out.

shakow

This is a question I don't feel qualified enough to lean one way or the other.

bjourne

Some would argue the same way about the Gaza uprising.

consumer451

For more context, WWII was started as a partnership between Hitler and Stalin to partition Poland. [0]

Spreading this knowledge is now illegal in Putin's Russia. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Against_Rehabilitation_of_...

mr_toad

It would be naive to think that either ruler intended to honour this agreement in the long run. Both sides were probably gambling on when, not if, the agreement would be broken.

consumer451

Sure, that's debatable supposition. I would think that it's likely correct.

What is fact is that Hitler and Stalin were military allies to start WWII. This is documented history.

Would you agree with my latter statement?

pstuart

Did Russia back out to intentionally let it happen or did they chicken out to avoid fighting the nazis?

Robotbeat

Intentionally. Allowed the Soviets to administer the place when the Nazis finally left, as the Polish resistance had been crushed. Unforgiveable.

spwa4

It was an attempt of the Polish resistance to avoid being "liberated" by the Soviets to just immediately become occupied by the communist red army. The idea being to liberate Warsaw and get US/UK assistance through the Polish government-in-exile in London to establish Polish military control before the Soviet army arrived. Getting US/UK support could have meant that Poland remained an independent state. Instead, Stalin not only betrayed them, but later actually convicted the surviving leaders of the uprising. "Crimes against communism".

This is now politely referred to as a Soviet betrayal in service of "Stalin's post-war political goals for Poland".

expedition32

The West aren't entirely the good guys here.

My own city was liberated by Polish troops. After WW2 they obviously couldn't go back to Poland. A lot of them ended up in relative poverty after the war.

At least Canadians and Australians went back home and got a parade.

varispeed

Russians started the war together with Germans. The idea that they could "help" is Western propaganda that tries to whitewash helping Soviet Union.

Amazing how much these photos remind me of Gaza.

xyzelement

Is it because you are ignorant of all historical context and want to see everything through convenient lens of today's popular thing? Would the closeup of life in Berlin as the red army was closing in remind you of gaza too? What wouldn't remind you of it?

datsci_est_2015

Well for one thing there are still buildings in Berlin that were built before 1945 (“Altbau”) but the policy of IDF appears to be to make the strip entirely uninhabitable except by their terms. At least, that’s what independent satellite imagery studies would imply (90%+ buildings uninhabitable).

xyzelement

Unsure about that "policy" but was there anything going on recently - any sort of context?

varispeed

Don't forget that Germans were able to quickly find people they wanted to exterminate by going through municipal and church records. Today it will be much easier thanks to push for Digital ID. Choose demographic and the dashboard will show where everyone is and their connections.

phatfish

Corporations already have a "digital ID" for everyone. As we know from WW2 (and more recent conflicts) private corporations would be lining up to work with the next Nazi regime if the price was right.

watwut

The choosen demographic in Poland was easy to find without any records. Jews were mostly orthodox and easily visibly different and poor.

Polish were basically "anyone there" no records necessary.

odiroot

That's a big simplification. There were plenty of ethnic Jews who already converted to Catholicism (or remained atheist) and identified as regular Polish citizens. There were also mixed families who were exterminated as a whole nonetheless.

varispeed

They were going after key people like academics, engineers, doctors, artists first.

expedition32

Yeah the Nazis had future plans for Poland. The idea was to make the entire country into illiterate slaves.

A lot of people don't know that although what the Nazis did was obviously terrible it was nothing compared to what they wanted to do.

Poland survived 60 years of communism. It would not have survived national socialism.

billypilgrim

Ten years ago multiple tech giants openly stated they would not help the Trump administration build a Muslim registry [1]. Since then, several of them have bowed the knee and donated to his second inauguration. I’m from Germany, and keep wondering how much more damage the NSDAP could have done if they had access to the data these companies now have on everybody. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13990234/google-muslim-r...

blub

Germany has the Schufa. Should be trivial to narrow down to a specific group based on name only.

lifestyleguru

Digital ID? Kiddos <25 years old give away 3D face scans and fingerprints at the gym, grocery store, and in the gambling mobile app.

nicbou

Germany already has religion logged in the Melderegister

flohofwoe

This was voluntarily before 2022 and has been removed entirely since 2022:

https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2022/kw39-de-p...

https://www.vaticannews.va/de/kirche/news/2022-10/deutschlan...

nicbou

I'm a little confused. It's still a field on the registration form and is used to collect Church tax, right? My last Anmeldung was in 2019 so I might have missed something.

elia_is_me

uprising together with Germans against russia invasion, and it garnered sympathy from many Chinese people --- though Polish people are anti-Chinese for religious and communism (maybe also religious) reasons

lukwoz

I don't think there's any such sentiment in Poland; in fact, this research points to (slightly) positive sentiment of the Polish towards the Chinese: https://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2026/K_016_26.PDF

flohofwoe

> uprising together with Germans against russia invasion

Please educate yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising

Maybe you've been confused by some of the resistance fighters wearing German helmets?

The Germans crushed the uprising because the Soviets conveniently stopped their advance, giving the Germans time to focus on the Polish resistance, which was convenient for the Soviets because it eliminated a potential "problem" for the Soviet occupation of Poland after WW2.

0rzech

> though Polish people are anti-Chinese for religious and communism (maybe also religious) reasons

Where did you get that from?

maradon

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siltcakes

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enoughstupid

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lifestyleguru

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cramsession

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ngruhn

They were fighting the German army. Hamas mostly and intentionally gunned down civilizations and then took some hostages for good measure.

cramsession

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ngruhn

Wow, Hamas is _more_ justified? The Nazi's invaded Poland. Doesn't get more stolen than that. Also again: one is slaughtering civilians, the other is fighting the army. This is not even comparable.

yakshaving_jgt

Lots of Polish people on this website, including me.

What makes you think you're in a position to qualify the morality of the deaths of my not-so-distant relatives at the hands of Nazi invaders?

sdoering

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Drupon

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sdoering

What is slaughtering babies, raping innocent women and girls and any festival partygoer, if not just despicable terrorism?

Anyone (yes, every single one in my book) who is defending Oct 7th is nothing but fueling antisemitism.

cramsession

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sdoering

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sdoering

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breppp

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Drupon

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breppp

So a thousand civilians weren't shot by death squads in civilian towns? babies weren't kidnapped? women weren't raped? houses weren't burned with people inside? bodies weren't found dismembered?

I think you should really investigate your sources of information as this is approaching an alternative reality.

cramsession

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sdoering

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