Warsaw Uprising

Before a country was placed on two empires’ map

To understand 23 August 1939, one must first see what kind of Poland was placed on the negotiating table. The Second Polish Republic had been rebuilt from the partitions of the empires in 1918, then fixed between Germany and Soviet Russia through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the border wars of 1919–1921. Its population stood at about 35.1 million in 1939, but it was not a state of Poles alone. Ukrainians made up 13.9 percent, Ashkenazi Jews 10 percent, Belarusians 3.1 percent, and Germans 2.3 percent. The eastern countryside and western industrial districts were sharply unequal, while the state had to bind together different imperial legacies and borders through one army and administration. The Home Army that would later fight in Warsaw grew out of the effort to preserve these state institutions underground during the war.

Politically, the republic began as a parliamentary state but changed after Józef Piłsudski’s May 1926 coup into the authoritarian Sanacja, or “healing,” regime. After the 1935 constitution, the country was directed by President Ignacy Mościcki, Foreign Minister Józef Beck, and Commander-in-Chief Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The government imprisoned opponents and manipulated elections, while discrimination against Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews also intensified. The Polish ruling group of 1939 therefore cannot be turned into uncomplicated defenders of democracy. Yet its defence of sovereignty was not merely rhetoric. Germany sought to overturn the Versailles settlement and demanded Danzig and the Polish Corridor, while the Soviet state carried memories of the 1920 war and its own claims concerning the eastern frontier. Becoming a protectorate of either neighbour meant the disappearance of an independent state.

The crisis acquired a military shape when Britain and France guaranteed Polish independence in March 1939 and Adolf Hitler repudiated the 1934 German-Polish declaration of non-aggression in April. Warsaw expected Western assistance, but it also refused to accept Soviet troops entering or crossing Polish territory to fight Germany. Moscow believed the West wanted to divert German aggression eastward, while London and Paris distrusted Soviet military power. In that deadlock, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August. The public treaty promised ten years of mutual non-aggression, but its Secret Additional Protocol divided Poland into German and Soviet spheres. The frontier was not yet fixed by battle, but the right to decide Poland’s existence had already been exercised outside Poland. The dual occupation of September, and the exile government, underground state, and Home Army that followed, began under conditions created by that document.

Poland Disappearing Between Two Agreements

Poland in 1939 was not simply a country defeated by two armies. The secret supplementary protocol to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in Moscow on 23 August divided Poland into German and Soviet spheres of influence, turning a public promise of non-aggression into an agreement about borders and power. When Germany invaded from the west on 1 September, the Soviet Union entered from the east on 17 September. The Soviet government said that the Polish state had collapsed and could no longer protect Ukrainians and Belarusians, so the Red Army was acting to provide security. In practice, occupation brought annexation wrapped in the form of elections, arrests, and deportations. Polish officers, police, officials, and intellectuals in the east were treated as potential organizers of resistance to the new order. On 5 March 1940, Stalin and leading Politburo members approved the execution of 25,700 Polish prisoners in camps and prisons. The result was the Katyn massacre and killings at Kalinin, Kharkiv, and other sites. This was not merely the removal of prisoners of war. It targeted the human infrastructure from which a Polish state might be rebuilt after the war.

The situation changed briefly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Sikorski-Mayski Agreement of 30 July 1941 stated that the territorial changes imposed by the 1939 German-Soviet treaties had lost their validity, and provided for the restoration of diplomatic relations, the formation of a Polish army on Soviet territory, and an amnesty for Polish citizens detained there. The London government accepted it as a practical truce against a common enemy. Yet Moscow did not accept the prewar frontier as settled, and it did not explain what had happened to the missing officers. On 13 April 1943, German radio announced the discovery of graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. The Polish government-in-exile asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate. For the Polish side, confirming the fate of the missing and establishing Soviet responsibility could take priority over preserving a cooperation whose political foundations were already broken. The Soviet government called the request collusion with Germany, blamed the killings on German forces, and broke relations with the government-in-exile on 25 April. In Soviet security terms, the London government was not only an ally but also a rival claimant to Poland's postwar borders and state power. Katyn therefore became more than the exposure of an earlier crime. It became a wartime rupture over who could speak for Poland. Later Soviet documents confirmed responsibility for the executions and their concealment, but by 1943 the question of whether the Home Army would be liberated alongside the Soviet advance, or whether a separate Soviet-backed authority would take power, was already being shaped by this distrust.

The State They Tried to Establish Before Liberation

When the Red Army crossed Poland’s prewar frontier on 4 January 1944, the Home Army faced a problem that could not be solved by simply choosing between Germany and the Soviet Union. The defeat of the German occupation was impossible without the Soviet advance, yet relations between the London government-in-exile and Moscow had been broken after Katyn. Operation Tempest, conceived under Home Army commander Stefan Rowecki and carried forward by Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, turned that contradiction into an operational plan. As German forces retreated, the Home Army would attack them from the rear and reveal its civilian administration just before the Red Army arrived. The aim was to show that the London government’s representatives remained the sovereign authority in Poland. The Home Army could cooperate tactically with Soviet forces, but it would not surrender command or the legal identity of the Polish state.

This decision cannot be explained by military necessity alone. Kazimierz Sosnkowski, speaking for the exile authorities, warned that the Soviet Union might turn Poland into a dependent state, even a seventeenth Soviet republic. An earlier, more cautious position associated with Władysław Sikorski had been to greet Soviet troops as allies for the moment, reveal the administration if hostility became unmistakable, and withdraw the armed units in order to save them. Leaders inside Poland reached the opposite conclusion: if they remained invisible, a Soviet-backed organization could take the state in the name of liberation. This was not an abstract fear. On 13 July, in Vilnius, Home Army commanders who had cooperated in defeating German forces were arrested after being invited to negotiations, while their soldiers faced disarmament and forced enlistment. Tempest did inflict real losses on Germany, but its success also gave Soviet security organs a reason to eliminate the Home Army as an independent claimant to state power.

The conflict became an open contest between authorities on 21 July. The Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation presented the State National Council as the sole legal source of power, and in its July Manifesto denounced the London government and its underground delegation as illegal. The manifesto promised land reform, confiscation of German property, and restoration of the 1921 Constitution, while insisting that no other administration could operate on Polish soil once it was liberated. For some peasants and anti-German Poles, that language offered social reform and national reconstruction. To London, however, it was not the program of a negotiating partner but the declaration of a rival government already occupying liberated territory. The lesson of Tempest was therefore double. The Home Army proved that Poles could fight Germany as an organized national force, but when Soviet troops arrived, military courage alone could not decide who would translate that victory into state power.

They were not merely waiting for help, they were trying to seize sovereignty first

The approval on 25 July was not issued from military optimism alone. Home Army commander Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski and the government delegate Jan Jankowski saw two timetables colliding. German authorities had begun withdrawing institutions and stores from Warsaw amid the collapse of the Eastern Front, yet on 27 July they ordered 100,000 Polish men and women to build fortifications around the city. The apparent gap would last only until German forces reorganized their defence. The Polish leaders calculated that a rising could last only a few days before the Red Army crossed the Vistula. But the deeper calculation was political. The Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation had just denounced the government-in-exile as usurpers. If Warsaw were liberated under the Home Army and the Underground State's administration, London could demonstrate that Poland had expelled Germany through its own authority. If Soviet troops entered first, liberation could instead be translated into rule by the Lublin Committee.

There was evidence against this decision. The Home Army had far too few weapons for its numbers and possessed no artillery, tanks, or aircraft. Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, a courier who had just returned from London, warned that Western aid would be limited, but the leadership judged that the short interval between German withdrawal and Soviet arrival outweighed the danger. Soviet signals pushed the judgement further. On 29 July, Moscow's Radio Station Kosciuszko declared that “the hour of action has struck” and called on Warsaw to attack the Germans and show the Red Army routes across the Vistula. It would be too simple to say that the Home Army treated this as a binding promise of a joint Soviet assault. The broadcast nevertheless gave an already political decision the appearance of immediate military necessity.

Events began to disprove the calculation that same day. Forward Soviet armoured units commanded by Konstantin Rokossovsky reached Warsaw's eastern approaches but were counterattacked by the German 39th Panzer Corps and 4th SS Panzer Corps. The Soviet armies were not yet in a position to encircle the city, and communication with the Home Army could not be maintained except through London or Moscow. The late-July decision was therefore not simply the error of believing that victory was certain because Soviet troops were nearby. It was a choice of danger, made under the fear that missing the last chance to act against the occupation would mean losing the political subject of the postwar state itself. The attempt allowed Poles to establish authority in their own capital first, but it also tied the city's survival to inadequate arms and an uncertain ally.

Within five days, the war was aimed at the population itself

At 5 p.m. on 1 August, the Home Army began its rising under tighter conditions than its planners had expected. Antoni Chruściel, commander of the Warsaw District, mobilized roughly 45,000 people, but only about one in four had weapons. The Germans had around 25,000 troops, supported by artillery, tanks, and aircraft. The first attacks linked the city centre, the Old Town, and several outer districts, yet they did not eliminate German strongpoints such as police headquarters, the airport, and the bridges. The decision still had an internal logic. The commanders believed that a short uprising could seize the capital’s administration and communications while German control was breaking, turning the London government-in-exile’s national authority into an accomplished fact before Soviet troops entered. They paid for this calculation with an underestimation of German will and military capacity.

German repression deliberately targeted civilians under Hitler’s and Himmler’s orders to destroy Warsaw and its population. From 5 August, SS and police units carried out mass executions in Wola; Dirlewanger’s SS special regiment, serving in Reinefarth’s battle group, participated. USHMM estimates approximately 40,000 deaths on 5–7 August, while the Museum of the Second World War presents estimates for the Wola massacre ranging from 15,000 to 65,000. These figures reflect differing scopes and evidence, rather than a settled total. USHMM, Museum of the Second World War.

The first five days therefore brought the Home Army’s political gamble, to take the capital before liberation arrived, into collision with Germany’s punitive campaign to remove a population as an example. The Home Army had not defeated every armed German position, while German forces used the rising to expand their existing colonial terror into the planned destruction of an entire city. The Wola massacre showed that civilians were not merely collateral victims but targets of German operations, making the subsequent fighting impossible to judge only as a contest of military success and failure.

Hospital massacres and violence in Ochota

Hospitals in Wola offered no reliable refuge. On 5 August, SS troops murdered the director, a physician and the chaplain of Wolski Hospital, then marched patients and staff to execution sites. At St Lazarus Hospital that day, troops belonging to Dirlewanger’s assault group massacred wounded people, staff and refugees and set the buildings alight. These were crimes directed at protected people, not simply incidental battle casualties. Hospital histories and survivor testimony.

In Ochota, the separate RONA regiment committed murder, rape and looting. Its crimes must be distinguished from those of Dirlewanger’s formation in Wola to identify the units and commanders responsible. Warsaw Uprising Remembrance Association.

Deportation and destruction after capitulation

German authorities also expelled civilians to the Dulag 121 transit camp outside Warsaw, sending some onward to concentration camps and forced labour. Expulsion and systematic destruction continued after the 2 October capitulation. Civilian suffering therefore extended beyond those killed during the uprising to deportees, forced labourers and survivors deprived of their homes. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Why aid from the sky could not break the blockade

What the insurgents needed was not food alone. Once ammunition, radios, and anti-tank weapons ran short, resistance groups in each district became isolated inside the German encirclement. For the government-in-exile in London and the Western air forces, therefore, an airlift was not symbolic consolation. It was the material condition for continuing the fight. On 4 August, Winston Churchill informed Iosif Stalin that 60 tons of equipment and ammunition would be dropped in south-western Warsaw. The British presented this not as an endorsement of every political aim of the uprising, but as aid to Polish resistance against Germany and as an Allied obligation. Yet the operation had to begin from Brindisi and other bases in Italy. A round trip of roughly 2,100 kilometres crossed German-held territory and the Carpathians, then required aircraft to approach at night and at low altitude, without fighter escort, amid fires and anti-aircraft fire over a city in combat. Even a safe arrival did not guarantee an accurate drop. The Home Army recovered roughly half of the supplies sent in the Western operations of August and September. In all, 41 British, Polish, South African, and American aircraft and about 360 airmen were lost. It was a brutal exchange, roughly one bomber for each ton delivered.

The more decisive obstacle was not the distance alone, but the lack of a place to land. The United States and Britain wanted to use Soviet-held airfields such as Poltava to refuel, rearm, and send aircraft out again. On 18 August, however, the Soviet People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs stated that the Soviet government did not object to British or American aircraft dropping supplies near Warsaw, but would not permit them to land on Soviet territory. From the Soviet standpoint, this drew a boundary: the state would not become militarily associated with an adventure led by the London government. Soviet officials also had genuine operational concerns after Poltava had been badly damaged by a German raid in June 1944, including the safety and defence of the airfields. But the cost of the decision was paid by the insurgents. Soviet permission for Western aircraft to land came only after 9 September. On 18 September, a large US Eighth Air Force daylight drop reached Warsaw at high altitude, and strong winds meant that only 288 of 1,284 containers reached the Home Army. Soviet aircraft began their own drops on the night of 13 September, but at first released containers without parachutes, damaging supplies or sending them into German-held positions. Around 2,500 Soviet sorties delivered 131 tons of food along with ammunition, grenades, and medicine, but this was not the same as a ground offensive to break the siege. An attempt by part of the Polish force under Soviet command to cross the Vistula did not expand into a bridgehead.

It therefore misses the point to say simply that the West did nothing or that the Soviet Union did nothing. The West took serious risks to deliver supplies, but distance and recovery rates made the airlift incapable of sustaining the uprising. The Soviet Union eventually sent supplies, but did not accept the political consequence of the London government-in-exile's army liberating the capital itself and creating a basis for postwar power. Military necessity and calculations about the postwar state were using the same sky in different directions.

Capitulation did not save the city

The 2 October capitulation was a military bargain to end the fighting, not a peace agreement that guaranteed Warsaw’s inhabitants safety. The most important clause won by the Home Army command was recognition of its fighters as prisoners of war. More than 11,000 were captured, including Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski and Antoni Chruściel. That clause gave the insurgents a barrier against summary execution or treatment as unlawful combatants, but it did not settle the fate of the people left in the city. German forces drove civilians to Dulag 121, a transit camp outside Warsaw, and then sorted them for forced labor or concentration camps. About 650,000 people were expelled from the city. Families were separated, and homes and possessions ceased to be places to which they could return. The fighters gained a path to survival by laying down their arms, while civilians paid for it with the loss of the city itself.

What followed was not merely the aftermath of battle but a separate operation to erase the city. On 5 August Hans Frank had already promised that Warsaw would be completely destroyed, and on 11 October Ludwig Fischer, head of the Warsaw District, ordered that it be torn down to its foundations, with materials and furniture removed first. German Vernichtungskommando units burned and demolished one quarter after another after the inhabitants had been driven out. Their targets were not only barricades. The Royal Castle, Sigismund III’s Column, archives, and libraries that preserved the material memory of the Polish state and culture were also destroyed. The language of suppressing the Home Army thus expanded into a colonial punishment aimed at removing the capital’s social foundations and historical memory. Within the German leadership, the destruction was understood both as immediate reprisal and as a long-term plan to eliminate the centre of Polish resistance.

When Soviet troops entered the western bank of the Vistula on 17 January 1945, Warsaw was nearly empty, and about 85 percent of it lay in ruins from the cumulative destruction of the war. It would be wrong to say simply that the Soviet Union destroyed the city. German forces carried out the direct burning and demolition. Yet the Soviet army did not attempt a main-force crossing during the uprising, and by the time its offensive resumed, the London government-in-exile and the Home Army had lost the organized base from which they might have exercised state power in the capital. Soviet and Allied explanations emphasized operational limits and the German counterattack; Polish critics saw a city that could have been aided being left aside for political reasons. The evidence fixes the facts between those positions. Germany deliberately erased the city, while the Soviet Union’s late entry allowed a Soviet-backed authority to build the postwar state over the ruins without an organized rival in Warsaw.

The defeat was settled, but the question of responsibility was not

The Warsaw Uprising settled two matters. First, the Home Army did not expel the German occupiers or restore the authority of the London government-in-exile in the capital. The 2 October 1944 capitulation was not only the end of the fighting. It was also the moment when the Home Army lost militarily in the contest over who would exercise power in postwar Poland. German forces deported the population, burned and demolished the city, and when Soviet troops entered in January 1945, what remained was a ruin that a new authority could take over. The Soviet-backed Lublin Committee network organized administration and armed power on that ruin. The London government's legal claim to legitimacy survived as a memory, but its chance to control the state disappeared. This does not make the uprising a “futile sacrifice.” The fact that an underground state and Warsaw's civilians tried to establish an independent state through their own action against German rule, and that this attempt was crushed amid German massacres and Soviet non-intervention, became part of the moral vocabulary of later Polish politics.

Yet the uprising's consequences cannot be described by reducing Soviet intentions to one sentence. One interpretation holds that Stalin regarded the Home Army as an obstacle to postwar power and therefore waited on the eastern bank of the Vistula. The August decision to refuse Allied aircraft permission to land at Soviet airfields, together with the fact that Soviet forces took possession of a ruined city after the uprising had been crushed, strongly supports that interpretation. Another interpretation emphasizes the German armoured counterattack in late July 1944, extended supply lines, the exhausted 1st Belorussian Front, and the operational problem of crossing a river to attack a fortified metropolis. Several scholars agree that Soviet forces were not in a position to carry out an immediate full-scale rescue when the rising began. The dispute, therefore, is not simply whether the Soviets could have helped. Even if the operational limits were real, did political calculation turn those limits into a reason to delay assistance and obstruct Western relief routes? The evidence suggests that military difficulty and political choice were not mutually exclusive.

A further dispute concerns the judgment of the Home Army command. Its leaders believed that unless they used the German retreat and Soviet approach to demonstrate Polish sovereignty in the capital, liberation would become the installation of a Soviet-backed regime. That calculation was politically intelligible, but it was joined to a military expectation that the capital could be held despite ammunition stocks lasting only a few days, inadequate heavy weapons, and uncertain outside support. The result was not German defeat but the deaths of 150,000 to 200,000 civilians, mass deportation, and the planned destruction of the city. The uprising thus established the legitimacy of resistance to German occupation, but it also showed that legitimacy cannot guarantee victory. The central historical question today is not whether to choose heroism or recklessness. It is how to establish, separately and with evidence, the German criminal decision to destroy Warsaw and the Soviet choices that shaped the uprising's isolation, while reconstructing the international conditions and information under which the attempt to assert sovereignty first was made.