Poles question Warsaw legend
“Not only idiotic but a crime,” read the cover the Przeglad weekly on Aug. 1, the anniversary of the Warsaw uprising.
Such an overt negative assessment of the uprising against the German occupiers that ultimately failed after 63 bloody days, leaving the capital a sea of ruins and more than 200,000 dead, was once unthinkable.
Sixty-six years later, closer scrutiny of events surrounding the uprising has emboldened critics.
Controversy has surrounded the uprising from the beginning: Tadeusz “Bor” Komorowski, the commander of the Home Army, the largest resistance force in occupied Europe, launched it with 50,000 poorly armed fighters on the mistaken belief that the Soviets were about to attack the German forces controlling the Polish capital. The Poles wanted to seize back control of Warsaw so that they would be masters of the capital before the Soviets came in, part of their doomed hope of retaining some measure of independence after the war.
But the Soviets paused on the other side of the Vistula River while the Germans threw heavy armor at the partisans and proceeded to execute tens of thousands of civilians.
The Americans and British were unwilling to exert pressure on the Soviets to help, and in the end the Polish capital fell. The Germans then evacuated the half-million surviving people and proceeded to methodically blow up almost every building in the capital. Poland was liberated by the Red Army, and spent the next 45 years as a Soviet satellite.
As a mark of the scale of the mismatch between the Poles and the Germans, the Germans only suffered about 9,000 dead and missing, while the Poles lost about 16,000 fighters and almost 200,000 civilians.
During the years of communist rule, the uprising was portrayed in the official media as an anti-Soviet action by the underground Home Army, which was true, and condemned the rebellion as an irresponsible act. No official commemorations of the uprising were held, and many of the leaders were imprisoned by the communists and some were executed.
“I walked through the ruins of Warsaw in 1945 and I saw that it had been a disaster,” said Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last leader of communist Poland....
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Such an overt negative assessment of the uprising against the German occupiers that ultimately failed after 63 bloody days, leaving the capital a sea of ruins and more than 200,000 dead, was once unthinkable.
Sixty-six years later, closer scrutiny of events surrounding the uprising has emboldened critics.
Controversy has surrounded the uprising from the beginning: Tadeusz “Bor” Komorowski, the commander of the Home Army, the largest resistance force in occupied Europe, launched it with 50,000 poorly armed fighters on the mistaken belief that the Soviets were about to attack the German forces controlling the Polish capital. The Poles wanted to seize back control of Warsaw so that they would be masters of the capital before the Soviets came in, part of their doomed hope of retaining some measure of independence after the war.
But the Soviets paused on the other side of the Vistula River while the Germans threw heavy armor at the partisans and proceeded to execute tens of thousands of civilians.
The Americans and British were unwilling to exert pressure on the Soviets to help, and in the end the Polish capital fell. The Germans then evacuated the half-million surviving people and proceeded to methodically blow up almost every building in the capital. Poland was liberated by the Red Army, and spent the next 45 years as a Soviet satellite.
As a mark of the scale of the mismatch between the Poles and the Germans, the Germans only suffered about 9,000 dead and missing, while the Poles lost about 16,000 fighters and almost 200,000 civilians.
During the years of communist rule, the uprising was portrayed in the official media as an anti-Soviet action by the underground Home Army, which was true, and condemned the rebellion as an irresponsible act. No official commemorations of the uprising were held, and many of the leaders were imprisoned by the communists and some were executed.
“I walked through the ruins of Warsaw in 1945 and I saw that it had been a disaster,” said Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last leader of communist Poland....