The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color | Hacker News Reader

The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color

barwypowstania.pl

174 pointskeiferski74 comments

These two in particular:

https://www.barwypowstania.pl/photos/22

https://www.barwypowstania.pl/photos/51

and the world is stupid enough to repeat the endless cycle of violence.

We have a monument commemorating children fighting in the uprising: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomnik_Ma%C5%82ego_Powsta%C5%8...

And the "W" Hour is commemorated on every 1st August at 1700 hours

https://youtu.be/Ejd2rsXoQSI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22W%22_Hour?useskin=vector

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Also, if you ever have a chance then head to Warsaw Rising Museum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Rising_Museum?useskin=v...

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.

And the parent comment has been flagged to death until now. What for?

Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego [1] indeed makes an exceptional work of walking people through the dramatic story of the Warsaw Uprising.

[1] https://www.1944.pl/en

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...

Well, there is "never again" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again).

It is up to us to decide if "never again" is a universal rule or "oh, but this time it is different".

“Nie wieder ist jetzt” is common graffiti in Berlin right now: “Never again is now.”

This slogan started as a reaction against rising antisemitism after 7. Octobre. A problem which many here just deny (" Germany is again on the wrong site")

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.

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.

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...

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

Again a reminder that Google etc have data far more than historical dictatorship like Stasi, KGB etc. just for better marketing. we need better data protection though GDPR is a good start.

Germany already has religion logged in the Melderegister

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Specifically a national socialism predicated on a definition of “nation” that was based on dubious race science and excluded anyone whose physical appearance or genealogy was “Polish”.

There was a version which considered leaving 15%-20% of the Polish population to be slaves, but "In 1941, the German leadership decided to destroy the Polish nation completely, and in 15–20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.[16]: 32 A majority of them, now deprived of their leaders and most of their intelligentsia (through mass murder, destruction of culture, banning education above the absolutely basic level, and kidnapping of children for Germanization), would have to be deported to regions in the East and scattered over as wide an area of Western Siberia as possible. According to the plan, this would result in their assimilation by the local populations, which would cause the Poles to vanish as a nation.[46]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost#Poland

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.

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

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

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

It’s in colour if you have a computer

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.

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

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

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".

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.

Yes, that was awful. Not to mention pushing Poland into Eastern Bloc and then putting embargoes on it.

It was definitely Soviets/Stalin that started conquering and this was a western reaction to it. The Yalta conference was an attempt to appease Stalin and give Russia the conquests it wanted (it's not like they appeased someone else 10 years before leading to the incredible disaster, arguably the biggest disaster in human history, or anything like that. But not giving up Eastern Europe would have likely meant war with the Soviets right then and there)

It was a choice between giving up a lot, not just Poland, and continued war. Must have sucked pretty damn badly if you were one of the things given up to Stalin, but ...

We can only guess if it would mean war or not, but it looks like Churchill assumed it would, given he tried to campaign for taking Poland from USSR by force. I know that not only Poland was sold.

It was a horrible betrayal in both how it was done and in its outcomes. Embargoing those countries by the West, which the same West has sold to Stalin in the first place, was just a cherry on top.

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”.

> 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.

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

Some would argue the same way about the Gaza uprising.

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_...

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.

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?

meanwhile France and UK simply sat on their asses against empty unguarded border

nobody cared about the poles

Yes, and actual history yet again subverts the dominant story:

> The citizens of Poland have the highest count of individuals who have been recognized by Yad Vashem as the Polish Righteous Among the Nations, for saving Jews from extermination during the Holocaust in World War II. There are 7,232 (as of 1 January 2022) Polish men and women conferred with the honor, over a quarter of the 28,486 recognized by Yad Vashem in total. The list of Righteous Among the Nations is not comprehensive and it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Poles concealed and aided tens of thousands of their Polish-Jewish neighbors. Many of these initiatives were carried out by individuals, but there also existed organized networks of Polish resistance which were dedicated to aiding Jews – most notably, the Żegota organization.

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

As a Pole, I am pissed af about the fact that this true story of WWII is not known. In fact, very often the Russian version of "pravda" is what has been spread.

Why tf is there no Oscar winning movie about this story?

Poland is invaded from both sides, saves the most lives of our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters: the most heroic story, and the movie count is zero.

A story of Witold Pilecki [1] would be more than enough.

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

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

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.

Glory to heroes

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

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

Where did you get that from?

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

> 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.

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